TYPES OP FORMAL STRUCTURE

IN

SELECTED NOVELS OP VLADIMIR NABOKOV

r David Charles)Nicol

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

June 1970

Approved by Doctoral Committee

Adviser

Graduate School-Representative ii

ABSTRACT

This study of the formal structures in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov begins with an analysis of his manipula­ tion of individual scenes, then considers the devices that determine the structure of various novels, and then at­ tempts to establish the dynamic that informs the canon of Nabokov's novels.

The first chapter investigates Nabokov's manipulation of his reader's expectations as a formal device, with Laughter in the Dark as the primary example. Lolita, where the technique is modified, is compared with the ear­ lier work.

The second chapter applies Nabokov's idea of "thematic designs" to Pnin. These inter-connecting networks of sub­ merged references are seen as reinforcing the surface structure of the novel. The third chapter investigates the larger structures that define the form of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. The novel is seen as a series of different formal ap­ proaches to the writing of a novel, and these authorial perspectives are considered individually.

The long final chapter attempts a broad perspective on the organization of Nabokov's novels, through the applica­ tion of a generalization about the interplay of memory and parody. This duality in Nabokov's aesthetics is investi­ gated in King, Queen, Knave, Laughter in the Dark, Invita­ tion to a Beheading, The gift, Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada. iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION...... 1

CHAPTER I, AUDIENCE AND CHARACTER EXPECTATIONS AS DETERMINERS OFF ORM...... 3

The Psychology of the Audience...... 3

Audience Expectation in Laughter in the Dark...... 4

Character as Audience Surrogate: Humbert's Lolita...... 11

The Comedy of Character Fulfilment...... 19

CHAPTER II, ASSOCIATIVE STRUCTURE: THEMATIC DESIGNS IN PNIN...... 22

Introduction ...... 22

Pnin’s Research ...... 25

Associative Structure: Squirrel to Glass...... 27

Thematic Designs ...... 30

Associative Structure: Shadows ...... 31

Victor, Dreams and Shadows...... 33

Character and Creator ...... 40

CHAPTER III, THE MIRRORS OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT ...... 44

Mirrors...... 44

Methods of Composition...... 47

The Novels of Sebastian Knight ...... 50 iv

CHAPTER IV, THE DYNAMICS OF NABOKOV’S ART...... 62

Dialectical Introduction ...... 62

Ecstasy and Memory...... 62

Parody, Trickery, and the Dream Agent...... 6?

The Dynamics of the Magician...... 70

The Dynamics of Lolita ...... 72

Humbert...... 73

Quilty...... 76

Lolita...... 79

The Early Novels: The Art of Non-Involvement ...... 81

Invitation to a Beheading...... 88

The Gift...... 94

Bend Sinister...... 98

Pale Fire...... 104

Ada or Ardor ...... 110

Summary ...... 122

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 124 1

INTRODUCTION

Form is organization. The novels of Vladimir Nabokov,

deliberately unrelated to their author’s life and uncon­

cerned with providing a message, are rewarding because of

their brilliant language and their intricate structuring

of novelistic events. They employ many Interesting and

original formal devices, or organizing principles. The present study is an attempt to analyse these various meth­ ods of composition, and is restricted to this area; it in­ tends no value judgments on Nabokov’s work, no definition of his place in the history of literature, and no compar­ isons with other novelists except where such comparison is essential to illuminate Nabokov’s intentions. Nor is this study concerned with Interpretation—at least not inter­ pretation drawn from outside the novels themselves. Nabo­ kov’s work is not here related to his biography, his fi­ nances, his social class, or his psychological profile.

This study was written over the course of four years, and some of its sections have already been published. It has grown more like a weed-patch than like a crystal, and each chapter is substantially self-contained. Roughly, it proceeds from microcosm to macrocosm; only the last chap­ ter concerns itself with an overview of Nabokov’s novels— and that overview is deliberately (and necessarily) incom­ plete. 2

The study Is intended as a guide to various formal elements in the writings of a great novelist. Whatever the possible relevance or irrelevance of this approach to contemporary trends in criticism, it is hoped that the ap­ proach is well suited to investigating the peculiar genius of Vladimir Nabokov. 3

CHAPTER I,

AUDIENCE AND CHARACTER EXPECTATIONS

AS DETERMINERS OF FORM

The Psychology of the Audience

The subject of this chapter is psychological form, form governed not by a striving for unity, but by the ex­ pectations of the audience. The psychology of the audi­ ence as a determiner of form was brilliantly analysed by

Kenneth Burke in an essay of 1931, "Psychology and Form":

Form is the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite. This satisfaction—so complicated is the human mechan­ ism—at times involves a temporary set of frustrations, but in the end these frustrations prove to be simply a more involved kind of satisfaction, and furthermore serve to make the satisfaction of fulfilment more in­ tense.*

At the heart of Nabokov's construction lies this exploita­ tion of audience frustration and fulfilment, an organizing principle that governs his presentation of scenes and epi­ sodes within the novels.

Kenneth Burke quite rightly finds Shakespeare to be the supreme master of the psychology of the audience. His example, given below, of Shakespeare's technique, Is also, however, a paradigm of Nabokov's psychological form.

1 Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Los Altos, Cal., 1953), P. 31. 4

Hamlet stands with Horatio and Marcellus, awaiting the

appearance of the ghost. The audience has awaited this

confrontation for the first three scenes; now the friends

further set the stage by announcing that the ghost might

be expected to appear at any moment.

Promptly hereafter there is a sound off-stage. "A flourish of trumpets, and ordnance shot off within," Hamlet’s friends have established the hour as twelve. It is time for the ghost. Sounds off-stage, and of course it is not the ghost. It is, rather, the sound of the king’s carousal, for the king "keeps wassail,” A tricky, and useful, detail. We have been waiting for a ghost, and get, startlingly, a blare of trumpets. And, once the trumpets are silent, we feel how desolate are these three men waiting for a ghost, on a bare “platform," feel it by this sudden juxtaposition of an imagined scene of lights and merriment. But the trum­ pets announcing a carousal have suggested a subject of conversation. In the darkness Hamlet discusses the excessive drinking of his countrymen. . . . Indeed, there in the gloom he is talking very intelligently on these matters, and Horatio answers, "Look, my Lord, it comes." All this time we had been waiting for a ghost, and it comes at the one moment which was not pointing towards it'. This ghost, so assiduously prepared for? is yet a surprise.1

This pattern, this surprise, this dropping of the trapdoor on the reader’s literary reflexes and then catching him in cadence to place him safely again on solid ground, is pre­ cisely the rhythm of Nabokov’s novels.

Audience Expectation in Laughter in the Dark

At various points in his career, Nabokov has exploited

1 Burke, pp. 30-31. My ellipsis and Italics 5

this pattern of surprise in different ways. The Gift, for

instance, is studded with conversations that, we are in­

formed after a few pages, never happened. Although these

discussions are functional since they demonstrate the vivid

quality of the central character’s imagination, these ima­

ginary encounters are perhaps not completely satisfactory.

In the two novels that describe imaginary totalitarian re­

gimes, Nabokov quite properly—considering his subject—

sought to extend this technique of frustration still fur­

ther. Thus in Invitation to a Beheading Cincinnatus con­

tinually escapes from prison; each time we then discover

that the escape was imaginary, one of Cincinnatus* fitful

daydreams. And consider Krug’s crossing of the bridge in

Bend Sinister. Krug has a pass, but the illiterate sol­

diers at the north end of the bridge will not let him by.

Claiming acquaintance with the family of one soldier, Krug

extricates himself. But Nabokov has more for us: at the south end of the bridge, Krug is told that the first group of soldiers should have signed his pass. He returns to the north end. Another traveler is allowed to sign Krug’s pass, and he traverses the bridge still again. Having battered his reader’s reflexes, Nabokov provides a perfect denouement: the soldiers at the south end have now left their post, so no one is interested In the finally perfect, ultimately useless document.

The well-known concept that If a gun is hanging on the 6 wall In the first act, It should be fired by the end of the third, is an idea of form—obviously a simple one.

Precisely because Nabokov's audience is sophisticated, aware of such rules, Nabokov's psychological form requires a far more Intricate toying with our expectations, finally catching us with our defenses down.

Laughter in the Dark (first published in 1932, as

Camera Obscura), the only one of Nabokov's Russian novels to obtain early popularity, is perhaps his most elaborate collection of pitfalls and man-traps. Everything is fore­ shadowed and expected, yet the reader is always out of step with the cadence of the novel. The second sentence of the book tells the whole tale, informing us that Albinus

••was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was 1 not loved; and his life ended in disaster." The gun men­ tioned at the end of the first chapter is Indeed fired in the final one. In the second chapter Albinus watches over and over a film which is clearly a cinematic version of the very novel Nabokov is writing. The bones of the story have deliberately been laid bare so the author's virtuosity with his materials can be better appreciated; there is in­ deed "profit and pleasure in the telling" (page 7).

Interestingly enough, Laughter's most remarkable char-

1 Laughter in the Dark (New York, I960), p. 7. Here- aft er cited m text. ? acter, Axel Rex, has a theory of humor based on audience expectation:

Uncle alone In the house with the children said he*d dress up to amuse them. After a long wait, as he did not appear, they went down and saw a masked man put­ ting the table silver into a bag. "Oh, Uncle," they cried in delight. "Yes, isn’t my make-up good?" said Uncle, taking his mask off. Thus goes the Hegelian syllogism of humor. Thesis: Uncle made himself up as a burglar (a laugh for the children); antithesis: it was a burglar (a laugh for the reader); synthesis: it still was Uncle (fooling the reader). This was the super-humor Rex liked to put into his work; and this, he claimed, was quite new. (page 143)

Rex and Nabokov put this theory into practise almost im­ mediately. Alblnus has one particularly curious painting in his collection. Thesis: it looks modern, almost sur­ real (a delight for the casual visitor); antithesis: it is not modern, but painted by the old master Baugin (a de­ light for Alblnus, who has an impressive knowledge of art); synthesis: it is still modern, a forgery by Rex (fooling

Alblnus).

"Pooling the reader," the basic principle of Axel’s aesthetic, is also a crucial part of Nabokov’s. Since this trickery requires the reader’s stock response to what seems a stock situation, Nabokov dusts off a fair amount of standard theatrical furniture in Laughter. Telephones and doorbells ring on cue—but the next line is always an ad lib. Thus in the fourth chapter Alblnus believes he has kept his identity a secret from Margot, the cunning girl he hopes to make his mistress, but we watch her dis­ 8

cover his name and phone number. The next morning Albinus’

telephone rings and his wife reaches out to answer its

"Tut, tut,” said Elizabeth, and leaned forward. Al- binus followed absent-mindedly the movements of her delicate fingers as they took and clasped the white receiver, and then he heard the tiny ghost of a voice squeaking at the other end. (page 50)

The attentive reader expects that "tiny ghost” to represent

Margot’s voice. This situation can be analysed as another

example of "super-humor,” with the reader as victim. The­

sis: Albinus is fooling his wife. Antithesis: Albinus

is being fooled, since the voice at the other end of the line is Margot. Synthesis: the reader is fooled, since

the caller is another person altogether. Notice that the

inattentive, non-participating reader would never have been tricked, for he would not have anticipated Margot’s phone call. In his autobiography, Nabokov discusses an analogous situation in a chess problem he was composing:

It was meant for the delectation of the very expert solver. The unsophisticated might miss the point of the problem entirely, and discover its fairly simple, "thetic" solution without having passed through the pleasurable torments perpared for the sophisticated one.1

Some critics have regarded Nabokov’s deceptions as the ir­ ritating result of his aristocratic posture, or rather his arrogance. It is worth pointing out that Nabokov regards this trickery as ultimately pleasant for the reader.

Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York, 1966), p. ¿91. 9

Notice further that this pattern of fooling the audi­

ence in Laughter is but a part of the larger pattern of

psychological form that Kenneth Burke analysed. For, as

soon as we admit our error in anticipating that telephone

call, Nabokov causes the telephone to ring again, a page

later, and this time, while we are off our guard, it is

indeed Margot on the line.

Sometimes the lag time in catching up our expectations

is so short that it hardly seems worth the troubles

Suddenly the bell rang. From three different doors Albinus, Margot and the cook all ran out into the hall simultaneously. "Albert," whispered Margot, "be very careful. I'm sure it's him." "Go to your room," he whispered back. "I'll han­ dle him nicely." He opened the door. It was the girl from the mil­ liner's, Hardly had she gone than there was another ring, (page 103)

This second time it is indeed he (an unimportant char­

acter). At other times this lag in reader expectations Is

quite extensive, roughly in proportion to the importance

of a given event in the novel. When Albinus finally dis­

covers, as every reader knows he must, that Bex and Margot are deceiving him, we are carefully led to expect the reve­

lation to come from Udo Conrad, a minor character who sits behind the lovers on the bus and then receives a chance visit from Albinus. But nothing comes of the visit. In­

stead, with deliberate carelessness Nabokov invents a re­

tired French colonel whose sole and precise purpose in the 10 novel is to impart the news of this liaison to Alblnus.

Laughter in the Dark is above all a novel of anticipa­ tion. We are continually waiting for old Hamlet’s ghost.

We expect Alblnus to make Margot’s acquaintance, take her to bed, and be discovered by his wife. We await his daughter’s death. We are prepared for Rex to seduce Mar­ got, for Alblnus to discover the betrayal, after an auto accident the fact of his blindness, and the fresh betrayal in Switzerland. Paul, Alblnus* kind and steady brother- in-law, strikes Rex with the blind man’s cane in the thirty-eighth chapter, an event for which we are prepared since Paul threatened to "thrash" Alblnus in the ninth chapter, Margot hoped in the eighteenth chapter that Paul would get "a good hiding," and, finally, in the twentieth chapter the correct pattern emerged as Paul looked at Rex and thought "Shall I hit him?" The gun fired in the last chapter appeared thematically in the first, second, twen­ tieth, and next to last chapter. Yet most of these anti­ cipated events surprise us anyway when they occur, for

Nabokov succeeds in tricking our expectations. Fooling the reader is, for Nabokov, a formal principle, Indeed a principle that Nabokov claims as a literary universal:

"In a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not be- tween the characters but between the author and the world."

1 Speak, Memory Revisited, p. 290. 11

This aspect of Nabokov’s writing does antagonize some

readers, but Nabokov, unlike Rex, does offer satisfaction

after frustration. The reader is left dazed but grinning.

Character as Audience Surrogate: Humbert’s Lolita

If we apply these considerations of reader frustration and satisfaction to Lolita, we find that Humbert’s confes­

sional narration alters the form of our anticipation.

Humbert is passionately involved in his tale, and although he warns us at the outset that "you can always count on a 1 murderer for a fancy prose style," he plays different games with our expectations than does his mentor, omni­ scient Nabokov. The carefully leading and misleading foreshadowing of Laughter in the Dark is generally replaced with a fairly straightforward recording of what happened.

Humbert is the protagonist, and the question of anticipa­ tion and fulfilment is here the question of whether he is successful in satisfying those desires conveniently made explicit in Humbert’s own words.

Our anticipation In Lolita is not governed by fore­ shadowing but by Humbert’s retrospective analysis of his own expectations. With the advantage of hindsight, Humbert is able to present the events of the novel so that we ex-

1 Lolita (New York, 1958), p. 11. Hereafter cited in text. 12

perlenee the anticipation, surprise, fulfilment, and frus­

tration that he experienced. For formal purposes, Humbert

is a surrogate for the reader. If this method is to suc­

ceed, the reader must to a large extent identify with Hum­

bert, rather than view him ironically. In spite of John

Ray, Jr.'s fictional foreword, Lolita would be an utter

failure if read as a case study, for then we would view

Humbert objectively and Nabokov's psychological form would

be ineffectual. Fortunately for everyone, Humbert is a persuasive talker, and he makes it easy for us to suspend our moral judgment and share his point of view. Lolita must be viewed as an epic novel about love and revenge, or we fail in our role as readers.

Ironically,‘Nabokov might disagree. "Minor readers," a former student remembers him as saying, include those who "identify with the characters," Yet there are only two alternatives: to view the novel as a case study or to view Humbert solely as his author's creature through whom, rather than by whom, the novel has been written. These are the methods we must use when reading Nabokov's Despair for its protagonist is frequently ignorant of the ramifica­ tions of what he writes—but Despair is a novel far in­ ferior to Lolita. Only very seldom is Humbert unaware of what is happening in his novel; the only examples that

1 Ross Wetzsteon, "Nabokov as Teacher," TrlQuarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 242-243. 13

come to mind are the unconscious comparisons of Lolita to

a butterfly (that is, unconscious for Humbert, conscious

for Nabokov), and Nabokov’s appearance in the novel as •j "Vivian Darkbloom," an anagram of himself. Otherwise,

Nabokov is content to control the novel solely from the

outside, for Humbert’s awareness of the world is as exotic

as his own. Indeed, while insisting that Humbert was

solely a creation, Nabokov in his afterword to Lolita

found it necessary to disassociate himself from that crea­

tion: "My creature Humbert is a foreigner and an anarch­

ist, and there are many things, besides nymphets, in which

I disagree with him" (page 317). There seems to be here a

certain rivalry between creator and creature, an idea more

fully developed In Pnin.

The guiding consciousness of Lolita is Humbert, not

Nabokov. For example, Humbert is somewhat knowledgeable

in German, but his two main languages are French and En­

glish. Unlike Nabokov, he speaks no Russian. Considering

Nabokov’s fascination with literary references and his

love for his "native" literature, it is amazing that there are no references to Russian literature in the novel. On

the other hand, references to French Literature abound, and French phrases occur so frequently that when Lolita

1 The fairly well known parallels between Lolita and a butterfly first discovered and named by Nabokov were first discussed by Diana Butler, "Lolita Lepidoptera," New World Writing No. 16 (Philadelphia, i960), pp. 58-64. 14

was first published—in English, by the Olympia Press, in

Paris—its French publisher suggested that Nabokov omit a 1 number of them.

If we give Humbert the status of co-creator with

Nabokov, we know first that Humbert is an excellent writer, since he has written Lolita. We know also that he is a scholar of comparative literature (French and Anglo-

American). He has apparently published, in French, a short history of English poetry, and

then started to compile that manual of French litera­ ture for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy [him] throughout the forties—and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of [his] ar­ rest. (page 18)

This comparison of French and English-language literatures is another structural element in Lolita, an element con­ trolled directly and consciously by Humbert.

One major example of this use of comparisons of the literatures in French and English is the continual flow of references to Edgar Allan Poe, whose “Annabel Lee“ pro­ vides the name of Humbert’s first love as well as the set­ ting, the “kingdom by the sea,“ where that love remained unconsummated. A minor figure in American literature, at least in Influence, Poe has been a major influence on

French literature. First Baudelaire, and then the symbol-

1 Maurice Girodias, “Lolita, Nabokov, and I," Evergreen Review, IX, No. 37 (September 1965), P. 45. 15

1st poets, took him to heart. Poe in a sense began a

cycle of French literature, Just as his Annabel Lee marked

the beginning of Humbert's disorder. That poem was trans­

lated into French by Mallarmé—one of those few perfect

translations that recreate the original. And aside from

Poe himself, the Symbolists seem to form the major web of

literary references in Lolita. At the end of the novel,

just before killing Quilty, Humbert hands him a poem, a parody of T. S. Eliot, that is his notice of execution.

Humbert mumbles here of "poetical justice" (page 301).

Eliot has himself pointed out the influence on him of the rhythms of "modern" French poetry—so the movement that

started with Poe has come full circle, or rather, full cycle. It has been pointed out that a characteristic pat- tern in Nabokov is the spiral. This movement in American literature from Poe to Eliot, not in a straight line but through France, is a striking curiosity of literary his­ tory that nicely fits Nabokov's special requirements.

But it Is Humbert who uses these references to trick our anticipation. We know at the start of the novel that he is in jail for murder, but we may well be deceived un­ til the final part of the novel into thinking that his victim was Lolita, rather than Quilty. And one of his methods for misleading the attentive reader is to continu-

1 L. L. Lee, "Vladimir Nabokov's Great Spiral of Being," Western Humanities Review. XVIII (Summer 1964), 225-236. 16

ally refer to Carmen, the heroine of Mérimée*s novel.

Carmen is killed by a jealous lover. Lolita Is not.

Another part of Humbert*s literary heritage helps ex­

plain how his love for Lolita inspired the book. Humbert

tells us that as a young man he wrote an essay, "The

Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey,

that "was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who

read it" (page 18). The Keats letter Humbert refers to

can be identified with some assurance as the letter to

Bailey of 22 November 1817. One recalls, in Remembrance

of Things Past, the effect that the one phrase from the

Vlnteuil sonata had on Swann, involuntarily summoning a

series of vivid memories and associations, especially that moment when he first heard the phrase in his lover’s com­ pany. Keats says it this way:

The simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming con­ tinually on the Spirit with a fine Suddenness—to com­ pare great things with small—have you never by being Surprised with an old Melody—in a delicious place—by a delicious voice, felt over again your very Specula­ tions and Surmises at the time it first operated on your Soul—do you not remember forming to yourself the singer’s face more beautiful than it was possible and yet with the elevation of the Moment you did not think so—even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagina tlon so high—that the Prototype must be here after— that delicious face you will see.2

This part of Keats* letter follows close upon an extended

1 First observed by Alfred Appel, Jr., "Ada Described," TriQuarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), p. 180n. £ Letters of John Keats, ed. Frederick Page (London, 1965T,' PP." 49-50" Spelling altered for clarity. 17

analysis of what may be Keats* most famous idea, that

“what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth."

One sentence of this analysis is particularly relevant in the present context: "The Imagination may be compared to

Adam’s dream--he awoke and found it truth.” Keats’ re­ ference here is to Paradise Lost; Milton has Adam dream of

Eve before she is created.

Humbert occasionally calls himself Adam, and Lolita is sometimes designated Eve, complete with bright red apple.

What is more important is that Lolita does indeed fulfill

Humbert’s dream: she is Imagination embodied. Humbert’s dream for twenty years was of Annabel, and when he encoun­ ters Lolita on a suburban lawn she not only resembles his

"Riviera love," she is also thoughtfully wearing a bathing suit. Lolita is Imagination. She is Humbert’s White God­ dess; she is inspiration: “And what is most singular is that she, this Lolita, my Lolita, has individualized the writer’s ancient lust, so that above and over everything there is—Lolita." (pages 46-47) While his author con­ ceals comparisons of Lolita to a butterfly (his, Nabokov’s muse) in the text, Humbert invokes literary comparisons to

Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s “Laureen" (page 21), The

“light of my life, fire of my loins" prose poem that be­ gins the novel is properly understood as Humbert’s invoca-

1 Letters of John Keats, p 48. 2 iBia;—------18

tion of the Muse.

Humbert and Nabokov may have different ideas of

Lolita's significance, but it is Humbert's dream that is

fulfilled. While Nabokov, imitating fate, toys with Hum­ bert's expectations, it Is Humbert who triumphs. He comes to Ramsdale on the track of a possible nymphet, the twelve year old daughter of Mr. McCoo. He spends wa fantastic night on the train, Imagining in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet [he] would coach in French and fondle in

Humbertish" (page 37). But when he arrives, Humbert finds that the McCoo house has Just burned down, and later we find out that Ginny McCoo was no nymphet anyway (page 43).

The upshot Is that, that very day, Humbert finds Lolita, fulfilling his dream. Humbert's sensitivity is such that he is aware of his author's manipulations: "I had long become used to a kind of secondary fate (McFate's inept secretary, so to speak) pettily interfering with the boss's generous magnificent plan” (page 118). And Hum­ bert's knowledge of Nabokov, son of Fate, becomes ever more subtle:

I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that Is not McFate's way—even if one does learn to recognize cer­ tain obscure indications, (pages 212-213)

Thus the expectant reader has both Humbert's "true” and 19

Nabokov’s deceptive imagination to account for.

The Comedy of Character Fulfilment

Lolita, then, fulfills Humbert’s dream. This desire, this dream is a device for the reader’s frustration and fulfilment as well as for the character’s. Here the psy­ chology of the audience is in full play. With this in mind, let us examine the famous seduction scene of Lolita.

The entire first half of the novel leads to this scene

Humbert and Lolita are alone. He has administered the carefully procured sleeping tablets; Lolita falls into a light sleep from which she awakes every time he approaches her. The situation appears more and more hopeless. Mor­ ning comes and Lolita wakes up; Humbert has missed his chance and the reader, disarmed, awaits another evening.

But at this moment Lolita, wide awake, whispers in Hum­ bert’s ear "and gradually the odd sense of living in a brand new, mad new dream world, where everything was per­ missible, came over me as I realized what she was sugges­ ting" (page 135). The expectations of the character and the reader have been checked and then given free rein when least expected.

The situation has been specifically designed to ful­ fill Humbert’s erotic dreams, for (according to Nabokov) in a dream what is desired is not naivete but knowledge, 20

corruption rather than purity. At this point Laughter in

the Dark can be re-introduced into the discussion, for its

seduction scene is strikingly similar:

This had been the night of which he had dreamed for years. The very way in which she had drawn her shoul­ der blades together and purred when he first kissed her downy back had told him that he would get exactly what he wanted, and what he wanted was not the chill of innocence. As in his most reckless visions, every­ thing was permissible; a puritan’s love, priggish, reserve, was less known in this new free world than white bears in Honolulu, (page 84)

"Everything was permissible"—the phrase (reminding us of

Dostoevsky in The Possessed) occurs in both descriptions, for both describe a dream becoming reality. Earlier we find Alblnus’ secret desire announced in his dreams: "at night he dreamed of coming across a young girl lying asprawl on a hot lonely beach" (page 17). And eventually

Margot is described in phrases that carefully match Al­ blnus’ fantasy:

With nothing but deep blue above, Margot lay spread- eagled on the platinum sand, her limbs a rich honey- brown, and a thin white rubber belt relieving the black of her bathing suit: the perfect seaside poster (page 112)

It may be noticed in passing that sun bathing is itself a minor theme In Nabokov, a passive, dreamlike sensual ex­ perience indulged in by many of his characters; it is, after all, what Lolita is doing when Humbert first sees her.

Both novels, then, consist of the consequences of a dream coming true. Humbert, far more acute than Alblnus, 21

is aware of this situation: "whether or not the realiza­

tion of a lifelong dream had surpassed all expectation, it had, in a sense, overshot its mark—and plunged into a nightmare" (page 142). Albinus* dream of finding "a young

girl lying asprawl" has its own nightmare continuation that comes true in his novel: "and in that dream a sudden

fear would seize him of being caught by his wife" (page

17). Whether the novel has a narrator or not, the reader traces the characters* desires through their dreams. And this is ultimately why Nabokov’s novels are comedies. The fall of a man who has been granted his fondest wish must be counted bathetic. Who can pity such a fool without also shrugging one's shoulders? 22

CHAPTER II,

ASSOCIATIVE STRUCTURE:

THEMATIC DESIGNS IN PNIN

Introduction

Pnin, one of Vladimir Nabokov’s most approachable

novels, may be read enjoyably on an elementary level for

its "human interest"—those quotation marks, and that sneer, belong to Nabokov himself.1 But a book that can be

enjoyed by simple people is not necessarily a simple book,

and Pnin is as complicated as a pet snake. Timofey Pnin, a pathetically comic Russian ¿mlgr£,

teaches his native language at Waindell College, somewhere

in New England. His Ineffectual English makes him the

butt of countless jokes; amid this alien com Pnin wanders

with apparent cheer, but cannot always avoid hearing the

mockery of his numerous mimics on campus. Significantly,

late in the novel he announces that "the history of man- o kind is the history of pain!" And his last name derives

from an eighteenth-century Russian poet whose most famous work was The Wall of Innocence.Thus Pnin is far from a 1 * 3

1 For Instance, in his preface to a new edition of Bend Sinister (New York, 1964), p. xii. Pnin (Garden City, N. Y., 1957)» P. 168. Hereafter cited in text. 3 Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Art (Boston, 1967), p. 139. 23

cliché clown; ho is painfully but inescapably comic be­

cause he is a penguin out of water, a man who had the

world pulled out from under him. Among fellow Russian

émigrés a highly Intelligent, articulate, polite, scholarly

student of the social sciences, among Americans he appears an Incoherent fool, unschooled in the simplest of the mores

of "unpredictable America" (page 13). As a whole, Pnin's life may be tragic, but in its visible fragments it is

either comic or pathetic. Nabokov thoroughly exploits

these dual possibilities, continually shifting his focus and our allegiance.

While the views of Pnin are ambivalent, they are rarely ambiguous; the distinction is between comic Pnin fooled and pathetic Pnin hurt. In the first chapter we witness Pnin's comic misadventures with American trains, busses, and wo­ men's clubs, as well as his pathetic heart attack. The second chapter Includes his hilarious encounters with a washing machine and a heart-breaking visit from his cruel, thoughtless, exploitative ex-wife. The quiet third chapter records his comic battles with the college library as well as the pathetic loss of his pleasant room and his sad fail­ ure to recognize his own birthday. The fourth chapter be­ gins a rising movement in Pnin's fortunes: he meets his ex-wife's son Victor to their mutual delight. The comedy of this chapter Involves Pnin's—or America's—confusion between football and soccer, the vagaries of Jack London's 24

literary reputation, and Victor’s height; a comic fall

gives Pnin a later, pathetic backache. The fifth chapter,

Pnin with fellow emigres, shows him at his bests the com­

edy involves not just Pnin lost in the Catskills, but also

Pnin marvellously talented at croquet; the pathos is Pnin’s remembrance of a childhood sweetheart who died in a Nazi

concentration camp. The sixth chapter begins a correspon­ ding falling movement. The comedy is again on Pnin’s side,

the triumph of his little party. The emotion catches us rather off-guard, for just as Pnin is feeling most at home in his new house and in Waindell College, he is informed that he is about to lose his job. The seventh chapter de­ tails how Pnin first met his cheaply poetic and intellec­ tual ex-wife Liza, and how now, on his birthday, Pnin leaves Waindell College with no particular destiny in mind and no new job in sight (in Pale Fire we find that Pnin did eventually find a better job). In this last chapter what humor there is, is deliberately flat.

That four of its seven chapters appeared first as sep­ arate stories in The New Yorker tends to reinforce the im­ pression that this short novel is marvellously realized throughout, but fails to progress; though his circumstances have changed, Pnin at the end of the novel may seem much the same as at its beginning. Lost: his position at Wain­ dell. Gained: friendship with Victor and the completion of an extensive piece of research. But because of these 25

two closely related gains, Pnin’s character does Indeed

change. After Liza’s visit in the second chapter, the

utter loneliness of Pnin comes home to him and he yields

to his grief: "’I haf nofing,* wailed Pnin between loud,

damp sniffs, ’I haf nofing left, nofing, nofingl”* (page

61) In contrast, at the end of the sixth chapter when he

again seems to have nothing left, neither Job, house, nor

the antique punch-bowl that is his link to Victor, "bracing

himself" he stoically continues washing dishes. Thus

Pnln’s character does change during the course of the nov­

el, and Pnln’s progress can be analysed.

Pnin’s Research

Many of Nabokov’s novels have men of letters as their

subjects, fictional authors whose projected writings re­ veal something about themselves. Naturally, these works often also Inform us of Nabokov’s own intentions; Humbert’s writings on psychology, Proust, and memory provide in­

sights into Lolita, and as is demonstrated in the third chapter of this dissertation, The Real Life of Sebastian

Knight mirrors the novels supposedly written by its title figure. In like manner, the research of modest and schol­ arly Timofey Pnin provides another dimension for our view of Pnin.

The content of Professor Pnin’s research is a bit hard 26

to establish, however, since it is only mentioned twice:

He contemplated writing a Petite Hlstolre of Russian culture, in which a choice of Russian Curiosities, Customs, Literary Anecdotes, and so forth would be presented in such a way as to reflect in miniature la Grande Hlstolre—Major Concatenations of Events. He was still at the blissful state of collecting his ma­ terial; and many good young people considered it a treat and an honor to see Pnin pull out a catalogue drawer from the comprehensive bosom of a card cabinet and take it, like a big nut, to a secluded corner and there make a quiet mental meal of it, now moving his lips in soundless comment, critical, satisfied, per­ plexed, and now lifting his rudimentary eyebrows and forgetting them there, left high upon his spacious brow where they remained long after all trace of dis­ pleasure or doubt had gone, (page ?6)

In the next paragraph we find Pnin consulting a "voluminous

work ... on Russian myths," but we find out no more about

that research until several years and several chapters la­

ter, when we are told that the project is practically fin­

ished:

Index cards were gradually loading a shoe box with their compact weight. The collation of two legends; a precious detail in manners or dress; a reference checked and found to be falsified by Incompetence, carelessness, or fraud; the spine thrill of a felic­ itous guess; and all the innumerable triumphs of bezkoristniy (disinterested, devoted) scholarship— this had corrupted Pnin, this had made of him a happy, footnote-drugged maniac who disturbs the book mites in a dull volume, a foot thick, to find in it a reference to an even duller one. (page 143)

And this is all. Two mentions, separated by almost half

the novel. There are no other references to Pnin's re­

search, and the trail of his little history grows cold.

And yet—we all know that when a man is wrapped up in

his studies, some of that wrapping unwinds wherever he 27

goes. At his own party, over-wound Pnin suddenly explodes

into suspiciously detailed, very pedantic footnotes about

the Cinderella fairy-tales

Professor Pnin remarked . . . that Cendrillon’s shoes were not made of glass but of Russian squirrel fur— valr, in French. It was, he said, an obvious case of the survival of the fittest among words, verre being more evocative than valr which, he submitted, came not from varlus. variegated, but from veverltsa, Slavic for a certain beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel fur, having a bluish, or better say slzily. columbine, shade—from oolumba. Latin for "pigeon.* (page 158)

Here, suddenly and clearly, is an example of Pnin’s re­

search on his Petite Hlstolre, an example that corresponds

perfectly to Nabokov’s second mention of that research

(see above), for it includes not only "the collation of

two legends" and "a precious detail in manners or dress,"

but even, most compactly, those index cards "loading a shoe

box"l

Associative Structures Squirrel to Glass

So Pnin has discovered how Cinderella’s shoes changed

from squirrel to glass. In Pnin’s projected book, this

little discovery will no doubt provide a model for some major trend in Russian history; however, it also illus­

trates a Major Concatenation of Events in the Life of

Timofey Pnin: squirrel to glass.

For there can be no doubt that pnin is associated with

squirrels throughout the novel. In the first chapter Pnin 28

suffers a heart attack that recalls a childhood delirium;

then in his fever he had felt that s squirrel drawn on a

screen by his bed held the answer to the world’s riddle.

That remembered picture overlaps Pnin’s confused percep­

tion of his present surroundings, a park where a gray

squirrel sits in front of him, emblematically holding a peach stone. In the second chapter, in a second park,

Pnin gives a third squirrel water from a drinking fountain,

thinking "she has fever, perhaps” (page 58). In the third chapter, a squirrel crosses the snow in front of the col­ lege library, and later Pnin is directly compared to a squirrel (in the extended description already quoted, of

Pnin investigating a catalogue drawer). The fourth, cen­ tral chapter is as much about young Victor Wind as it is about Timofey. And when Pnin begins writing to Victor, he follows his first letter with "a picture postcard repre­ senting the Gray Squirrel" (page 88). (The Gray Squirrel,

Sclurus carollnensis, is the uniquely American squirrel.

Might Pnin’s squirrels belong to a special Nabokovian sub- variety, Carolina Slavsky—the name of a minor character in

Pnin?) It is, in a sense that Pnin himself does not under­ stand, Pnin’s calling card. "Victor," we are told, "was glad to learn that ’squirrel* came from a Greek word which meant ’shadow-tali’" (page 88). We shall return later, first to Victor, then to shadow-tail. The fifth chapter begins with Pnin somewhere in New England, lost; after a 23

hunter fires at a squirrel and misses, Pnin finds his road

The sixth chapter contains the history of Cinderella’s

shoes, which we have already mentioned; Pnin demonstrates

that they were originally made from Russian squirrel fur.

The seventh, last chapter contains the narrator’s glimpse of young Pnin’s Russian schoolroom, where a stuffed squir­ rel stands among the toys and books.

Victor, Liza’s son by Eric Wind while she was still

Mrs. Pnin, is associated with glass, for he is, themati­ cally, the later version of Cinderella’s slipper. Glass can reflect and refract events, as well as shadow them, and all of Victor’s painting and drawing is concerned with optical effects; for instance, he spends much time observ­ ing the appearance of various objects through the distor­ tion of a glass of water. One of his ancestors was "a stained-glass artist in Lübeck" (page 89). Victor, at his private school, St. Bart’s, learns from Lake, his art teacher, that

the order of the solar spectrum is not a closed circle but a spiral of tints from cadmium red and oranges through a strontian yellow and a pale paradisal green to cobalt blues and violets, at which point the se­ quence does not grade into red again but passes into another spiral, which starts with a kind of lavender gray and goes on to Cinderella shades transcending human perception, (page 96)

Pnin approaches the Cinderella tale through history and legends; Victor approaches the same material through art, and eventually sends Pnin a beautiful punch-bowl of aqua­ 30

marine glass. One of Pnin’s guests, admiring this gift,

uses the same Cinderella description that Lake uses above:

"when she was a child, she imagined Cinderella’s glass

shoes to be exactly of that greenish blue tint" (page 158).

These words prompt Pnin’s discussion of Cinderella’s shoes.

Glass, squirrel, we have come full circle again.

Thematic Designs

It should be made clear at this point that squirrels are not symbols for Pnin, shorthand to represent him, or reductions of him, but only themes associated with him.

Nabokov’s method of assoclatlonal cross-references, not text but texture, is uniquely non-reductive, non-levelling.

If one thing can be reduced to another, then the first item has no independent value; if one thing stands for an­ other, then the system is itself unnecessary. Nabokov ob­

jects to all reductive systems, particularly Freudian and

Marxian, that treat art as source material for ideas, deny­ ing creation its essential dignity.

Nabokov investigates events not in their reduction to a hidden simplicity, but in their hidden complexity. Drunk on Pnin’s punch, one of his guests asks it this way: "But don’t you think—haw—that what he is trying to do—haw— practically in all his novels—haw—is—haw—to express the fantastic recurrence of certain situations?" (page 159) 31

Early In his autobiography, Nabokov discusses his two mem­

ories of General Kuropatkin, and how these memories are

both associated with sulfur matches. "What pleases me,"

Nabokov writes, ”is the evolution of the match theme"—and

then comes one of the organizing principles of his arts

"The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography."1

Following such designs is also, in Pnin, a rationale for

fiction.

Associative Structure: Shadows

The card that Pnin sends Victor, carefully chosen from

"an educational series depicting Our Mammals and Birds"

(page 88), tells us that "squirrel" comes from the Greek for "shadow-tail." The Greek for shadow is skla. We know from Fire the importance to Nabokov of Shade and Sha­ dow; it is fitting that, just as this card helps begin the relationship of Victor and Pnin, this word as a "thematic design" helps demonstrate their deep natural affinity. In the beginning of the novel, we are told that Pnin can "sha­ dowgraph with his knuckles a rabbit (complete with blinking eye)" (page 13). Here, "shadowgraph" has a perfectly clear meaning. Compare the same word, at a different stage in

1 Speak, Memory Revisited, p. 27. 32

its etymological history, applied to Victor:

He studied his mediums with the care and patience of an insatiable child—one of those painter’s apprentices (it is now Lake who is dreaming!), lads with bobbed hair and bright eyes who would spend years grinding colors in the workshop of some great Italian skia- grapher, in a world of amber and paradlsal glazes. (page 98)

Here, with "shadow" moved back into Greek, Nabokov seems

to be referring to some highly technical artistic process.

But there is apparently no such term as "skiagrapher" in

the history of art—although Victor is Indeed visiting

Italy with his mother at the end of the novel. It is, rather, an early term for a Roentgen photographer; that is, a skiagrapher is an X-ray technician. ("Pnin said, laugh­ ing, that every time he was X-rayed, doctors vainly tried to puzzle out what they termed *a shadow behind the heart’"

[page 126].) But while there has been no such term in art,

Nabokov demonstrates that there easily could be. A skia­ grapher might project shadows, or sketch shadows, or draw silhouettes. Pnin, as we have seen, does the first by projecting blinking rabbits on walls. Victor does the second:

He never went through that Initial stage of graphic activity when infants draw Kopffiisslers (tadpole peo­ ple), or humpty dumptles with L-like legs, and arms ending in rake prongs; in fact, he avoided the human form altogether and when pressed by Papa (Dr. Eric Wind) to draw Mama (Dr. Liza Wind), responded with a lovely undulation, which he said was her shadow on the new refrigerator . , . And at six, Victor already distinguished what so many adults never learn to see­ the eolors of shadows, the difference in tint between the shadow of an orange and that of a plum or of an 33

avocado pear, (pages 89-90)

Thus Pnin and Victor are both practitioners of the art of

skiagraphy. Amusingly, so is Nabokov, who chooses the

third and, he admits, the easiest method of skiagraphy to

end his fifth chapter:

On the distant crest of the knoll, at the exact spot where Gramineev’s easel had stood a few hours before, two dark figures in profile were silhouetted against the ember-red sky. They stood there closely, facing each other. One could not make out from the road whether it was the Poroshin girl and her beau, or Nina Bolotov and young Poroshin, or merely an emblematic couple placed with easy art on the last page of Pnin’s fading day. (page 136)

Victor and Pnin are bound together by their common rela­

tionship to the associational complex of shadows.

Victor, Dreams and Shadows

In the undercurrents of this novel, Pnin and young

Victor are related through two thematic designs: the Cin­ derella story (squirrel to glass), and shadows. What that relationship approximates is obvious even on the surface of the novel: father and son. The thematic designs run in harmony with the flow of the novel. Pnin’s triumph is that eventually he and Victor qualify as father and son under every test but flesh itself.

Approached directly, the relationship is a reasonable one. Liza, Victor’s mother, was at the time of her preg- 34 nancy Pnln’s wife. (One analysis of Pnin incorrectly states that Liza was already pregnant when she married

Pnin. Since Liza married Pnin on the rebound from her affair with the narrator, and since the narrator seems to be Nabokov himself, this would indeed be a fascinating situation. The chronology is, however, quite impossible.)

Although Liza eventually married Eric Wind, Victor’s actual father, still later she takes for granted that Pnin will help finance the education of a boy he is not related to and has never met, simply because the relationships of

Victor and Pnin to Liza make them father and son by extra­ polation. And when Liza, Timofey, and Eric all came to

America on the same ocean liner, Liza and Eric both seemed more than willing to include Pnin in their parenthood.

When Eric referred to "our child,” Nabokov tells us, "the

*our* sounded tri-personal" (page 49). Given Pnin’s wide sympathies, his innocence and openness, his plans at the end of his European career to raise then-unborn Victor as his own, and his still firm attachment to Liza, Pnin’s ac­ ceptance of Victor as a son is effortlessly believable.

The problem is Victor himself. Victor is a very tal­ ented youth, possibly a genius; like Pnin he is a loner; before he meets Pnin Nabokov confides about him, "I do not think he loved anybody" (page 87). Yet, almost purely

1 Page Stegner, Escape Into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov (New York, 1966), p. 93. 35

through indirection, Nabokov has convinced us by the end

of the novel that Victor, in spite of his "amicable aloof­

ness" (page 87), thinks of Pnin as his proper father. This

involves a careful predisposing of Victor’s fantasies,

tastes, and opinions,

Victor’s relationships with Eric and Liza are hardly

satisfactory: "Both parents, in their capacity of psycho­

therapists, did their best to Impersonate Lalus and Jo-

casta, but the boy proved to be a very mediocre little

Oedipus" (pages 87-88). Considering Nabokov’s well known

attitude toward Freud, this statement is hardly surprising.

What is surprising is that Andrew Field, perhaps our fore­

most Nabokov expert, has in his study come close to repro­

ducing this "modish triangle of Freudian romance" (page

88). Victor has a recurring fantasy about "the King, his

father6 (page 84). Because in these dreams the man who

has married Liza resembles Victor "as that underformer

imagined he would look at forty himself" (page 85), Field assumes that Victor wishes to elevate himself to the role 1 of his own father: "the child Victor is the king." But

this would mean that Victor wishes to replace his father in his mother’s affection, and has in his Imagination de­

stroyed his father (Eric is non-existent in the dream) in order to marry his mother (the photograph of the King’s

1 Field, p. 138 36

wife is clearly of Liza). Since Field failed to comment

on these Oedipal implications, perhaps he did not realize

the consequences of his reading of Victor’s fantasy.

Victor’s dream is not what Field apparently takes it

to be, a boy’s fantasy about being king; rather, it is a

more significant fantasy on the subject of an ideal father.

Logic would dictate to Victor that his father should re­

semble himself; most of the other elements of the dream,

as Nabokov points out, were borrowed from films, plays,

and stories, although "the residue of various family al­

lusions of long standing to the flight of Russian intel­

lectuals from Lenin’s regime" (pages 86-87) has its place also. Significantly, if we continue Victor’s dream to

"the crucial flight episode when the King alone . . . paced a beach on the Bohemian Sea" (page 86), we find it merging with Pnin’s dream that ends the chapter. The Sea of Bo­ hemia, a Shakespeare reference, is of course non-existent.

Pnin’s dream apparently occurs on the coast of that same

"hopeless sea" (page 110), so It is no wonder that his friend in the dream has gone home to get a map. (This theme of the impossible voyage occurs also in the middle of the chapter in the legendary float trip of St. Bar­ tholomew’s casket from the landlocked Caspian Sea to the coast of Sicily.) Pnin, who has escaped from a palace in his own dream, must also be the king, the "more plausible father" (page 85), in Victor’s dream, for this dream has 37

insistently recurred to Victor ever since Liza, her mar­

riage to Eric breaking up, first

Informed [Victor] that she had been Mrs. Pnin before she left Europe. She told him that this former hus­ band of hers had migrated to America too—that in fact he would soon see Victor; and since everything Liza alluded to . . . invariably took on a veneer of mys­ tery and glamour, the figure of the great Timofey Pnin . . . acquired in Victor’s hospitable mind a curious charm, a family resemblance to those Bulgarian kings or Mediterranean princes who used to be world-famous experts in butterflies or sea shells, (page 88)

Thus, even before meeting him, Victor’s choice for father

(and king) is a tentative Pnin.

Their first meeting, in chapter four, is "extremely satisfactory" (page 104). Because of this meeting, the chapter has the underlying theme of the cross, or inter­ section (the intersection on a map in the first part,

Jung’s mandala in the third, a Celtic cross of stone in the fourth). Because Pnin is Victor’s "water father"—an insistent reference in the novel—it rains throughout this chapter, even in dreams.

Victor’s attitude toward his parents is quite clear.

Eric, "a cranky refugee doctor, whom the lad had never much liked and had not seen now for almost two years"

(page 85), is hardly a rival for Liza’s affections, since he now lives in South America and Liza is about to marry for a third time. And the narrator expressly rejects the possibility that Victor is jealous about his mother’s love: "In his attitude toward his mother, passionate 38

childhood affection had long since been replaced by tender

condescension" (page 87).

This condescension apparently does not extend to

Liza’s appearance, for the desk photograph in Victor’s dream indicates that he and his mother share the same opin­

ion of her beauty and of her style, "those great blue eyes,

that carmine mouth (it was a colored photo, not fit for a king, but no matter)" (page 85). Compare the poem that

Liza wrote in Paris: "No jewels save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rose lips"

(page 181). Victor’s own poem is not just about da Vinci’s painting, but in continuing the concern6with "lips" and in using her name, about his own mother:

Leonardo I Strange diseases strike at madders mixed with lead: nun-pale now are Mona Lisa’s lips that you had made so red. (page 98)

And now that this contrast of nun-like appearance and lurid reality has been added to the mix, we should notice that the same pattern comes up in Liza’s own poem, the one she cruelly recites to Pnin in Walndell:

I have put on a dark dress And am more modest than a nun; An ivory crucifix Is over my cold bed.

But the lights of fabulous orgies Bum through my oblivion, And I whisper the name George— Your golden name! (page 56)

Clearly, Victor understands his mother’s character. Inci­ 39

dentally, the ultimate joke in this particular thematic

complex threatens to be a private one for Russians, for

Liza’s poems are described as being unoriginal in a spe­

cial way, "the kind of stuff that émigre” rhymsterettes

wrote after Akhmatova" (page 180). At least twice in Pnin

Liza’s poems are described as weak imitations of Anna

Akhmatova, and Akhmatova herself was notoriously denounced

by Zhdanov (Stalin’s sub-dictator in matters of culture) in 1946 as "a mixture of nun and harlot."1 Nabokov’s joke

is that this parody of criticism does apply perfectly to

Liza, a parody of a poetess.

The central concern of Pnin is the relationship of

Victor and his proximate father, Timofey Pnin, and the

father-son relationship was also the central concern of an earlier novel. "It is for the sake of the pages about

David and his father that the book was written and should 2 be read," Nabokov wrote in a new preface to Bend Sinister.

In its concern with this theme, Pnin can be profitably compared to Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the few twentieth cen­ tury works for which Nabokov has unrestrained admiration— a comparison one critic has already pointed out.^ Liza, like Molly Bloom, is an unfaithful Penelope to her Odys- 1 * 3

1 Alexander Werth, "Akhmatova: Tragic Queen Anna," London Magazine. VI (December 1966), 88. Bend Sinister (New York, 1964), p. xiv. 3 Ambrose Gordon, Jr., "The Double Pnin," in Nabokov^ The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo (Madison, Wls., 196’/), pp. 144-158'.'. 40

seus, while Pnin is the "true” father of Victor, as Bloom

is of Stephen.

Victor is also more autobiographical than he first ap­

pears (extending the comparison with Joyce’s Stephen),

since Nabokov was almost by mistake christened Victor (ac-

cording to the autobiography, at least), and was expected

to beoome not a writer but a painter. Victor, then, em­

bodies two alternative paths, or "time-forks,’’ in Nabokov’s

life. Although he insists that the biography of the artist

is ultimately irrelevant to fulfilled art, one suspects

that Nabokov has a control over his biography that rivals

his control over his fiction, and that these little refer­

ences were not intended to go forever unnoticed.

Character and Creator

Pnin’s relationship to Victor is not his whole history,

but it is a major factor in Pnin’s progress. His full

character development lies in his rejection of Nabokov—

or, purists will insist, of Nabokov’s persona. Several

commentators have, rightly, been intrigued with the parti­

cularly wobbly lines between the author, the narrator, and ultimately the character in the novel who seems to be

Nabokov. This devilish composite personality shall here

1 Speak, Memory Revisited, p. 21, 2 Field]' p.-30.------41

be simply called Nabokov.

Nabokov, author and narrator, leads Pnin through in­

numerable agonies of fever, seizure, "pain and panic" in

the first chapter; in the second he dredges up Liza and

reduces Pnin to his nadir. In the third chapter, Nabokov

the narrator warns the "careless reader" that it is Pnin’s

birthday, but no one warns Pnin. "And where will fate

send me?" Pnin wonders (page 68). Following the thought

of the Pushkin poem he has just taught in class, he fails

to find out (page 73). He is unknowingly missing one an­ niversary, his birthday, and preparing for a Pushkinlan

"future anniversary" (page 68), the birthday several years

later when he will leave Walndell College. Pnin has now begun his research on the Petite Hlstolre in earnest,

storing up fragments against his ruin. In the fourth chap

ter, Pnin affirms the new pattern of his life through meet ing and cherishing Victor. The fifth chapter provides

Pnin with a breathing space, the semblance of a full life, visiting Russian friends, talking about Victor, showing his mental and physical prowess. But Nabokov is mentioned during a conversation, and innocent, unfortunate Pnin says

"I have always had the impression that his entomology was merely a pose." "Oh no," replies Pnin’s best friend

Chateau, continuing rather ominously, "You will lose it some day," referring to "the Greek Catholic cross on a golden chainlet" that Pnin has temporarily taken off (page 42

128). Whether or not we take this as a warning from an

Insulted author, the next, sixth chapter Includes another

attempt to reduce Timofey to nothing. Herman Hagen tells

vulnerable Pnin that he will almost certainly be fired

when a new chairman takes over. When Hagen reveals that

Nabokov will be a lecturer in the English Department and a

potential employer, Pnin insists, HI will never work under

him" (page 170). A further disaster now occurs: quietly

washing dishes, Pnin drops a nutcracker into the water,

"where an excruciating crack of broken glass followed upon

the plunge" (page 172). The "melodious" punch-bowl, Pnin’s

most precious possession, his Cinderella link to Victor

seems to have been broken. Nabokov has slipped tremendous

importance into that aquamarine punch-bowl, Invisible in a

sink full of water. And Pnin rises magnificently to the occasion. In The Heal Life of Sebastian Knight, after merging the experience of two lives the narrator is able to speculate on the possibility of Nabokov’s existence.

In Bend Sinister Nabokov confronts the hero on a "beam of pale light" and drives him mad. Stupendous Pnin, standing once again in the wreckage of his life, confronts fate, chance, Nabokov with all the energy in his zig-zag soul, and drags his punch-bowl back from his author:

Pnin hurled the towel into a corner and, turning away, stood for a moment staring at the blackness beyond the threshold of the open back door. A quiet, lacy-winged little green insect [an emblem of entomologist Nabokov, this bug is the signature, the evidence of Nabokov’s 43

presence In the scene] circled in the glare of a strong naked lamp above Pnin’s glossy bald head. He looked very old, with his toothless mouth half open and a film of tears dimming his blank, unblinking eyes, (page 172)

Pnin seems dead himself on his return from this "duration,"

this long moment where we feel time in our bones, but at

this crucial moment of time suspension to which the novel

has led, he has confronted Nabokov and won: his punch-bowl

is intact.

In the last chapter Nabokov emerges from his den,

striking in all directions, and takes on the definite

shape of a character. He visits a direct hit on Pnin’s

past by telling us that it was his affair with Liza that

precipitated her into marriage with Pnin. Then Nabokov

visits the campus for a lecture and a personal confronta­

tion with his victim. But Pnin flees, escaping on his

birthday while Nabokov is busy with a decoy, Jack Cocker­

ell, the false Pnin who "had acquired an unmistakable re­

semblance to the man he had now been mimicking for almost

ten years" (page 187). Surging up the hill, Pnin is "free at last" (page 191). But Nabokov will neither retire his puppet to his box, nor let him go, a real live boy, on his

earned escape. Pnin will re-appear briefly in Pale Fire, carefully trimmed back to comic Russian, fantastic pedant, stock figure trapped in an enormous burlesque. 44

CHAPTER III, THE MIRRORS OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT1

Mirrors

Vladimir Nabokov insists that a novel is not to be

read, but to be studied: "You can only re-read a novel. 2 Or re-re-read a novel,” This attitude makes heavy de­

mands on the reader, for Nabokov’s work, even more than

that of James Joyce, requires an involvement with the

author’s private calculus. The idiosyncratic literalness

of his translation of Eugene Onegin suggests that Nabokov

regards literature as a collection of cabbalistic texts,

an attitude also voiced by V., the narrator of The Real

Life of Sebastian Knight:

I sometimes feel when I turn the pages of Sebastian’s masterpiece that the "absolute solution" is there, somewhere, concealed in some passage I have read too hastily, or that it is Intertwined with other words whose familiar guise deceived me. I don’t know any other book that gives one this special sensation, and perhaps this was the author’s special intention.3

Perhaps for Nabokov there is no religion but art. For him 1 2 3

1 This chapter of the dissertation has already been pub­ lished, in Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo (Madison, Wis., Ï9Ô7J, pp. 8j>-94, A few revisions have been found necessary, and the format slightly altered. 2 John G. Hayman, "A Conversation with Vladimir Nabokov- with Digressions," The Twentieth Century, CLXVI (December 1959), 449. 3 The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Norfolk, Conn., I959), p. 18Ö. Hereafter cited in text. 45

as for Joyce, a work has submerged structures probably not grasped at first glance, designed to Intensify the reading

experience. It is all the more remarkable that these gnostic novels are couched in the most lucid prose; Nabo­ kov’s labyrinthine buildings have glass-and-steel, curtain- wall exteriors.

The beautiful and brief Sebastian Knight is congenially designed for that re-reading that Nabokov desires. Tightly constructed, it does not employ the diffuse attitude toward its subject that weakens The Gift, the novel that immedi­ ately precedes it in the Nabokov canon. Nabokov has stated that, like Joyce, he writes his novels not from beginning to end but at all points at the same time, slowly filling in the gaps. While re-reading, one begins to acquire the same method as reader that Nabokov employs as writer: see­ ing the entire novel simultaneously, as numerous struc­ tures, interlocking syllogisms which may proceed in reverse as well as forward order. For example, Sebastian’s experi­ ence visiting what he wrongly believed to be the house his mother died in becomes significant only after V. has a similar experience—one that leads to the triumphant, vi­ sionary announcement at the end of the novel—while visit­ ing the wrong sickroom.

Should one venture beyond a first reading, the gate of the labyrinth, there is always the possibility that one might not be able to find one’s way out again, as Nabokov 46

suggests in an interview: "Reality is an Infinite sucoes-

lon of levels, levels of perception, of false bottoms, and

hence unquenchable, unattainable." Mary McCarthy, in a

remarkable review of Pale Fire, seems to agree: "Each

plane or level in its shadow box proves to be a false bot­

tom; there is an infinite perspective regression, for the 2 book is a book of mirrors." Yet Miss McCarthy may have

fallen for one of Nabokov’s gambits, for a novel may have

other rules than "reality," and mirrors may oast mutual or

collective reflections without providing an infinite re­

gression. Nabokov often compares his novels to chess prob­

lems, and "deception in chess, as in art, is only part of

the game";in his autobiography, he compares chess-problem

composition to "one of those incredible novels where the

author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain

unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles 4 that he surmounts." Even the most deceptive chess prob­

lems have solutions, and Nabokov’s novels promist to re­

solve themselves once the "false bottoms" have been opened.

"I like composing riddles and I like finding elegant solu­

tions to those riddles that I have composed myself,

1 Peter Duval Smith and Vladimir Nabokov, "Vladimir Nabokov on His Life and Work," The Listener, LXVIII (Nov. 22. 1962), 856. 2 "A Bolt from the Blue," in The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (New York, 1970), P? 19. 3 Smith and Nabokov, p. 856. 4 Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York, 1966), pp. ¿96-^91. 5 Smith and Nabokov, p. 857. V?

To describe a Nabokov novel as "a book of mirrors" is

to employ an accurate metaphor, one that has been fre­

quently used by Nabokov himself. For instance, he de­

scribes one novella as "my rain-sparkling crystograms" and

continues: "The theme of The Eye is the pursuit of an in­

vestigation which leads the protagonist through a hell of

mirrors and ends in the merging of twin Images." (In this

context we should remember that not only The Eye is con­

cerned with dual identities, but so too are Sebastian

Knight and Despair.) Nabokov also calls his novels mirrors

in other contexts. He tells us, for instance, that the

title of Bend Sinister is "an attempt to suggest an outline

broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister o world." The "unique rules" that "lucidly mad" Nabokov

follows in Sebastian Knight require the construction of multiple mirrors, and the "elegant solution" of the novel

is that these metaphorical mirrors are the novels written by Sebastian Knight.

Methods of Composition

The problem that Nabokov sets up and solves is out-

1 The Eye (New York, 1965), Foreword. 2 Sinister (New York, 1964), p. xii. 48

lined in V.*s discussion of Sebastian’s first novel:

The Prismatic Bezel can be thoroughly enjoyed once it is understood that the heroes of the book are what can be loosely called "methods of composition." It is as if a painter said: Look, here I’m going to show you not the painting of a landscape, but the painting of different ways of painting a certain landscape, and I trust their harmonious fusion will disclose the land­ scape as I intend you to see it. (page 95)

This seems to be a logical extension of early twentieth century painting practices. A painter could Incorporate a number of spatial perspectives into a single painting

(cubism), or a number of time perspectives into that paint­ ing (Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase); to in­ corporate a number of perspectives of technique into a single painting seems to be a logical next step. It might be called "technical cubism"—to coin a term for a non­ existent art.

But this idea can easily be applied to literature, to

Sebastian Knight itself: the personality of Sebastian will be disclosed by different ways of writing about that per­ sonality (that is, different methods of biography). The resulting book will be a fusion of these different methods, a merging of the images reflected by these variously angled mirrors. It is as though one prism had broken a diffused light into its rainbow spectrum and a second prism had turned it back into one pure, concentrated ray.

One method of composition, of biography, that will not be used is the environmental method of correlating the 49 author with the fluctuations of the society around him.

For one thing, Sebastian is anything but a representative of his generation, or of any other. For another, this is the method used by Mr. Goodman, Sebastian’s unscrupulous literary agent, in The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, the rival biography. V.*s deflation of the fictitious Mr.

Goodman is as vicious and satisfying as Dwight MacDonald’s best pricking of similarly bloated reputations. We must remember, however, that it is Mr. Goodman’s book, not Mr.

Goodman, that is the farcical villain of Sebastian Knight.

Its type of biography, showing the artist as a child of his age, is rejected as a method of composition, for it pro­ vides a mirror of distortion rather than perspective.

Goodman’s world, in which society influences the artist rather than the reverse, is a scaled-down version of the tyrannies of banality and conformity pictured in Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, and is to Nabokov equally absurd.

In spite of the apparently receding structure of

Sebastian Knight (the more V. talks about his half-brother the less we seem to know about him) the novel leads con­ vincingly to its last-page resolution: "Thus—I am Sebas­ tian Knight." All roads lead to this denouement. It will be reached here through Sebastian’s five books, for V.’s

Increasingly vague focus on Sebastian’s life corresponds to his increasingly sharp interest in Sebastian’s work. 50

The Novels of Sebastian Knight

Sebastian Knight’s first novel, The Prismatic Bezel,

is a detective story, or rather the parody of a detective

story. Any biographer worth his ink must be part detec­ tive, and The Prismatic Bezel is a novel of literary de­ tection. V. tells us that Sebastian’s first three books employ the •’research" theme, and the first part of a bio­ grapher’s quest, that of providing himself with a general background on his subject’s life, corresponds to the ele­ mentary, subllterary nature of the detective genre. The

Prismatic Bezel shifts from a resort hotel to a house in the country in its parody of contemporary novels, much as

V.’s quest for the mysterious woman in Sebastian’s life

(the killer?) shifts from hotel to country house. Per­ haps this is why, while visiting Madame Lecerf, V. has the o odd impression that there is a corpse in the garden.

Sebastian’s novel is a murder mystery; the same, of course, can be said for Sebastian Knight; "One corpse, one inves­ tigator, some obscure photographs and burned letters, a mysterious woman or two, faint clues dropped here and

1 Susan Fromberg has pointed out that The Prismatic Bezel is here parodying South Wind, one of the books in Sebas­ tian’s study. See "The Unwritten Chapters in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," Modern Fiction Studies, XIII (winter ------2 The Waste Land comes to mind. 51

there, and so on.”1 But the parallel is even more exact,

for The Prismatic Bezel closes with the revelation that

old Nosebag is G. Abeson, that the murder victim is still

alive, and Sebastian Knight ends with V.’s defiant declara­

tion that, in a sense, he is Sebastian.

Success is Sebastian’s second novel:

Here he seems to have passed from one plane to another rising a step higher, for, if his first novel is based on methods of literary composition,—the second one deals mainly with the methods of human fate, (page 95)

Sebastian here explores various avenues of chance leading

to the accidental first meeting of a man and woman who be­

come lovers, devoting Success to "one of the most compli­

cated researches that has ever been attempted by a writer"

(page 96). The novel starts by pursuing several avenues

that end in blind alleys, and we are reminded of V.’s un­

successful but nevertheless duly reported inquiries, such

as his interview with Mademoiselle; in his autobiography

Nabokov calls these various frustrated pursuits "self­ mates."2 Finally, retracing the steps of the lovers, the

novel not only establishes why they came to the right place

at the right time, but discovers that they had almost met

on several previous occasions where

every time, a minute mistake (the shadow of a flaw, the stopped hole of an unwatched possibility, a caprice

1 Page Stegner, Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov (New York, 19¿¿), p. ¿9. ¿ Speak, Memory Revisited, p. 257. 52

of free will) [spoiled] the necessitarian’s pleasure and the two lives [were] diverging again with in­ creased rapidity, (page 97)

We are reminded of the obstacles placed in the way of V.

as he tries to race death to Sebastian’s bedside, or per­

haps of the meeting of Clare and Sebastian that is narrowly averted when Sebastian spies the book he needs at a nearby

stand. Sebastian Knight could have been written in the way described in Success; the method Is only partially adopted, however, and this second potential version remains

only a shadow, a mirror, or a dream move beyond the border of a chessboard.1 The first meeting of Sebastian and Ma­ dame de Rechnoy, however, does provide a concrete example of the method of Success. Not only is the situation iden­ tical (the first meeting of two lovers), but V. provides us with the reasons of both parties for going to Blauberg

(Sebastian was tired and ill; Madame de Reohnoy was suf­ fering from her restless hypochondria), just as Sebastian retraced the movements of his pair of lovers.

This concern with chance and fate also reminds us of the strokes of pure luck that Nabokov paints with a wide brush in Sebastian Knight. While interviewing Goodman, V. meets Helen Pratt, who can tell him about Sebastian’s re­ lationship with her close friend, Clare Bishop—this in

1 Susan Fromberg has suggested that Success is also a parody of the mechanism of chance in The Bridge of San Luis Hey, another of the books in Sebastian’s study. See From­ berg, p. 438, 53

spite of Nabokov’s almost Immediately preceding admonition that this kind of accident does not happen in "real life."

After an unsuccessful visit to Blauberg to find the mys­ terious woman who wrote letters to Sebastian in Russian,

V. meets a curious traveler who is able to procure V.’s list of names. The first of these leads, Helene Grinsteln, provides, again by chance, an anecdote of Sebastian’s Rus­ sian student days. The second provides the background which will eventually allow V. to identify Madame Lecerf as Madame de Rechnoy, Sebastian’s lover, because Rechnoy’s cousin happens to be visiting. The third visit, to Helene von Graun, yields Madame Lecerf instead, who happens to be staying at her friend’s house. It is no wonder that V. speculates that Sebastian’s shade is hovering over him.

Sebastian’s third book, The Funny Mountain, is not a novel but a collection of three short stories. Of these stories we find out little from V., but he does mention the last of the three, "The Back of the Moon":

You remember that delightful character in it—the meek little man waiting for a train who helped three miser­ able travellers in three different ways? This Mr. Siller is perhaps the most alive of Sebastian’s orea- tur ».tures and is incidentally the final representative of the "research theme." ... It is as though a certain idea steadily growing through two books has now burst into real physical existence, and so Mr. Siller makes his bow, with every detail of habit and manner, pal­ pable and unique, (pages 103-104)

It is Nabokov’s (or V.’s?) little joke that this "real,"

"palpable" character, Siller, demonstrates his reality by appearing In Sebastian Knight as Sllbermann, with every mannerism Intact, and helpfully mentions the title of the story he appeared in, in case the reader’s memory is poor.

He helps V. on the train as he had earlier helped three characters in Sebastian’s story.

This surprising development leads us to some complex questions. Is V.’s meeting with Sllbermann another of those instances where V. finds the Initial impulse which led to Sebastian’s prose, as he caught the original of

"that stone melting into wing" (page 74), also from The

Funny Mountain, in pigeons fluttering away from the Arc de

Trlomphe? Or is it an example of art manifesting itself in nature? There is no question, however, that Nabokov has provided us with another method of writing Knight’s biography, and an example of that method,

Nabokov’s third mirror (method of composition, level of biography) is the first one that is applicable only to a literary personality. In this third potential biography

Nabokov is for the first time considering Sebastian pri­ marily as an author. The biographer searches his subject’ books for clues to his personality, attempting to find cor respondences between his creations and his life. At the extreme, such as Aiken’s Ushant. characters are merely dis guises for actual faces; more commonly, characters are par- tially "drawn from life" and partly imaginary. V. has, perhaps without realizing it, achieved a literary triumph 55

in finding the original of Sebastian’s Siller. The Funny

Mountain also reflects Sebastian Knight in that Nabokov’s

novel has one ’’real“ character, Nabokov himself, who poses 1 as Paul Reohnoy. This double mirroring also occurs in

Nabokov’s use of Sebastian’s last two novels.

Lost Property, Knight’s fourth book, gives us another

level of analysis. V. calls it Sebastian’s "most auto­

biographical work” (page 6), and this seems to be the posi­

tion from which we should consider the novel. It is the

only one of Sebastian’s novels whose plot is not described,

but it "appears as a kind of halt in his literary journey

of discovery: a summing up, a counting of the things and

souls lost on the way, a setting of bearings" (page 111).

One fertile mode of literary investigation has always been

to trace remnants of an author’s autobiography in his fic­

tional creations. V. uses this method occasionally in

Sebastian Knight, almost always taking these autobiograph­

ical quotations from Lost Property; V. assumes that the

"fiction" is very thin in that novel, that Sebastian is

speaking throughout in his own voice.

Any reader acquainted with Speak, Memory soon discovers

that all of Nabokov’s novels teem with details from his own

life, given to various characters almost haphazardly. In

Sebastian Knight V.’s mother wears her dead husband’s wed-

1 According to Stegner, p. 73 56 ding ring tied to her own with black thread, an eccentri­ city which Nabokov also ascribes to his own mother, and there are countless similar details in any of his novels, let what V. says of Sebastian’s works, that it is futile to trace their autobiographical aspects, applies equally to Nabokov’s own:

He had a queer habit of endowing even his most grotes­ que characters with this or that idea, or impression, or desire which he himself might have toyed with. . . . I fail to name any other author who made use of his art in such a baffling manner—baffling to me who might desire to see the real man behind the author, (page 114)

This method, then, although used successfully with Lost

Property, has its hazards. Culling autobiography from an author’s fiction is, however, another useful method of composing a biography.

In a different way, the novel is indeed autobiograph­ ical, because Sebastian and V. seem to represent aspects of Nabokov’s literary career. Sebastian Knight is the first of Nabokov’s English novels, and marks the end of his composing in Russian. Nabokov has frequently stated that his Russian is far richer than his English, and thus

V., his new self, is a worried, amateur author. In the last sentence of Sebastian Knight, V. speculates on his relationship not only to Sebastian but to Nabokov: "I am

Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are some­ one whom neither of us knows.n

Sebastian Knight’s fifth and last book, The Doubtful 57

Asphodel, provides a more obvious mirror for Sebastian

Knight than any other of Knight’s novels. V.’s summary of

the novel could be considered a description of Sebastian

Knight as well:

The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole. . . . The man is the book; the book itself is heaving and dying, and draw­ ing up a ghostly knee, (page 92)

Not only does the protagonist of The Doubtful Asphodel

seem to be Sebastian, but the other characters also pro­

vide echoes of Sebastian Knight:

We follow the gentle old chess player Schwarz, who sits down on a chair in a room in a house, to teach the orphan boy the moves of the knight; we meet the fat Bohemian woman with that grey streak showing in the fast colour of her cheaply dyed hair; we listen to a pale wretch noisily denouncing the policy of oppres­ sion to an attentive plainclothes man in an ill-famed public-house. The lovely tall prlmadonna steps in her haste into a puddle, and her silver shoes are ruined. An old man sobs and is soothed by a soft-lipped girl in mourning. Professor Nussbaum, a Swiss scientist, shoots his young mistress and himself dead in a hotel- room at half past three in the morning, (page 175)

Schwarz is "Uncle Black," Paul Rechnoy*s cousin; the "fat

Bohemian woman" is Lydia Bohemsky; the plainclothes man

may be Silbermann again; the "lovely tall prlmadonna" seems

to be Helene von Graun, who has a "fine contralto voice?

and also steps Into a puddle, although her silver shoes

once belonged to Clare Bishop; the suicidal couple died in

Blauberg, around the corner from Sebastian.

While each of Sebastian’s novels provides a mirror for

Sebastian Knight, each successive reflection has caught 58

more of the finished book, and The Doubtful Asphodel pro­

vides the closest parallel to V.’s work. The burden of

The Doubtful Asphodel is an expected revelation about the

nature of life and death: "In a moment or two, at the end

of this sentence, in the middle of the next, or perhaps a

little further still, we shall learn something that will

change all our concepts” (page 178). Of course the revela­

tion does not come, the man dies, and the eternal secret

remains unrevealed. Nabokov coolly replays this situation

twice again in the last pages of Sebastian Knight. First

Sebastian appears to V. in a dream: "I knew he was calling

me and saying something very important—and promising to

tell me something more Important still" (page 189). Sebas­

tian’s letter, which prompted V.’s dream, had concluded

with the ominous, "I don’t much like those bare branches

and twigs which I see from my window" (page 186), echoing

the last observation in The Doubtful Asphodel, that "the

’absolute solution’ was written all over the world he had known" (page 178), and V.’s subconscious has provided a nightmare continuation. Then V. receives word that Sebas­

tian is dying, and this fantasy takes on substance; if V.

can reach Sebastian in time, the truth about life and death may yet be revealed. Again the answer is lost, for Sebas­

tian has died and V. sits unknowingly at the wrong bedside.

Here Is a final, astonishing level of biography, for V. has, through his affinity for, sympathy with, and thorough 59

re-reading of The Doubtful Asphodel, literally re-lived

its central situation in his own life. Through his total

immersion in the novel, he has become its author: "Sebas­

tian’s mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be

washed off" (page 205). What is still more astonishing is

that V. reveals the secret that Sebastian did not, that

"the soul is but a manner of being—not a constant state—

that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its un­

dulations" (page 204). V.’s revelation came as he sat by

the wrong bed, listening to the "quick soft breathing" of an ill man asleep, and what he learned would have been the

same had he been listening to Sebastian’s breathing, that the physical part of a man is unimportant in a quest for his soul. Sebastian’s life is almost irrelevant to his

"real life."

It is, then, through his attention to Knight’s novels, rather than to his autobiography, that V. becomes Sebas­ tian Knight. Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay "A New Refu­ tation of Time" (neither Sebastian nor Nabokov believes in time), presents this idea in a condensed form:

We can postulate, in the mind of an individual (or of two individuals who do not know of each other but in whom the same process works) two identical moments. Once this identity is postulated, one may ask: Are not these identical moments the same? Is not one single repeated term sufficient to break down and con­ fuse the series of time? Do not the fervent readers

1 Sebastian Knight. pp. 65-66, and Speak, Memory Re- visited, p. 13$. 60

who surrender themselves to Shakespeare become, liter­ ally, Shakespeare?1

To Borges, these fervent readers seem to be fairly numer­ ous. Nabokov is more skeptical, for his reader begins with an "inner knowledge" of, and "some sort of common rhythm" with, Sebastian (pages 33, 34); his success comes only after his intensive re-reading of Sebastian’s last novel and a literal reliving of its incidents. Still,

Nabokov’s argument proceeds along the same lines—in a sense, he goes even further than Borges, for in suddenly making the physical world irrelevant, V. is able not only to grasp Sebastian’s soul but to make the visionary leap that "perhaps we both are someone else whom neither of us knows," a speculative discovery that drove the protagonist of another Nabokov novel mad.

"Two modes of his life, question each other and the answer is his life itself, and that is the nearest one ever ean approach a human truth" (page 137). Sebastian Knight is not a biography but a presentation of methods by which to write that biography; each of the methods used is mir­ rored by one of Sebastian’s novels; and each of these mir­ rors comes closer to providing a perfect reflection of the finished book. A final mirror is yet to oome, for Sebas­ tian Knight is the fictional biography which Sebastian was

1 "A New Refutation of Time," Labyrinths (New York, 1964), p. 224. 61 planning in the last year of his life (pages 40-41). This last mirror is a flawless and endless double reflection. 62

CHAPTER IV,

THE DYNAMICS OF NABOKOV’S ART

Dialectical Introduction

Nabokov has sometimes been accused, almost contra­ dictorily, of both sentimentality and cruelty. Both char­ ges are misunderstandings, based on the two principles of his aesthetic dynamic. Nabokov’s aesthetic rests on the two pillars of the memory and the dream-producing sub­ conscious, and his art is the dynamic interplay of ecstasy and parody. In a loosely Hegelian formulation, Nabokov finds the imagination (the creative faculty) to be a syn­ thesis of the memory and the subconscious.

Ecstasy and Memory

Nabokov makes two characteristic types of pronounce­ ments on art: as ecstasy and as trickery. This statement from the afterword to Lolita is typical of the first:

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it af­ fords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, ten­ derness, Kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.1

I wish here to define Nabokov’s concept of aesthetic bliss

1 Lolita (New York, 1958), pp. 316-317 63

and its relation to memory, and to indicate the chains of

association through which both are invoked.

Nabokov frequently and clearly defines ecstasy as a

state where awareness of time or space expands or con­

tracts to non-existences

A philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels every­ thing that happens in one point of time.1

The passage continues with the example of the poet, who is

ubiquitous in space:

Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hlrsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur—all forming an Instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N. Y.) Is the nucleus.

This type of observation effectively provides ecstasy, aesthetic bliss, throughout Nabokov’s work. For instance,

Chapter Five of Pnin opens with Pnin lost in the woods in the Catskills, and our frustration is skillfully built for several pages, until Nabokov Judges it a proper time for artistic release:

Another minute passed, and then everything happened at

1 Speak, Memory (New York, 1951)> P. 155. In his recent revision Nabokov added, presumably to emphasize the point further, that "Vivian Bloodmark"—his own anagram—was the "friend," Speak, Memory Revisited, p. 218. 64

once: the ant found an up-right beam leading to the roof of the tower and started to ascend it with re­ newed zest; the sun appeared; and Pnin at the height of hopelessness, found himself on a paved road with the rusty but still glistening sign directing way­ farers "To The Pines."1

Perhaps ecstasy is too strong a word to describe the effect

that Nabokov here sought and found, the effect of ubiquity

in space; the point remains, however, that the formal, aesthetic purpose of this section of the chapter lay in that slow climb of frustration and that sudden glide of bliss.

So the poet is ubiquitous in space. And, according to

Nabokov, ecstasy for the scientist is ubiquity in time.

He is, of course, also a scientist, a lepldopterist, him­ self:

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to super­ impose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timeless­ ness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and beyond the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mor­ tal.12

In the highly elliptic quotation above, we should notice that "magic carpet" is an elaborate conceit for the Memory.

Incidentally, the last memory Humbert offers us at the end

1 Pnin (Garden City, N. Y., 1957), p. 115. 2 8peak, Memory Revisited, p. 139. 65

of Lolita is one of these mountain landscapes.

In Speak, Memory and elsewhere, Nabokov frequently uses two other tropes to represent Memory. The first is a butterfly with the properly corresponding name, Mnemosyne.

Indeed, after the original American edition of his auto­ biography was first published as Conclusive Evidence, he toyed with the idea of calling the British edition Speak, Mnemosyne before arriving at the present title.1

The second trope is the camera luolda. Over and over in Speak, Memory the past is placed in a tiny glass cell; the microscope Is the Nabokov equivalent of Proust’s magic lantern. And there is a further complication, since Nabo­ kov’s use for the microscope has been to study the anatomy of butterflies—especially their genitalia. Thus sex thrusts itself into Nabokov’s thematical complex of but­ terflies, glass cells, and memory.

Indeed, Nabokov has throughout his autobiography placed sexual revelations in proximity to butterfly recol­ lections, as one of his "thematic designs," one of those patterns in his life which together make up "a certain in­ tricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap."12

This Juxtaposition of sex and butterflies seems also.to have been one of his traps for Freudians, but no Freudian

1 Speak, Memory Revisited, p. 11. 2 ibia.. p. 25. 66 critics have suggested Nabokov’s passion for butterflies in Speak, Memory was a substitute for sex (the same trap was relald in Lolita), This in "First Love," a frequently anthologized chapter of the autobiography, young Nabokov first acquires a larger lepidopteral vocabulary ("I learned, and have preserved ever since in a glass cell of my memory, that ’butterfly’ in the Basque language is mlserlooletea"). then the girl is introduced one sentence 1 later and given the obviously related name, Colette. No­ tice that the "glass cell" of the memory also entered this last quotation; several pages further, Nabokov insists on enshrining that oft-repeated metaphor:

Among the trivial souvenirs acquired at Biarritz be­ fore leaving, my favorite was not the small bull of black stone and not the sonorous sea shell but some­ thing which now seems almost symbolic—a meerschaum penholder with a tiny peephole of crystal in its orna­ mental part. One held it quite close to one’s eye, screwing up the other, and when one had got rid of the shimmer of one’s own lashes, a miraculous photographic view of the bay and of the line of cliffs ending in a lighthouse could be seen inside.

If this thematic complex is now firmly established, fur­ ther evidence can be postponed.

The continual Invocation to the memory to do its work, the Insistence on visual accuracy, the framing devices, such as the slide show in Chapter Eight, all of these must

1 Speak, Memory Revisited, pp. 148-149. In the index to this revised version of the autobiography, Nabokov con­ firms whate astute readers must have presumed all along, that "Colette" is a pseudonym for the girl’s real name. 2 Ibid.. p. 151. 67

remind us of Proust. And this Influence has been ac­ knowledged.1 But this affinity with Proust can best be handled when discussing Humbert’s "Proustian intonations" in Lolita.

Parody, Trickery, and the Dream Agent

There are two states of cognitive existence: that normal, daylight one where everything occurs by dull rote or slow progression, the life we pass that seems but a clumsy imitation of life; and the other existence that we live when we dream at night, sifting the day’s events un­ til they fall into an assimilable order and we can file them away in our madly ordered heads, for there is a re­ lentless logic in nightmares, and while they parody the day’s experience they also insist that they are more real when they proceed down their own path than when they slav­ ishly copy the Inanities of normal life. Nabokov’s art grasps this duality of existence, and offers visions of both day and night. His view can be stated fairly simply: parody and trickery are the counterparts of the dream.

Of course, this formula falls to clarify the matter unless we understand Nabokov’s attitude toward dreams. A dream is an irrational parody of the day’s events, created

1 See King, Queen, Knave (New York, 1968), p, ix. 68

by an autonomous agency in the mind consistently labeled

by Nabokov "the dream producer,” and often briefly person­

ified as a half-starved and half-crazy magician or Piran-

delllan stage manager ("whenever possible the scenery of

our infancy is used by an economically minded producer as a ready-made setting for our adult dreams").1 This inner

eccentric has a prodigious sense of humor, a fierce inde­

pendence, and otherwise, crude tastes: he has no sense of

harmony, consequently no sense of beauty, and he is total­

ly capricious, consequently often cruel.

Games, with their irrational but totally rigid rules,

represent a portion of this concept to Nabokov~as they

did for other artists who have pursued this dream world,

such as Lewis Carroll. Poker is occasionally used as a

conceptual framework for the dream, but chess is its most

frequent realization. The chess board is a highly serious but almost totally abstracted world, where all beauty de­ pends on trickery and deception. In chess, one player faces another across a looking-glass battlefield where the most frequent lines of play begin with duplicated moves, then slowly the image distorts until the loser’s side is a gross, gnarled parody of the winner’s.

In his autobiography Nabokov has written an elegant section on the composing of chess problems, and the middle

1 Speak, Memory Revisited, p. 130. 69

of that section contains a running comparison of chess

problems and the art of the novel:

It should be understood that competition In chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (Just as in a first-rate of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world), so that a great part of a problem’s value is due to the number of "tries”—delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the wood-be solver astray. But whatever I can say about this matter of problem composing, I do not seem to convey sufficiently the ecstatic core of the process and its points of connec­ tion with various other, more overt and fruitful, operations of the creative mind, from the charting of dangerous seas to the writing of one of those incred­ ible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid mad­ ness, has set himself certain unique rules that he ob­ serves, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients—rocks, and carbon, and blind throbbings. In the case of problem composition, the event is accompanied by a mellow physical satis­ faction, especially when the chessmen are beginning to enact adequately, in a penultimate rehearsal, the com­ poser’s dream.1

That lengthy quotation seems necessary, for if this point is to be understood, that deception, parody, chess, and dreams have a common denominator for Nabokov, then the

slow movement of the undercurrents of his writing must be mapped out, as well as its prominent surface movement. It

is fascinating to notice in the above quotation how the language of trickery ("delusive," "false," "specious") be­

comes the language of fantasy ("madness," "nightmare,"

"dream"). Like many of Nabokov’s novels, this description

1 Speak, Memory Revisited, pp. 290-291. 70

sinks into a delirium.

The Dynamics of the Magician

To what extent is art accurate memory and perception,

to what extent supremely audacious trickery? The question

has been with Nabokov since his childhood, when two of his

painting tutors prepresented the opposing views:

[Dobuzhinski] made me depict from memory, in the greatest possible detail, objects I had certainly seen thousands of times without visualizing them properly: a street lamp, a postbox, the tulip design on the stained glass of our own front door. He tried to teach me to find the geometrical coordinations between the slender twigs of a leafless boulevard tree, a sys­ tem of visual give-and-takes, requiring a precision of linear expression, which I failed to achieve in my youth, but applied gratefully, in my adult instar, not only to the drawing of butterfly genitalia during my seven years at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoo­ logy, when immersing myself In the bright wellhole of a microscope to record in India ink this or that new structure; but also, perhaps, to certain camera-lucida needs of literary composition.

Dobuzhinski is carefully correlated to memory, butterflies, and the glass lens that Joins the two.

Emotionally, however, I am still more indebted to the earlier color treats given me by my mother and her former teacher. How readily Mr. Cummings would sit down on a stool, part behind with both hands his— what? was he wearing a frock coat? I see only the gesture—and proceed to open the black tin paintbox. I loved the nimble way he had of soaking his paint­ brush in multiple color to the accompaniment of a ra­ pid clatter produced by the enamel containers wherein the rich reds and yellows that the brush dimpled were appetlzingly cupped; and having thus collected its honey, it would cease to hover and poke, and, by two or three sweeps of its lush tip, would drench the "Vatmanski" paper with an even spread of orange sky, 71

across which, while that sky was still dampish, a long purple-black cloud would be laid. "And that’s all, dearie," he would say. "That’s all there is to it."*

Cummings is, very tellingly, not quite remembered. Was he

wearing a frock coat? The trickster necessarily sacri­

fices accuracy of detail to striking effect. Perhaps such

a heavy burden should not be placed on Mr. Cummings* use

of "dearie," but it should be noticed that Nabokov’s trick­

sters often are either homosexual or sexually ambivalent.

Nabokov frequently acknowledges this duality of art and then yokes its two aspects together, for art is cre­ ated in the Imagination, the melting pot for the Memory and the Subconscious. And in his central metaphor for the artist (the man of supreme imagination), Nabokov combines these two strands of his art. The artist is, above all, the Magician. Inevitably, Nabokov’s explanations of his own art fall into this metaphor:

I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book and who, when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such ancient terms as In­ terreaction of Inspiration and Combination—which, I admit, sounds like a conjurer explaining one trick by performing another.12

Inspiration is the element of ecstasy, Combination the element of trickery. This synthesis (Interreaction) is always unstable, because it is dynamic, and Nabokov has in different novels mixed different proportions of ecstasy

1 Speak, Memory Revisited, pp. 92-93. 2 Lolita, Afterword, p. 313. and trickery, of memory and the dream. The mixture is it

self necessary for the full development of his art, since

parody, itself dynamic ("the clash between the author and

the world**), operates on second-rate, vulgar materials, while ecstasy, the culmination of art, is itself static, and cannot stand alone.

The Dynamics of Lolita

This pattern can be traced through most of Nabokov’s novels, but -chrono-logic will be violated here by present ing the analysis of Lolita first. Lolita is still Nabo­ kov’s greatest novel, the one which has unmistakably marked Itself as a classic. It is a monument in our lit­ erature. It deserves the most extensive and individual treatment. In addition, an extended example seems neces­ sary to further illustrate and explain the dynamics of

Nabokov’s art, and Lolita exploits this artistic energy more completely than any other novel in the canon of his works. There is a great danger of over-simplification throughout this chapter, and nowhere is that danger great­ er than here, but it is hoped that this explication will offer a limited but rational suggestion of Lolita’s per­ fection.

The syllogism—or rather, Hegelian triad—is as fol­ lows: Humbert (thesis) represents ecstasy and memory; 73

Quilty (antithesis) parody and the dream agent; Lolita

(synthesis) art and the imagination.

Humbert

Lolita consists of a Foreword (of parodic material),

Book I, and Book II. Book I is a recording of Humbert’s

serial ecstasies, trials, and triumphs, with only one ob­

vious, grotesque appearance of Quilty at The Enchanted

Hunters. Book II, of approximately the same length, is basically Quilty’s book, a parody of Book I even to the

extent of a final climax in bed, as Humbert fires at Quil­

ty one final time and on Quilty’s lips forms "a big pink bubble with Juvenile connotations.” Humbert eventually triumphs, killing the dream producer and establishing to­ tal freedom; but this freedom last only a moment. Of ar­ tistic necessity Humbert and Lolita both die soon after— for the sides of the triad are mutually interdependent.

Humbert represents ecstasy and memory. Some of Hum­ bert’s ecstasies are perhaps too well known to be cited, but at the same time criticism always tends to admire only the esoteric aspects of Nabokov and other "difficult” wri­ ters, hardly pausing to explore their most straightforward aspects. At any rate, Humbert’s list of blisses includes

1 Lolita 306. Hereafter cited in text 74

not only the pleasantly erotie scene with Lolita on the

sofa (’’the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known,”

page 63), and later their initial fornication, but also

the marvelous description of Lolita on the tennis court

(pages 232-236); Humbert has introduced Lolita to the art

of tennis, and it is characteristic of his training that

Lolita Is an incredibly graceful player, but totally with­

out trickery, parody, and deceit—essential elements in

all games. The liberating ecstasy which Humbert fails to

achieve by killing Quilty is accomplished soon after by

driving down the road on the wrong side, and the final

listed ecstasy is a memory of standing above the valley town.1

Humbert’s dominating faculty is the memory. Indeed, his whole passion for "nymphets" is blamed on a vivid mem­ ory of frustrated desire, his unfulfilled childhood ro­ mance with "Annabel Leigh." And one of his ecstatic mo­ ments not previously mentioned is his shock of recognition when he sees Lolita for the first time, for every detail of her appearance down to the "tiny dark-brown mole on her side" parallels his memory. "The twenty-five years I had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and van­ ished" (page 41). This ecstasy then, is one of tlmeless-

1 The correlation of this ecstasy to the one "among rare butterflies and their food plants" in Speak, Memory was first suggested by Diana Butler, "Lolita Lepidoptera," New World Writing 16 (Philadelphia, i960), p. 81. 75

ness, and belongs among the ecstasies of memory discussed

earlier.

Inevitably such a determined memoirist brings Proust

to mind, and Nabokov has laid in the parallels for us.

Thus Humbert is not only French, but has written one scho larly article on "Mimir and Memory" and another on Proust

(this latter was discussed in the first chapter of the present study). At one point Humbert finds his prose to have "Proustian intonations"; at another he wonders if he might call one section of the novel "Dolores Dlsparue."

And his distinctions between various kinds of memory seem also to echo his sometime model:

There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark lnnerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita), (page 13)

Again and again Humbert Invokes Lolita’s presence, at­ tempting the most total precision in detail, arresting her ever-changing appearance:

No hereafter is acceptable if it does not produce her as she was then, in that Colorado resort between Snow and Elphinstone, with everything right: the white wide little-boy shorts, the slender waist, the apricot midriff, the white breast-kerchief whose ribbons went up and encircled her neck to end behind in a dangling knot leaving bare her gaspingly young and adorable apricot shoulder blades with that pubescence and those lovely gentle bones, and the smooth, downward-tapering back. Her cap had a white peak. Her racket had cost 76

me a small fortune. Idiot, triple idiot! I could have filmed her! I would have had her now with me, before my eyes, in the projection room of my pain and despair! (pages 232-233)

Humbert has been perverse, but the dross of his perversity burns away in the heat of his agony; one finds the passion of Humbert Humbert the most moving drama in modem fiction.

He does not need film of Lolita; she is burned into his inner vision, before his eyes continually. Humbert is a mnemneslac, looked eternally into that awful projection room of the past.

Quilty

Quilty is the trickster, the parodist, the dream pro­ ducer, the essence of perversity. During the mad chase across the country, Humbert finds a residual pleasure in the contemplation of a possible Quilty:

We all admire the spangled acrobat with classical grace meticulously walking his tight rope in the tal­ cum light: but how much rarer art there Is in the sagging rope expert wearing scarecrow clothes and im­ personating a grotesque drunk! I should know, (page 25D

Quilty is indeed a grotesque drunk in his first appearance in the novel; the first sounds Humbert hears from him are

"the rasp of a screwing off, then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on" (page 128). And

In his final appearance he is intoxicated almost to inco­ herence on "herculanita with rum" (page 304). But face to 77 face Humbert has nothing but an awful contempt for "this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling" (page 297).

Quilty represents the dream producer of the mind. He is a playwright, "the author of fifty-two successful sce­ narios" (page 300)—one for every week of the year. He ad mits modestly, "I have been called the American Maeter­ linck" (page 303); Maeterlinck wrote heavily symbolic fan­ tasies, dream plays. His house is on Grimm Road and its door swings open "as in a medieval fairy tale" (page 296).

When first shot, he rises in the air "like some old night­ mare of mine" (page 304),

His identity is totally parody. First Humbert thinks

Quilty*s picture is admired by Lolita for its faint resem­ blance to his own face, then Lolita convinces him that

Quilty is a woman, then Humbert thinks Quilty is only a detective, then notices he resembles Humbert’s uncle Gus­ tave, then Quilty wears a Dick Tracy ("Jutting Chin") mask then Quilty steals Lolita from the hospital by pretending to be Humbert’s brother. He is amorphous, a shape-shifter

His speech is all parody; his first conversation with

Humbert is a parody of everyday speech:

"Where the devil did you get her?" "I beg your pardon?" "I said: the weather Is getting better." "Seems so." "Who’s the lassie?" "My daughter." "You lie—she’s not," 78

"I beg your pardon?” ”1 said: July was hot.” (page 129)

His last conversation is full of parody quotations:

I promise you, Brewster, you will be happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all the royalties from my next play—I have not much at the bank right now but I propose to borrow—you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow, (page 303)

He signs in at motels under a bewildering variety of pseu­ donyms. He is false even as he dies:

and every time I got him with those slow, clumsy, blind bullets of mine, he would say under his breath, with a phoney British accent—all the while dreadfully twitching, shivering, smirking, but withal talking in a curiously detached and even amiable manner: "Ah, that hurts, sir, enough!" (page 305)

His appearances are always during or just after rain and electrical storms, possibly because Humbert has a tendency to hallucinate during "periods of electrical disturbance and crepitating lightnings" (page 219). His last, dying defense is to curl up in bed.

And ultimately, he Is a parody of Humbert. His pic­ ture resembles Humbert, in person he resembles Humbert’s uncle, and even his bathrobe is much like Humbert’s own.

His character is like the parody of himself that Humbert invented to fool the psychiatrists, whose misled studies supposedly revealed that Humbert was "potentially homo­ sexual" and "totally impotent" (page 36). These are qual­ ities that describe "practically impotent" Quilty (page

300) with his "strange feminine manner" (page 298) fairly 79

well. So Quilty is, among other things, Humbert’s own

parody of himself.

Lolita

Lolita is Imagination—as was suggested in a different

context in the first chapter of this study. She is a syn­ thesis of Humbert and Quilty, part beautiful childhood memory and part vulgar adolescent parody, all nymphet and all Lolita,

Lolita as synthesis. This is the Important point to make about the novel: Lolita merges the two strands. To the extent a nymphet is a child, she represents Memory, the girl of Humbert’s childhood; to the extent a nymphet is an adolescent, she represents the parody of dreams, the silly reader of movie magazines, the desire of twisted

Quilty. These points can best be made by citing Humbert.

Early in their acquaintance, Humbert realizes that Lolita is more than the reincarnation of his childhood sweetheart, and that to abstract this Humbertlan quality is to falsify

Lolita’s essence:

What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating be­ tween me and her, and having no will, no consciousness —indeed, no life of her own. (page 64)

The other half of Lolita, the half that Humbert at first ignores, is equally clear: it is parody. Lolita has been 80

entranced by the dream world of the movies:

Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, in­ different, twilight eyes—for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate—while we moan and die. (page 122)

But Humbert usually finds her dual essence, her quality as synthesis, as imagination, as art, as magic. Humbert’s quest Is "to fix once for all the perilous magic of nym­ phets" (page 136). And he succeeds; here, for Instance, is one of his most clear and eloquent passages, one in­ deed, where Nabokov himself seems to have joined him in his statement:

What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet—of every nymphet, perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures, from the blurry pinkness of adolescent maidservants in the Old Country (smell­ ing of crushed daisies and sweat); and from very young harlots disguised as children in provincial brothels; and then again, all this gets mixed up with the exqui­ site stainless tenderness seeping through the musk and the mud, through the dirt and the death, oh God, oh God. And what is most singular is that she, this Lo­ lita, my Lolita, has individualized the writer’s an- cient lust, so that above and over everything there is —Lolita, (pages 46-4?)

Because of Lolita, nymphet has now entered the.English language—and American dictionaries. Webster’s New World

Dictionary of the American Language now defines a nymphet as "a pubescent girl, especially a sexually attractive one.” But that is not enough; we must end with a reminder from Humbert and Nabokov: "Sex is but the ancilla of art"

(page 26l). 81

The Early Novels: The Art of Non-Involvement

This survey of the early novels is necessarily incom­

plete for two reasons: first, its author is not competent

to treat those novels which have not been translated from

Russian; second, the point developed here is often peri­

pheral to those novels discussed, and only becomes central

in the later novels.

Nabokov’s art may be divided into two periods: those

novels before The Gift, which are concerned with Mimesis

and Parody; and those novels after and Including The Gift, which are concerned with Memory and Parody. His recent preface to King, Queen, Knave (his second novel, published

in Russian in 1928), explains Nabokov’s early approach to art:

At a stage of gradual inner disentanglement, when I had not yet found, or did not yet dare apply, the very special methods of re-creating a historical situation that I used ten years later in The Gift, the lack of any emotional Involvement and the fairytale freedom inherent in an unknown milieu answered my dream of pure invention.1

In this short, but for Nabokov remarkable, confession he states that "emotional involvement" was avoided in his early novels because of his own inner confusion; a value

judgment is surely implied, and we can reasonably assume that having "dared" to confront his own world In The Gift,

1 Klftg* Queen# Knave (New York, 1968), p. viii. Here- aft er cited in text. 82

he would not later turn his back on that confrontation.

Not "re-creating a historical situation," in the early novels Nabokov does not have Memory at his disposal. One does not "know" what he has not experienced; hence, Memory is an essential ingredient for creating a "real" world.

In the early novels his choice is between parody and mere imitation, and since imitation is always flawed, he relies more on the parody element.

In King, Queen, Knave the characters are admittedly, even defiantly, mere imitations of life. They are named after playing cards. Like the other early novels, King,

Queen, Knave is highly plotted and deliberately artificial

Its main plot is a love triangle, an uneasy parody of bad art. Two minor characters represent Nabokov’s early dual­ ity of aesthetics. The first is an Inventor who tries to create life-like dummies. First he builds a small child who

walked back and forth with a very natural human-like motion, swaggering a wee bit and turning at every tenth step with a built-in little cry between "hep" and "help" meant to disguise the slight creak of its mechanism, (pages I92-I93)

Then he graduates to full-scale adults. At first they are a virtually complete success:

When vulgar young Max humorously impersonated the younger automannequin by stalking and prancing in his wake on the delightful youth’s final appearance, none could doubt which of the two personages had more human charm, though one Inventor was so much more experi­ enced than the other, (page 218) 83

But life is more than Just walking, and when the robots

are given more difficult assignments they fail hilariously.

One of them, on roller skates, crashes off-stage while the

other perishes through an excess of politeness:

White-gloved, in evening dress, one hand raised to his top hat, the old chap entered, looking refreshed and gay. He stopped in front of the spectators and started to remove his hat in a complicated, much too complicated, salute. Something crunched. "Halt," howled the Inventor with great presence of mind and darted toward the mechanical maniac. "Too late!" The hat was doffed with a flourish but the arm came off too. (page 263)

The scientific approach, careful observation and duplica­

tion, turns into unintentionally comic bad art If one does not have total control over his materials. Franz* land­ lord represents the other possibility, the simplicity of dazzling deception:

He [Franz, the young knave of the novel’s title] stopped In the passage, stunned by an unpleasant thought: good manners bade him take leave of old En- rlcht. He put down the suitcases and knocked hurried­ ly at the landlord’s bedroom door. No answer. He pushed the door and stepped in. The old woman whose face he had never seen sat with her back to him in her usual place, "I’m leaving; I want to say good-by," he said, advancing toward the armchair. There was no old woman at all—only a gray wig stuck on a stick and a knitted shawl. He knocked the whole dusty contraption to the floor. Old Enrlcht came out from behind a screen. He was stark naked and had a paper fan in his hand. "You no longer exist, Franz Bubendorf," he said dryly, indicating the door with his fan. (page 229)

In his solipsism, landlord Enrlcht is not only one of

Nabokov’s tricksters, he is also that other Nabokovian figure, the old magician: "In fact, he himself could at any moment turn into a mouse-trap, a mouse, an old couch, 84

a slave girl led away by the highest bidder. Such magi­

cians should be made emperors" (page 228). Enricht, who

thinks of himself as "the famed illusionist and conjuror

Menetek-El-Pharsin" (page 99), is of course quite mad.

Between a naturalistic and a surrealistic fiction, the

choice for Nabokov at this time is clear: parody and mad­ ness seem better choices than the imitation of everyday

life. The limitation of King, Queen, Knave should be ob­ vious: it is only a comic novel.

Laughter in the Dark, Nabokov’s fifth novel, was orig­

inally published in 1932 as Camera Obscura. If the iden­ tification earlier in this chapter of the Memory with the camera lucida is correct, and if Nabokov made this identi­ fication this early in his career, then this first title may perhaps be taken to announce the parodic intent of the novel. On the other hand, the later title may Indicate a possible debt to Henri Bergson, whose Laughter posited that things become comic when they are reduced to being mechanical—an idea that is certainly congenial to Nabo­ kov’s earlier writings. And Laughter in the Dark’s most fascinating character, the trickster Axel Rex, offers his own theory of comedy during the course of the novel, a theory discussed in the first chapter of this dissertation

Rex is indeed king of tricksters, and in his way far more frightening than Quilty; the only adjective that is strong enough to describe him—and then only if said in an 85

absolutely level, Inflectionless voice—is, sardonic. But it is important to notice that, in this one full-length portrait of the artist as trickster, Axel is several times insulted by his author and finally given a solid blow with a cane by Paul, a solid bourgeois:

Rex leaped back—his face still twisted in a smile— and suddenly something very remarkable occurred: like Adam after the Fall, Rex, cowering by the white wall and grinning wanly, covered his nakedness with his hand.1

In this moment it is the trickster himself who makes a reflex gesture, who is mechanical. In the meantime, Al­ blnus, his victim throughout the novel, has as a blind man begun to take on a dimension of nobility. Having lost the power of sight, a sense which had only misled him into a superficial admiration for painting, films, and Margot,

Alblnus develops new awareness of the world around him and, ultimately, a purpose: to kill Margot. When he traps her in his old apartment, his sense of purpose is invincible, and although he is killed in the souffle instead of her,

Alblnus dies in a satisfying way, with no trace of the pathetic.

It Is only the second-rate, the predictable, that can be parodied in art. If Nabokov is to write exclusively as a trickster, he will always be working with banal materi­ als. Hex, with his insatiable appetite for fooling people,

1 Laughter In the Dark (New York, i960), p. 278. Here- after cited in text. 86

stays with his •’super-humor,* but Nabokov accuses him of

having a vulgar mind; Ironically, Rex is dismissed because

of the one weakness in his armor, his liking for Margot:

"Their mutual passion was based on a profound affinity of

souls, though Margot was a vulgar little Berlin girl and

he—a cosmopolitan artist" (page 184). Axel’s cynical at­

titude toward art is especially characteristic, and appar­

ently the ultimate reason why Nabokov created this char­ acter:

Perhaps the only real thing about him was his innate conviction that everything that had ever been created in the domain of art, science or sentiment, was only a more or less clever trick, (page 182)

It is important to notice first, that this principle is dangerously close to being a simplification of Nabokov’s own view at this time, and second, that it would be disas­ trous to equate the views of the author and Axel Rex. It is not an aesthetic they share, but a metaphysic; thus Rex thought of the situation in Laughter in the Dark as a play at which he

had been reserved a place in the stage manager’s pri­ vate box. The stage manager of this performance was neither God nor the devil. . . . The stage manager whom Rex had in view was an elusive, double, triple, self-reflecting magic Proteus of a phantom, the shadow of many-colored glass balls flying in a curve, the ghost of a Juggler on a shimmering curtain, (page 183)

Rex has here a vision of his author. That vision casts

Nabokov as a stage manager and as a magician, and Nabokov accepts both mantles. 87

But the other side of the artist makes its first ap­ pearance. The characters of Laughter in the Bark include

Udo Conrad, an old and financially unsuccessful novelist.

Like Bex, he is a wanderer, and again like Rex, he is un­ concerned with social problems. But he is not a trickster, he is Albinus* friend, and his special identification is with Memory. One of the two novels he is mentioned as having written is Memoirs of a Forgetful Man—indeed a modest beginning for the Memory theme. His other novel,

The Vanishing Trick, is about "the old conjuror who spir­ ited himself away at his farewell performance” (page 7).

Thus he too represents the Imagination as the Magician.

The two principles of Parody and Memory are in conflict here, and remain in conflict through much of Nabokov’s work.

And Laughter in the Dark is the first Nabokov novel to employ the techniques of aesthetic bliss: liberation in space and time. When Albinus has his automobile accident,

Nabokov stops time and frees space:

The old woman gathering herbs on the hillside saw the car and the two cyclists approaching the sharp bend from opposite directions. From a mail plane fly­ ing coastward through the sparkling blue dust of the sky, the pilot could see the loops of the road, the shadow of his wings gliding across the sunlit slopes and two villages twelve miles distant from one another. Perhaps by rising still higher it would be possible to see simultaneously the mountains of Provence, and a distant town in another country—let us say, Berlin— where the weather was hot too; for on this particular day the cheek of the earth from Gibraltar to Stockholm was painted with mellow sunshine. 88

In Berlin, on this particular day, a great many ices were sold.

After several paragraphs describing Alblnus* wife*s acti­ vities at this particular moment in time, the author moves back to the automobile accident, far from Berlin:

From the balcony she could see the ice-cream ven­ dor with his white cap. The balcony seemed to soar higher, higher. The sun threw a dazzling light on the tiles—in Berlin, in Brussels, in Paris and farther toward the South. The mail plane was flying to St. Cassien. The old woman was gathering herbs on the rocky slope. For a whole year at least she would be telling people how she had seen . . . what she had seen . . . (pages 237-238)

And at the end of the novel, after Alblnus has died, Nabo­ kov as stage manager freezes space and liberates time:

Stage-directions for last silent scene: door—wide open. Table—thrust away from it. Carpet—bulging up at table foot in a frozen wave. Chair—lying close by dead body of man in a purplish brown suit and felt slippers. Automatic pistol not visible. It Is under him. Cabinet where the miniatures had been—empty. On the other (small) table, on which ages ago a porce­ lain ballet-dancer stood (later transferred to another room) lies a woman’s glove, black outside, white in­ side. By the striped sofa stands a smart little trunk, with a colored label still adhering to it: "Rouglnard, Hotel Britannia." (page 292)

Since it is the Memory that abolishes time and space, it is fitting that aesthetic ecstasy (the abolition of time or space) enters Nabokov’s novels with the Memory theme.

Invitation to a Beheading

Invitation to a Beheading. Nabokov’s seventh novel, was written in 1935. It Is the first of his two novels 89

investigating imaginary totalitarian regimes (Bend Sinister is the other), but that easy pairing Is not so important here as the larger grouping of all Nabokov novels employ­ ing fictitious worlds; thus the group includes not only

Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, but also Pale

Fire and Ada or Ardor. The point is that all of these fictitious worlds are parody worlds, an observation that will clear up some difficulties in interpreting those later novels.

In Invitation to a Beheading, Cincinnatus C. is the only Mreal” person; the rest of his world is parody, in­ cluding his jailer, the jailer’s daughter, the guard, the executioner, Cincinnatus* mother, and Cincinnatus’ wife and children. Even the spider in his cell is a mechanical device. Indeed, the only real character beside Cincinnatus is a moth that is brought into his cell, an emblem of his author.

Cincinnatus is the first Nabokov character to live out of time, in moments of aesthetic bliss:

Once, when I was a child, on a distant school excur­ sion, when I had got separated from the others—al­ though I may have dreamt it—I found myself, under the sultry sun of midday, in a drowsy little town, so drowsy that when a man who had been dozing on a bench beneath a bright whitewashed wall at last got up to help me find my way, his blue shadow on the wall did not immediately follow him. Oh, I know, I know, there must have been some oversight, on my part, and the shadow did not linger at all, but simply, shall we say, it caught on the wall’s unevenness . . . but here is what I want to express: between his movement and the movement of the laggard shadow—that second, that syn- 90

cope—there is the rare kind of time in which I live— the pause, the hiatus, when the heart is like a feather.1

Cincinnatus has, with Bergson, with Proust, with Nabokov

himself, entered the world of duration. The rest of his

world lives purely in the present, in sensation, but Cin­

cinnatus has the added dimension of time-awareness, of

memory, of freedom from the world of flux. This extra

dimension is what sets him apart, so that he is "opaque”

to the thoughts of others in his world; he has been

accused of the most terrible of crimes, gnostical tur­ pitude, so rare and so unutterable that it was neces­ sary to use circumlocutions like "impenetrability," "opacity," "occlusion." (page 72)

The thoughts of those good Russians of the future—for un­

like the denizens of the worlds of Bend Sinister and Pale

Fire, who speak invented, parody languages, the inhabi­

tants of Cincinnatus* world speak a simple, modern Russian

—are the thoughts of simple animals, doomed to live mem­ oryless in the eternal present. Thus when Cincinnatus* lawyer loses his cuff link, his thought processes fail to rise beyond those of an idiot:

It was plain that he was upset by the loss of that precious object. It was plain. The loss of the ob­ ject upset him. The object was precious. He was up­ set by the loss of the object, (page 36)

In this parody world, this dream world, Cincinnatus is il­ legal because memory is Itself illegal. Standing at the

1 Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (New York, 1959), pp. ¿2-53. Hereafter cited in text. 91

top of the tower looking down toward the Tamara Gardens,

Cincinnatus recalls his first tryst with Marthes "His

eyes were making highly illegal excursions. Now he thought he distinguished that very bush in flower, that bird, that path disappearing under a canopy of Ivy" (page 44). His­ tory no longer exists:

Yes, matter has grown old and weary, and little has survived of those legendary days—a couple of machines, two or three fountains—and no one regrets the past, and even the very concept of "past" has changed. (pages 50-51)

The world has lost a dimension, and only Cincinnatus has retained it; life, "weakened by nausea and languor—ought

I to say it?—finding itself in a new dimension, as it were" (page 50), life has shrunken to parody and dream.

Cincinnatus, with his extra dimension, is connected to the "real" world: "part of my thoughts is always crowding around the invisible umbilical cord that joins this world to something" (page 53). The real world that Cincinnatus dreams of is the world of memory:

there time takes shape according to one’s pleasure, like a figured rug whose folds can be gathered in such a way that two designs will meet—and the rug Is once again smoothed out, and you live on, or else superim­ pose the next image on the last, endlessly, endlessly, with the leisurely concentration of a woman selecting a belt to go with her dress, (page 9^)

And that world defines his own as a parody: "It exists, my dream world, it must exist, since, surely there must be an original of the clumsy copy" (page 93).

The secret, of course, should surprise no one: the 92

world that Cincinnatus lives in is only a dream from which

he awakes as he is beheaded. Cincinnatus begins to realize

this early in the novels

I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only sense­ less visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life, (page 36)

And Nabokov tells us much the same things

The subject will now be the precious quality of Cin­ cinnatus; his fleshy incompleteness; the fact that the greater part of him was in a quite different place, while only an insignificant portion of it was wander­ ing, perplexed, here—a poor, vague Cincinnatus, a comparatively stupid Cincinnatus, trusting, feeble and foolish as people are in their sleep. But even during this sleep—still, still—his real life showed through too much, (page 120)

The real world is the one Cincinnatus dreams of, while his waking world is the actual dream. He gradually becomes aware of this himself:

I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is, they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind—as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidi­ ous tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off. But how I fear awakening! (page 92)

The full truth of this concept does not dawn on Cincin­ natus, however, until the next to last chapter. His life has been the parody of a prison novel, Nabokov’s mockery of a set of stereotypes: 93

everything has duped me—all of this theatrical, pathetic stuff—the promises of a volatile maiden, a mother’s moist gaze, the knocking on the wall, a neighbor’s friendliness, and finally, those hills which broke out in a deadly rash, (pages 204-205)

And he realizes that what he will lose when he is executed was a dream, and not worth having:

This is the dead end of this life, and I should not have sought salvation within its confines. It is strange that I should have sought salvation. Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again, (page 205)

He strokes the fur of a large moth that has "settled, asleep, its visionary wings spread in solemn Invulnerable torpor" (page 206), and Cincinnatus is comforted. As his

Jailers take him outside, the prison begins to collapse, then the trees begin to fall, and finally the whole parody world collapses as Cincinnatus is beheaded, "and amidst the dust, and the falling things, and the flapping scenery,

Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where, to Judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him" (page 223).

An elegant metaphysical statement, not especially original, might be derived from the novel: life is a dream from which we awaken when we die to find . . . But within the novel, Nabokov’s dream structure has its own elegant solution, a solution like Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. The looking-glass world begins to crumble as Alice wakes up, as does the world in Invitation to a Beheading at its conclusion. But Alice has noticed 94

one figure asleep, the red king; we are told that he is

dreaming her (rather than dreaming of her). He dreams her

world; she dreams his. In Invitation to a Beheading It is

the black moth of the next to last chapter who dreams the

counter-world. We suddenly hear the voice of the sleepy

moth: "But to me your daytime is dark, why did you disturb

my slumber?" (page 204) When Cincinnatus awakens to a

new life at the end of the novel, the artist of memory has

finally emerged from his long metamorphosis. From this

point in his career, Nabokov will be as obsessed with mem­

ory as with parody.

The Gift

Although The Gift opens with an epigraph that is a parody of Pushkin, the central positions of memory and ac­ curate, scientific imagination become apparent at once.

After the first page of careful description the mechanics of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s mind become clear:.

Some day, he thought, I must use such a scene to start a good, thick old-fashioned novel. The fleeting thought was touched with a careless irony; an irony, however, that was quite unnecessary, because somebody within him, on his behalf, independently from him, had absorbed all this, recorded It, and filed it away.1

Fyodor is a poet, later an inventive critic, and eventually

1 trans. Michael Soammell and Vladimir Nabokov (New York, 1963), p. 16. Hereafter cited in text. 95

he also becomes a novelist, for there are scattered hints,

of which the quotation above is one, that he is the "real"

author of The Gift (Nabokov also points this out in the

Foreword, unnumbered page). His style of writing is Nabo­ kov’s own, new, later style, the style of all the novels

to come after: intense description built from a painter’s

eye for visual effects, a scientist’s knowledge of the

"inner* natural world, and a poet’s flights into metaphor.

All of these come into play in Fyodor’s description of the

street in front of his new apartment:

Lined with lindens of medium size, with hanging drop­ lets of rain distributed among their intricate black twigs according to the future arrangement of leaves (tomorrow each drop would contain a green pupil); com­ plete with a smooth tarred surface some thirty feet across and variegated sidewalks (hand-built, and flat­ tering to the feet), it rose at a barely perceptible angle, beginning with a post office and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel, (page 16)

And the theme of memory arrives obtrusively soon after, for Fyodor’s first volume of poems consists of "about fif­ ty twelve-line poems all devoted to a single theme: childhood" (page 21). Fyodor is a Russian emigre living in Berlin during the twenties, remembering his childhood in a lost land, and this theme of memory is in a sense a double theme, since Nabokov wrote the novel between 1935 and 1937» looking back on the novel in the Foreword, Nabo­ kov finds that in several minor characters "I distinguish odds and ends of myself as I was circa 1925“ (unnumbered page). At the time of its writing then, the setting of 96

The Gift was a Berlin imbedded ten years deep in Nabokov’s

memory.

Parody also enters the novel early. Among Fyodor’s

remembered childhood toys are two that are highly emblema­

tic—Indeed, Fyodor confesses that it was for the sake of an unknown critic that these two objects have been cele­ brated In his poetry. The first item was

an ample painted flowerpot containing an artificial plant from a sunny land, on which was perched a stuffed tropical songbird, so astonishingly lifelike that It seemed about to take wing, with black plumage and an amethyst breast; and, when the big key had been whee­ dled from the housekeeper Ivonna Ivanovna, Inserted in the side of the pot and given several tight, vivifying turns, the little Malayan nightingale would open its beak . . . no, it would not even open its beak, for something odd had happened to the eloekworn mechanism, to some spring or other, which, however, stored up its action for laters the bird would not sing then, but if one forgot about it and a week later happened to walk past its lofty wardrobe-top perch, then some mys­ terious tremor would suddenly make it emit its magical warbling, (pages 23-24)

The second •'poetized’* toy

behaved in similar fashion, but with a zany suggestion of imitation—as the spirit of parody always goes along with genuine poetry. This was a clown in satin plus fours who was propping himself on two white­ washed parallel bars and who would be set in motion by an accidental Jolt, (page 24)

A lyric imitation of life and its clownish parody, both brought to life through memory—good emblems of Nabokov.

The trickster appears early also, this time a man slowly growing insane. The novel begins on April Fools*

Day, and Fyodor is cruelly tricked by Alexander Yakovle­ vich Chernyshevsky into thinking that a favorable, percep­ 97

tive review of his book of poems has appeared in an émigré

newspaper. But this vicious trickster becomes a pathetic

figure, for his imagination has turned into mental illness

since the suicide of his son; later, we see Alexander in

the asylum. The parody element in the Chernyshevsky fami­

ly goes deeper, for Alexander’s wife sees in Fyodor a re­

semblance to her dead son, himself a poet (a bad one).

Fyodor, who has lost his own father, can understand the

family’s grief; eventually, however, he recognizes that

the entire situation is his author’s parody of Fyodor’s

own family tragedy:

Troubled Fyodor kept pondering over the fact that the misfortune of the Chernyshevskis appeared to be a kind of mocking variation on the theme of his own hope- suffused grief, and only much later did he understand the full refinement of the corollary and all the ir­ reproachable compositional balance with which these collateral sounds had been included in his own life, (page 104)

Echoes of the Chernyshevski family’s suffering reverberate about Fyodor until the last chapter, when the elder Cher­ nyshevski dies and Fyodor, sunbathing in the woods, visits

the spot where the son had committed suicide.

In The Gift, where memory establishes a high serious­ ness, parody is itself elevated to a device for establish­ ing truth. When planning his highly eccentric biography of Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (a Russian literary figure of the last century), Fyodor explains his artistic principles : 98

I want to keep everything as it were on the very brink of parody. You know those idiotic ’biographies roman- cees* where Byron is coolly slipped a dream extracted from one of his own poems? And there must be on the other hand an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it. And most essentially, there must be a single uninterrupted progression of thought, (page 212)

To the man of humor—or perhaps to the man of style, who fears unreadability above all things—seriousness is not a way of life; how then can it be a way of writing? Nabokov himself, in the introduction to another novel, similarly disarms us by dismissing whatever point he had begun to makes "Some curious additional information might be given if I took myself seriously.”1 In The Gift parody is a matter of style, and serves only to counterpoint the seri­ ous nature of the novel, its theme of memory.

Bend Sinister

Bend Sinister is the second of Nabokov’s two novels of a totalitarian society, the second of his four novels that take place in parody worlds, the second of his novels written in English, and the tenth novel of his career.

Its title indicates the novel’s parody nature: "This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline bro­ ken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a

1 The Defense, trans, Michael Scammell and Vladimir Nabokov (New York, 1964), p. 7. Hereafter cited in text. 99

1 wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world.”

Nabokov’s Introduction is here extremely helpful, indica­ ting that the world of Bend Sinister exists through the looking glass, on the other side of the mirror. The bend sinister of the title, "a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy)" (page xii), appears in the "oblong pud­ dle" that opens the novel, its coat of arms: "It also re­ flects a brief tangle of bare twigs and the brown sinus of a stouter limb cut off by its rim and a transverse bright cream-coloured band" (page 1). Some of the "thematic de­ signs" in Pnin were discussed in the second chapter of the present study. That puddle is one of the thematic designs in Bend Sinister, as Nabokov has pointed outs

The plot starts to breed in the bright broth of a rain puddle. The puddle Is observed by Krug from a window of the hospital where his wife is dying. The oblong pool, shaped like a cell that is about to di­ vide, reappears subthematlcally throughout the novel, as an ink blot in Chapter Pour, an inkstaln in Chapter Five, spilled milk in Chapter Eleven, the infusoria­ like image of ciliated thought in Chapter Twelve, the footprint of a phosphorescent islander in Chapter Eighteen, and the imprint a soul leaves in the inti­ mate texture of space in the closing paragraph. The puddle thus kindled and rekindled in Krug’s mind re­ mains linked up with the image of his wife not only because he had contemplated the inset sunset from her death-bedside, but also because this little puddle vaguely evokes in him my link with him: a rent in his world leading to another world of tenderness, bright­ ness and beauty. And a companion image even more eloquently speak- i

1 Bend Sinister (New York, 1964), p. xii. Hereafter cited in text. 100

ing of Olga is the vision of her divesting herself of herself, of her jewels, of the necklace and tiara of earthly life, in front of a brilliant mirror, (pages xlv-xv)

In the image of the mirror, Krug dreams of Olga stripping to nothing, and the logical next step is to pass through the mirror. And the puddle, itself a mirror, is described by Nabokov, above, as a gateway to “another world," Nabo­ kov’s own world. This Is made clear by the last paragraph of the novel, where Nabokov, having finished the novel’s manuscript, looks outside:

I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquir­ ing the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground, (page 21?)

If Krug can perceive the same puddle, then he must see it through the other side of the reflection.

The language of Krug’s country encourages this view.

One of Krug’s philosophical works, "wherein he looked straight into the eyesookets of death and called him a dog and an abomination" (page 122), is called Mlrokonzepsla.

This title would apparently translate as "The Idea of the

World," since mlrovovo mashtaba translates as "of world­ wide scope" (page 133). In the language of this parody country, miro means world; miro seems, however, to be a logical cognate of "mirror," and Krug’s country is a mir­ ror world, a "crazy-mirror of terror and art" (page xvi).

Krug perceives his creator, Nabokov, first in dreams 101

and then through madness.

In the second paragraph of Chapter Five comes the first intimation that "someone is in the know"—a mys­ terious intruder who takes advantage of Krug’s dream to convey his own peculiar code message. The intruder is ... an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me. (page xviii)

Chapter Five consists of a lengthy dream, whose subjects are Krug’s childhood and Krug’s dead wife Olga. Concern­

ing childhood, it is a version of "the recurrent dream we all know (finding ourselves in the old classroom, with our homework not done because of our having unwittingly missed

ten thousand days of school)" (page 55). Nabokov chooses to invoke Krug’s schooldays with the Toad (now the dicta­

tor of Krug’s country in Eastern Europe) through this dream rather than through Krug’s memory, since those schooldays were themselves a mockery, and the parody atmo­ sphere of a dream "was in Krug’s case a fair rendering of the original version."

Naturally, the script of daytime memory is far more subtle in regard to factual details, since a good deal of cutting and trimming and conventional recombination has to be done by the dream producers (of whom there are usually several, mostly illiterate and middle- class and pressed by time); but a show is always a show, and the embarrassing return to one’s former ex­ istence (with the off-stage passing of years trans­ lated in terms of forgetfulness, truancy, inefficiency) is somehow better enacted by a popular dream than by the scholarly precision of memory, (page 55)

Nabokov enters the dream, foreshadowing his later intru­ sion into the novel which drives Krug insane:

But among the producers or stagehands responsible for the setting there has been one ... it is hard to 102

express it ... a nameless, mysterious genius who took advantage of the dream to convey his own peculiar code message which has nothing to do with school days or indeed with any aspect of Krug’s physical existence, but which links him up somehow with an unfathomable mode of being, perhaps terrible, perhaps blissful, perhaps neither, a kind of transcendental madness which lurks behind the corner of consciousness and which cannot be defined more accurately than this, no matter how Krug strains his brain, (page 56)

At the end of the novel, after his child has been sense­ lessly murdered, Krug in prison is suddenly visited by his author:

I felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid towards him along an inclined beam of pale light—causing instan­ taneous madness, but at least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical fate, (page 210)

The preface explains what constitutes this madness:

he suddenly perceives the simple reality of things and knows but cannot express in the words of his world that he and his son and his wife and everybody else are merely my whims and megrims, (page xiv)

This might be said a different way: Adam Krug suddenly realizes that he is living in a dream, which means that he has total freedom, and he begins to act accordingly. The final scene re-enacts the childhood soccer game dreamed of in Chapter Five.

Bend Sinister is also a parody of Hamlet. Nabokov has called Hamlet a “dream-play,'’1 and dreams are frequently described as plays by Nabokov. Krug’s dream in Chapter

Five contains several references to Hamlet. Most of Chap­ ter Seven is devoted to a discussion of various obscure,

1 Nikolai Gogol (New York, 1961), p. 54 103 pedantic, and preposterous Interpretations and transla­

tions of Hamlet. Krug’s character is Itself modeled after

that of Hamlet; he Is a philosopher, rude to most people, contemptuous of the throne, obsessed by grief, and friend­ ly towards students, actors, and solid, Horatian men. He is, like Hamlet, Indecisive about events—as though he were in a dream. Hamlet loses first his father, then

Ophelia. Krug loses first his wife—and he is visited by her ghost—then his child. For both, the dictator desires friendship, then decides on destruction; in the final fight, the regime collapses as an external power (Fortin- bras, the student Phokus) takes over. To carry the paral­ lels further would force an interpretation of Hamlet upon

Nabokov, an interpretation that may not have been intended

At Ophelia’s funeral, Hamlet leaps into the grave; if

Nabokov’s novel is Intended to carry a parallel here,

Nabokov is suggesting that at this point Hamlet goes mad in earnest, and is mad for the rest of the play, for the final scene in which he plays a child’s game (fencing) with catastrophic results.

Krug is, however, unlike Hamlet who Insists on wearing mourning long after everyone else has abandoned it, a per­ son who attempts to Ignore memory. After his wife dies, he has all of her possessions destroyed. She is cremated, and he refuses to attend the funeral. By destroying the memory, Krug hopes to become impervious, an impregnable 104 circle—the meaning of his name in Russian (page xv). Of course, he is not a circle; he has a handle, his son David

And the memories he represses come to the surface in his dreams, by an inexorable rule of psychology. Indeed, a final, nagging possibility remains, since Olga’s death and the rise of the new regime coincide: perhaps by repress­ ing the wrealH world of memory, Krug himself is guilty of the creation of this monstrous totalitarian dream that eventually destroys Krug and Krug’s world.

Pale Fire

Pale Fire, Nabokov’s thirteenth novel, may be said to consist of an invocation of memory and a parody of that invocation, or, in terms of the novel’s external struc­ ture, Pale Fire consists of an unfinished long poem of 999 lines (also entitled Pale Fire) written by John Shade, and an introduction, commentary, and index written by his friend and neighbor, Charles X. Klnbote. Or, in terms of the novel’s ostensible plot, it is the tragic story of the death of the poet John Shade, killed accidentally by a bullet fired by Jakob Gradus, member of a group of terror­ ists known as the Shadows, a bullet intended for Charles

Xavier Vseslav, the exiled king of Zembla, now living in the United States under the alias of Charles X. Kinbote.

Or, in terms of the "real” plot, it is the tragic and 105

pathetic story of how the poet John Shade, old, ugly, and

deformed, was killed by the homicidal maniac Jack Grey un­

der the impression that he was killing the judge who had

sentenced him to prison, and how a paranoid homosexual

Russian exile, V. Botkin, reconstructed the event accofd-

ing to his own fantasies and delusions of grandeur, build­

ing upon the tragedy his own myths of a lost kingdom and an elaborate conspiracy.1

The density of the above description suggests the near-impossibility of treating this novel in summary form, and further remarks will be limited to the themes of mem­ ory and parody.

The beautiful first lines of John Shade’s poem are highly ambiguous in the context of the novel:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I ? Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

Kinbote convincingly argues that the first line was.also intended to be the last line of the poem—a line the poet could not write because he was at that minute indeed slain.

Thus the line applies to Shade at two different times with two different meanings. But in the commentary we learn 1 2 *

1 Mary McCarthy’s remarkable review of Pale Fire is es­ pecially recommended. See "A Bolt from the Blue6in The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (New York, i^6), pp7i?-34:— ------2 Pale Fire (New York, 1962), p. 33. Hereafter cited in text. 106

that one waxwing, bombyollla shade!, has Shade’s own name, and Shade is frequently identified with that bird. We further learn that Kinbote, his neighbor, does Indeed trail after him like a shadow. So the line could also fit

Kinbote as the "I" speaker. Indeed, Gradus belongs to an organization called the Shadows, so the line could even be sensibly delivered by him. All of which suggests that lots of ink has been spilled by a number of critics on diagramming that reflected bird, that windowpane become a mirror, and that sudden division into dead body and ether­ eal, imaginary surviving soul. The question also simpli­ fies into whether Shade imagined Kinbote, or Kinbote ima­ gined Shade~a question laboring under a misapprehension i of Kinbote’s looking-glass world of Zembla.

Actually, Kinbote’s Zembla is a mad parody of Shade’s

Aroady; Kinbote wishes to forget his own unhappy Russian past and borrow Shade’s happy American one, and in the process he acclimatizes it. Shade admires this trait of

Kinbote, and accurately describes him as “a person who de­ liberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention” (page 238). What Shade never realizes is that this brilliant invention is drawn from his own final poem.

1 See especially Andrew Field’s diagram in Nabokov: His Life in Art (Boston, 196?), p. 304, and Elizabeth Janeway, ^Nabokov the Magician," The Atlantic. July 1967» pp. 69-71 107

Even the idea comes from the poem: "Man’s life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem" (page 67).

Shade is a scholar of Alexander Pope, and when he mentions

Zembla in the poem, it is the Zembla of Pope, a simple re­ presentation of distant unknown lands (page 272). And a variant passage cites another line of Pope that gives Kin­ bote the idea of royalty: "the lunatic a king" (page 203)

Kinbote’s alteration of Jack Grey’s name to Gradus, also comes from one of the poem’s variant passages: "Or perish must / Alike great temples and Tanagra dust?" Look at the last two syllables, as Kinbote says he did (page 231).

Kinbote*s queen, Disa, is drawn from Shade’s descrip­ tion of his wife Sybil as she was forty years ago:

Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular re­ semblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized pic­ ture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire. Actually it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represent­ ed a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all. (page 207)

Kinbote*s comment here is especially charming.

The Shadows, however, are thin disguises for Kinbote’s enemies at the university. Aside from Gradus, they repre­ sent Professor Hurley, chairman of the English department,

Gerald Emerald, an instructor in that department, and Pro­ fessor C., a Freudian and literary expert. They have at­ 108

tempted to obtain possession of Shade’s last poem, and they have apparently prevented Kinbote from teaching fur­ ther at Wordsmith University, where he was temporarily given a position through the influence of Sylvia O’Donnell, the major trustee of the university and the mother of his friend Donald, an actor and film director. Zembla is a composite of Kinbote*s two lost countries, Russia and the university. For all of these reasons, Kinbote "sinks his identity in the mirror of exile" (page 267), Zemblan is

"the tongue of the mirror" (page 242), and "the name

Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of

Semberland, a land of reflections, of ’resemblers’" (page

265).

The title of the novel (and of Shade’s poem) comes from Shakespeare’s Tlmon of Athens:

The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction Sobs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun; The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt tears; the earth’s a thief, That feeds and breeds by a composture stol’n From gen’ral excrement. (IV, ill)

The quotation suggests extensive, perhaps even cyclic thievery, perhaps again (according to some interpretations) bringing up the Through the Looking Glass question of who dreamed who. The pattern is more satisfactorily seen as one of diminishing reflections, as in a multiple mirror.

Thus the demented scholar Botkin inverts his name to Kin­ bote, as in a mirror, and borrows his "reality" from 109

Shade’s poem, and the maniac Jack Grey borrows his "real­ ity" from Kinbote’s fantasy, where he acquires the name

Jakob Gradus, a glass-factory worker turned revolutionary

(with a further inversion in Kinbote’s Zembla, where an old "mirror-maker of genius" was named Sudarg—Gradus backwards, page 314).

John Shade Is one of Nabokov’s exemplars of memory, and his poem, Pale Fire, is concerned with personal mem­ ories (with occasional looks at the present). By the end of the poem he has worked through his past and into the present. His concern with trees, birds, and butterflies is precise, scientifically observant, and personal:

I had a favorite young shagbark there With ample dark Jade leaves and a black, spare, Vermiculated trunk., The setting sun Bronzed the black bark, around which, like undone Garlands, the shadows of the foliage fell. It is now stout and rough; It has done well. White butterflies turn lavender as they Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway The phantom of my little daughter’s swing. (pages 34-35)

If one has not read the novel for a few months, or years, one remembers Shade’s poem as solid and friendly, Kin- bote’s commentary as amusing but vaporous. The first Is lovely, the second witty. In Pale Fire the elements of memory and parody are not just aspects, but actually the structure of the novel. 110

Ada or Ardor

Nabokov once claimed that two themes were taboo to

American publishers:

a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glori­ ous success resulting in lots of children and grand­ children; and the total atheist who lives a happy and. useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106.

Ada has a third, similarly “impossible" subject (impos­ sible, that is, because of the happy ending): an incestu­ ous love affair that prospers and continues until the lov­ ers are in their nineties. These lovers, Ada and Van, ap­ pear to be both first and second cousins (their mothers were twins, their fathers were first cousins). If we read with care, we find that they actually have the same father

(Demon) and mother (Marina: her first child, Van, was bora out of wedlock and substituted for her mad sister’s miscarriage); so they are brother and sister. Perhaps

Nabokov’s ideal reader will find a continuation of this trend toward proximity with the siblings suddenly ceasing to exist as separate personalities. Indeed, they are fre­ quently referred to as "Vaniada," which in Russian would mean Van-and-Ada, but in English comes out as, I am both

Van and Ada, with that "I" bodkin between the novel’s o principal characters being presumably Nabokov himself.

1 Lolita (New York, 1958), p. 316. 2 Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in Five Parts (New York, 1969), pp. 226, 373, 4ÓÍ. Hereafter cited in text. Ill

Nabokov’s novel is vivid and sensual, but here.incest does not outrage. Society is not flouted, it is ignored.

Nabokov’s characters carry their morality internally, as private property, and follow or violate norms indifferent­ ly, while sex is another part of the friendly universe that Nabokov tells us in his autobiography "was made on a

Sunday." The one scene that is Intended to shock us does so because it shocks Ada’s sister, and will continue to have its effect when all the four-letter words of other novels taste like leftover chip-dip.1

Van and Ada’s affair begins in early adolescence, when he is fourteen and she is twelve, in an idyllic northern

Eden at Ardis (almost Paradise). But while Ada’s name is three fourths of Adam’s, and is a three-letter palindrome like Eve (in Spanish the feminine form of the word for feminine is another palindrome, adamada), it also means

"hell" in the Russian phrase iz ada ("out of hell"). This incest supposedly takes place not on Earth, but on a sis­ ter planet called Antiterra, or Demonia (read Dementia), or perhaps on Venus, that also resembles Shaw’s hell in

Man and Superman as a fine place for sensual gratification

(Shaw’s Don Juan rejects it, being an intellectual). On

Antiterra, history and chronology, as we know them, are

1 The scene, Van, Ada, and Lucette naked on the hotel bed, parodies a similar scene in Mallarme’s "L’Apres-midi d’un Faune," a poem used for different purposes in Bend Sinister. See Nabokov’s introduction to that work. 112

hopelessly askew: cars and discussions of Proust abound

in the 1880*s; Russia is an insignificant, Impotent Tar-

tary, particularly after a second Crimean War, but Russian

is spoken in Alaska and parts of Canada, both of which are

part of a United States that embraces all of North America.

Only the hopelessly insane, safely locked In their asylums,

have visions of the "real" world, whieh they think of as

heaven. But as Van and Ada grow old, this world begins to

impinge on the world of the novel, and we realize that,

compared with Nabokov*s characters, we are the ones in

hell: safe in their obsession for each other, they have

all the fruits of the twentieth century but the bloodshed

--and curiously, electricity.

Antiterra provides splendid comic relief, particularly

in its dorophones—water-powered telephones that frenzy

the plumbing when a call comes through. But Nabokov has

also invented Antiterra to tell us something about the na­

ture of time. In "The Garden of Forking Paths," a story

with a similar subject, Jorge Luis Borges might be speak­

ing of Nabokov:

He believed in an infinite series of time, in a grow­ ing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and paral­ lel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one an­ other for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.1

Nabokov’s own metaphor is of two chess games with the same

1 Borges, Labyrinths (New York, 1964), p. 28. 113

opening and the same end game, but with a divergent middle

game (pages 18-19). Time forked when on Antiterra a com­

mittee abolished electricity in the 1860’s; on Terra, our

world, electricity was developed. Eventually the paths of

the two world converge again. Our reality (their delu­

sion) slowly overcomes their reality. Telephones appear,

and Antiterra fades away, leaving only the novel as evi­

dence.

In interviews of a few years ago, Nabokov praised the

works of Borges, and in Ada he seems to pay Borges the

supreme^ compliment of attributing to him, or at least to

Osberg, an anagram of Borges, some of Nabokov’s own works, 1 notably Lolita. Nabokov’s more recent comments on Borges

have been less favorable, however, and irony may be the 2 over-riding feature of his self-comparison to Borges. Of

course, many of Borges’ themes have also always been Nabo­

kov’s own, as in "Time and Ebb," a story first printed In

1945, which seems to prefigure the world of Ada:

Our [twenty-first century] denominations of time would have seemed to them [the twentieth century] "tele­ phone" numbers. They played with electricity in vari­ ous ways without having the slightest notion of what It really was—and no wonder the chance revelation of its true nature came as a most hideous surprise.3

1 For instance, in September, 1966, Nabokov described Borges as "a man of infinite talent," Alfred Appel, Jr., "An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov," in Nabokov; The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo (Madison, Wls., 1967), p. 34. * For an unfavorable comment on Borges, see the inter­ view with Martha Duffy in Time, May 23, 1969, P. 83. 3 Nabokov’s Dozen (Garden City, 195°), pp. 157-158. 114

And Borges is only a marvelous speculative writer (not

what Nabokov despises, a "novelist of ideas"—the differ­

ence is between a dreamer and a cardboard dogmatist).

Nabokov is more: a speculative, psychological, comic, and

sensual stylist—at his best, the supreme novelist.

Though Van is physically Marina’s son, spiritually he

is the son of her insane twin sister, Aqua. He draws his

dreams about the real world from Aqua’s delusions. The

situation is roughly analogous to that in Pnin, where Pnin

is spiritually Victor’s father, and stems from the "metem­

psychosis" of Ulysses, where Bloom is the father of

Stephen. Like Joyce, Nabokov enjoys using myths and lit­

erature for ironic and comic effects. In Ada, the servant

girl Blanche is clearly and continually designated as Cin­

derella, but she acquires venereal diseases and eventually a doltish husband named Partukov. Early in their affair,

Van and Ada avidly read Chateaubriand’s tentative stories of adolescent incest. Their governess is Maupassant rein­ carnate. Several Chekhov plays get confused, and his harmless candid photographer becomes a blackmailer. Some­ one pronounces Van’s name "Wann," Van becomes a professor in England, and when he is about to take a new mistress,

Nabokov—going a long way for a joke—has him see a film,

Don Juan’s Last Fling.

While working on this novel several years ago, Nabokov called it The Texture of Time, and it was to be an essay 115

on Time, illuminated by metaphors which would gradually

take on a life of their own, become a novel, and eventu-

ally subside back into the essay.* Obviously, Nabokov’s

plans changed, but that essay still exists under its old

title and is delivered by Van; it is the fourth of the

five books that make up the present Ada. Considering its

former prominence, the essay’s content is disappointing:

past time is accumulation, present time is duration (up to

several seconds), future time does not exist. Throughout

the novel brief disquisitions—on Chateaubriand’s mosquito

for instance—provide other pleasant excursions.

Ada may be described as a dream in anagrams, and the

most extended anagram is sclent / Insect /nicest / incest

Ada is indeed sclent about Insects, and her Incest is the nicest Imaginable. Lepidopterists and other natural scien

tists may be able to follow Nabokov’s games with butter­

flies and orchids, which are beyond this reader. The most

obvious correlation is that an orchid, which characteris­ tically has three petals, one of which differs greatly from the other two, derives its name from the Greek word for testicle—for obvious reasons. Various references in the novel would suggest that Van is thematically related to orchids, Ada to the butterflies that might be attracted to Van’s particular orchid. Nabokov’s dreams are not

1 This information is drawn from an Interview on NET. 116

quite like our own.

Nabokov demands that we keep the whole novel in mind

at all times~an impossible duty on first reading. But

his reader finds special rewards, the unveiling of allu­

sions, the solutions to elegant minor puzzles, on every

page. This new work is more arcane than ever, and the

successful reader pursues its dazzling structures in the

glorious illusion that he, not Nabokov, has invented the art of the novel.1

If Van and Ada are indeed the two parts of Nabokov’s

personality (Vaniada), they fall naturally into the divi­

sion made throughout the last chapter of this study. Van

is the trickster, the parodist, the dream-producer; Ada is

memory, particularly scientific memory. Van stands on his

hands, does card tricks, and investigates the dreams and

delusions of lunatics; he is cruel, immoral, and caprici­

ous. Ada is interested in the natural world, particularly

in the larvae of butterflies; she knows the scientific names of insects, flowers, and trees. Van is the primary author of Ada, but Ada herself often corrects him:

(Van, I trust your taste and your talent but are we quite sure we should keep reverting so zestfully to that wicked world which after all may have existed only oneirologically, Van? Marginal jotting in Ada’s I965 hand; crossed out lightly in her latest wavering one.) (page 15)

1 Aside from frequent omissions and additions, the above appeared as "Don Juan out of Hell," in The Atlantic. June, 1969, PP. 105-106. 117

Antiterra, then, Is Van’s dream, not a real world but the

parody of our own. Only Ada’s part is real: "Reality and

natural science are synonymous in the terms of this, and

only this, dream" (page 77). Ada, then, is a mixture of

dream and memory.

The "idea* of the novel is that it takes fifty years

for memory to congeal into its patterns of significance, and the very aged lovers relive their past in dreams and memory with the present occasionally penetrating their

consciousness and influencing the presentation of the past.

For this reason Proust and Joyce seem to exist in the lov­ ers* childhood in the 1880*s, for these two authors have

Influenced the lovers’ way of seeing the past. Their childhood is seen In a dream America, not In the real Rus­ sia which is the only location which, as in Nabokov’s own childhood, could explain their tri-lingual proficiency:

Ardis Hall—the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis—this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and de­ lightful chronicle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America—for are not our childhood mem­ ories comparable to Vineland-bom caravelles, indo­ lently encircled by the white birds of dreams? (page 588)

The last "true" event—true in the reality of the novel, is the lovers’ reunion in 1922, that occupies the novel’s fourth book. The fifth, last book is a brief summary and conclusion: "This Part Five is not meant as an epilogue; it is the true introduction of my ninety-seven percent true, and three percent likely, Ada or Ardor, a family 118 chronicle" (page 5^7). Ada is primarily about Time. What happens to the shared memories of two people after fifty years?

In the first place, memories become distorted. Thus

Ada writes Van five letters between 1888 and I89O:

When Van retrieved in 1940 this thin batch of five letters . . . from the safe in his Swiss bank where they had been preserved for exactly one half of a cen­ tury, he was baffled by their small number. The ex­ pansion of the past, the luxuriant growth of memory had magnified that number to at least fifty. ... No doubt the singular multiplication of those letters in retrospect could be explained by each of them casting an excruciating shadow, similar to that of a lunar volcano, over several months of his life, and tapering to a point only when the no less pangful precognition of the next message began to dawn. But many years later, when working on his Texture of Time. Van found in that phenomenon additional proof of real time’s be­ ing connected with the interval between events, not with their "passage," not with their blending, not with their shading the gap wherein the pure and im­ penetrable texture of time transpires, (pages 336— 337)

When Van leaves Ardis (Greek for Harrow," Ardis stands for the arrow of time, Zeno’s arrow) in 1884, he arranges a final tryst with Ada in the forest on the way to the sta­ tion. Van leaves Ardis Hall in an anachronistic automo­ bile, but after the farewell embrace Van rides off on *?his favorite black horse" (page 159). In the process of re­ membering, Van’s memory corrects itself, and the black car becomes its correct equivalent transportation, a black horse. This is the process that explains much of the novel’s distortion.

Second, the over-lapping of similar situations pro- 119

duces distortions. For instance, when Van visits Ada at her school, he sees—or properly, he remembers seeing—a

mysterious lady at the railway station:

It was empty, save for a slender lady in black velvet, wearing a beautiful black velvet picture hat, who sat with her back to them at a "tonic bar" and never once turned her head, but the thought brushed him that she was a cocotte from Toulouse, (page 169)

"Toulouse" refers to Toulouse-Lautrec, and to one of his posters which offers a similar picture. A few years later, Van stops at a "passably attractive" restaurant:

At the far end of the room, on one of the red stools of the burning bar, a graceful harlot in black—tight bodice, wide skirt, long black gloves, black-velvet picture hat—was sucking a golden drink through a straw, (page 307)

Years after that, Van sees her again:

He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space’s recent re­ venge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blak’s Incognita. It was a queer feeling —as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sen­ tence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prema­ turely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time. (page 460)

This time, the girl turns out to be Lucette, Ada’s sister, and we realize that the other appearances were only phan­ tom Lucettes in Van’s memory, indicating the importance of this meeting in the course of the novel. Memory begins to take on the qualities of dreams. In this conversation with Lucette, Van recalls another "real" meeting that is not itself described in the novel: 120

"The last time I saw you,” said Van, "was two years ago, at a railway station. You had just left Villa Armina and I had just arrived. You wore a flowery dress which got mixed with the flowers you carried be­ cause you moved so fast—jumping out of a green ca­ lèche and up into the Ausonian Express that had brought me to Nice." (page 461)

Although this glimpse of Lucette is not described at its proper place, it' too has gone through a process of re­ placement, for Van remembers having seen this particular action at the time he first visited Ardis Hall:

Suddenly a hackney coach drove up to the platform and a red-haired lady, carrying her straw hat and laughing at her own haste, made for the train and just managed to board It before it moved. So Van agreed to use the means of transportation made available to him by a chance crease in the texture of time, and seated him­ self in the old calèche, (page 34)

Of course, Van could not have at that time seen and taken part in that action, for he was fourteen, Ada was twelve, and Lucette was only eight. The reference to "a chance crease in the texture of time" gives the game away: Van has remembered incorrectly again.

Without multiplying these distortions further, perhaps the novel’s central method of distortion has been indi­ cated. Faulty memory makes the past a dream.

Another means of distortion is that Van and Ada remem­ ber the past differently, and, further, they have differ­ ent styles of writing and remembering. To clarify this in the following long passage, where the two adolescents make an initial investigation of each other’s bodies, the lib­ erty has been taken of indicating the writer, occasionally 121

disrupting the paragraph structure.

Van "Relief map," said the primrose prig, "the rivers of Africa." Her index traced the blue Nile down into its Jungle and traveled up again. "Now what’s this? The cap of the Red Bolete is not half as plushy. In fact" (positively chattering), "I’m reminded of geran­ ium or rather pelargonium bloom." "God, we all are," said Van. "Oh, I like this texture, Van, I like it! Really I do!" "Squeeze, you goose, can’t you see I’m dying." But our young botanist had not the faintest idea how to handle the thing properly—and Van, now in ex­ tremis, driving it roughly against the hem of her nightdress, could not help groaning as he dissolved in a puddle of pleasure. She looked down in dismay. "Not what you think," remarked Van calmly. "This is not number one. Actually it’s as clean as grass sap. Well, now the Nile is settled stop Stanley." Ada (I wonder, Van, why you are doing your best to transform our poetical and unique past into a dirty farce? Honestly, Van! Van , Oh, I am honest, that’s how it went. I wasn’t sure of my ground, hence the sauciness and the simper. Ada Ah, parlez pour vous: I, dear, can affirm that those famous fingertrips up your Africa and to the edge of the world came considerably later when I knew the itinerary by heart, Van Sorry, no—if people remembered the same they would not be different people. That’s-how-it-went. Ada But we are not "differ­ ent"! Think and dream are the same in French. Think of the douceur, Van! Van Oh, I am thinking of it, of course, I am—it was all douceur, my child, my rhyme. Ada That’s better, said Ada). Van Please, take over. Ada Van stretched himself naked in the now motionless candle-light. "Let us sleep here," he said. "They won’t be back before dawn relights Uncle’s cigar." "My nightie is tremp^e," she whispered. "Take it off, this plaid sleeps two." "Don’t look, Van." "That’s not fair," he said and helped her to slip it up and over her hair-shaking head. She was shaded with a mere touch of coal at the mystery point of her 122

chalk-white body, (pages 119-120)

Ada’s memory is lyrical; Van’s memory is comic. The pas­

sage Just quoted is not especially typical, in that the

writer of various portions is fairly easy to distinguish.

Usually, the reader must make his own deoisions as to

whose memory is cited for descriptions of setting and ac­

tions. Van, the trickster and parodist, is, however, the

predominant voice.

Here then, is Ada, Nabokov’s latest novel, where mem­

ory and parody do more than walk hand in hand.

Summary

Parody has always been central to Nabokov’s concept of art, while Nabokov’s other central concept, the scientific memory, developed more slowly, together with the notion of aesthetic bliss. The first major statement on memory was

The Gift, where parody is only a minor element. Aside

from Bend Sinister, whose hero denies memory until Its re­ pression drives him Insane, Nabokov’s later works have the

interplay of parodic dream and scientific memory as their

central dynamic. In Lolita, the "objective correlative" of this aesthetic struggle is Lolita herself, part child and part parody of the movie seductress. In Ada the cor­ relative is an incestuous affair. In Pale Fire, where each principle has Its own section of the novel, which is 123

divided into poem and commentary, no such correlative has been found, but the division of memory and parody still expresses the core of the novel.

The final test of this approach is that it offers ade­ quate explanations of Pale Fire and Ada, two exceedingly difficult books, and presents a new insight into Lolita.

There is nothing especially original in discussing either memory or parody in Nabokov; what is original is discuss­ ing them together, as a dynamic that Informs Nabokov’s novels. 124

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alter, Robert. "Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics," TrlQuarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 41-59.

——-"Nabokov’s Ardor," Commentary. August 1969, pp. 47-50.

Anderson, Quentin. "Nabokov in Time," The New Republic, 4 June 1966, pp. 23-28.

Appel, Alfred, Jr. "Ada Described," TrlQuarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 160-186.

—---. "Backgrounds of Lolita," TrlQuarterly No. 17 (Win­ ter 1970), pp. 17-40.

——. "An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov," in Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, I967, pp. 19-44.

---—. "Lolita: The Springboard of Parody," in Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967, pp. 106-143.

——. "Nabokov’s Puppet Show—I," The New Republic. 14 January 1967, pp. 27-30.

----- . "Nabokov’s puppet Show—II," The New Republic. 21 January 1967, PP. 25-28, 30.

Berberova, Nina. "The Mechanics of Pale Fire." TrlQuar­ terly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 147-159.

----- . "Nabokov in the Thirties," TrlQuarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 220-233.

Bishop, Morris. "Nabokov at Cornell," TrlQuarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 234-239.

Bitsilll, p. M. "The Revival of Allegory," TrlQuarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 102-118.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. New York: New Direc­ tions, 1964. 125

Brown, Clarence. "Nabokov’s Pushkin and Nabokov’s Nabo­ kov," In Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967, pp. 195-208.

Bryer, Jackson R., and Thomas J. Bergin, Jr. "Vladimir Nabokov’s Critical Reputation in English: A Note and a Checklist," in Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed, L. S. Dembo. Madison, Wis.: The University of Wis­ consin Press, 1967» pp. 225-276.

Burke, Kenneth. "Psychology and Form," in Counter- Statement. Los Altos, California: Hermes, 1953, pp. 29-44.

Butler, Diana. "Lolita Lepidoptera," New World Writing No. 16. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, i960, pp. 58-84.

Daniels, Guy. "Pushkin and the Lepidopterlst," The New Republic. 3 April 1965, pp. 19-21.

Dembo, L. S., ed. Nabokov: The Man and His Work. Madi­ son, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 196?. Essays also listed separately by author.

Duffy, Margaret. "*I Have Never Seen a More Lucid, More Lonely, Better Balanced Mad Mind Than Mine,’" Time, 23 May 1969, PP. 82-83.

Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. Boston: Lit­ tle, Brown, 1967.

Fromberg, Susan. "The Unwritten Chapters in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight." Modern Fiction Studies, XIII (Winter 1967-1960), 427-442.

Girodias, Maurice. "Lolita, Nabokov, and I," Evergreen Review No. 37, September 1965, PP. 44-47, 89-9I.

Gold, Herbert. "The Artist in Pursuit of Butterflies," The Saturday Evening Post, 11 February 1967, PP. 81-85

Gordon, Ambrose, Jr. "The Double Pnin," in Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, Wls.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967, pp. 144-156.

Hughes, Daniel. "Nabokov: Spiral and Glass," Novel: A Forum on Fiction, I (Winter 1968), 178-185. 126

Hughes, Robert P. "Notes on the Translation of Invitation to a Beheading." TriQuarterly No. 1? (Winter I9?o), pp. 284-292.

Hyman, Stanley Edgar. "The Handles Invitation to a Be­ heading and Bend Sinister." TrlQuarterly No. 17 (win­ ter 1970), pp. ¿0-71.

Janeway, Elizabeth. "Nabokov the Magician," The Atlantic, July 1967, pp. 66-71.

Karlinsky, Simon. "Anya in Wonderland: Nabokov’s Russi­ fied Lewis Carroll," TrlQuarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 310-315.

----- . "Illusion, Reality, and Parody in Nabokov’s Plays," in Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, Wls.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967, PP. 183-194.

----- . "Nabokov and Chekhov: The Lesser Russian Tradi­ tion," TrlQuarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 7-16.

Kazin, Alfred. "In the Mind of Nabokov," Saturday Review. 10 May 1969, pp. 27-29, 35.

Khodasevich, Vladislav. "On Sirin," TrlQuarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 96-101.

Lee, L. L. "Bend Sinister: Nabokov’s Political Dream," in Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967, PP. 95-105.

»Vladimir Nabokov’s Great Spiral of Being," Western Humanities Review. XVIII (Summer 1964), 225- 2357

Leonard, Jeffrey. "In Place of Lost Time: Ada," Trl­ Quarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 136-146.

Lyons, John 0. "Pale Fire and the Fine Art of Annotation," in Nabokovs The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967, pp. 157-164.

Macdonald, Dwight. "Virtuosity Rewarded, or Dr, Kinbote’s Revenge," Partisan Review. XXIX (Summer 1962), 437-442. 127

McCarthy, Mary. "A Bolt from the Blue,” in The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays. New York: Har­ court, Brace, and World, 1970, pp. 15-34.

Merivale, Patricia. "The Flaunting of Artifice in Vladi­ mir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges," in Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967, pp. 209-224.

Monter, Barbara Heldt. "’Spring in Fialta’: The Choice that Mimics Chance," TrlQuarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 128-135.

Moynahan, Julian. "Lolita and Related Memories," TrlQuar­ terly No. 17 (Winter ±970), pp. 247-252.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in Five Parts. New""York": McGraw-Hill, I969.

— ---. Bend Sinister. New York: Henry Holt, 1947.

----- . Bend Sinister. New York: Time Reading Program, 1964.

---—. The Defense, trans. Michael Scammell and Vladimir Nabokov. New York: G. P, Putnam’s Sons, 1964.

----- • Despair. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966.

----- , trans. Eugene Onegin, by Aleksandr Pushkin. 4 vols. New York: Bollingen, 1964.

----- • The Eye, trans. Dmitri Nabokov and Vladimir Nabo­ kov. New York: Phaedra, 1965.

----- . The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell and Vladimir Nabokov. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963.

---—, and Dmitri Nabokov, trans. A Hero of Our Time, by Mihail Lermentov. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958.

— ---. Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Dmitri Nabokov and Vladimir Nabokov. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959.

----- . King, Queen, Knave, trans. Dmitri Nabokov and Vladimir Nabokov. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

----- . König Dame Bube, trans. Siegfried von Vegesack. Reinbek feel Hamburg, Germany: Rowohlt, 1959. 128

Nabokov, Vladimir. Laughter in the Dark. [Norfolk, Conn.]: New Directions, i960.

----- . Lolita. 2 vols. Paris: The Olympia Press, 1955.

— --- . Lolita. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958.

——. Lushins Verteidigung, trans. Dietmar Schulde. Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany: Rowohlt, 1961.

----- . Nabokov’s Dozen. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1958.

— ---. Nabokov’s Quartet. New York: Phaedra, I966.

----- . Nikolai Gogol. New York: New Directions, I96I.

——. Pale Fire. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962.

----- . Pnin. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1957.

-----. Poems. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961.

——. "Problems of Translation: ’Onegin* In English," Partisan Review. XXII (Fall 1955), 496-512.

----- • The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1959.

~--- t trans. The Song of Igor’s Campaign: An Epic of the Twelfth Century. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, i960.

---—. speak, Memory. New York: Universal Library, Grosset and Dunlap, n. d.

----- . Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906.

——. The Waltz Invention, trans. Dmitri Nabokov. New York": Phaedra, 1966.

Nicol, Charles. "Don Juan out of Hell," The Atlantic, June 1969, pp. 105-106.

---- «The Mirrors of Sebastian Knight," in Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967, pp. 85-94.

---—. "Nabokov’s Card Trick," The Atlantic. June 1968, pp. 107-109, 114. 129

Noel, Luoie Leon. "Playback," TrlQuarterly No. 1? (Winter 1970), pp. 209-219.

"Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov," Playboy, January 1954, PP. 35-41, 44-45.

Proffer, Carl R. Keys to Lolita. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1968.

"A, Mew Deck for Nabokov’s Knaves," TrlQuarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 293-309.

Proffer, Ellendea. "Nabokov’s Russian Readers," TrlQuar­ terly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 253-260.

"Prospero’s Progress," Time. 23 May 1969, pp. 81-82, 84, 89-90.

Purdy, Strother B. "Solus Rex: Nabokov and the Chess Novel," Modem Fiction Studies, XIV (Winter 1968-1969) 379-395.

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Rougemont, Denis de. "Lolita, or Scandal," in Love De­ clared. trans. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963» PP. 48-54.

Scott, W. B. "The Cypress Veil," TrlQuarterly No. 17 (Winter 1970), pp. 316-331.

Smith, Peter Duval. "Vladimir Nabokov on His Life and Work." The Listener, LXVIII (22 November 1962), 856- 858.

Stegner, Page. Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladi­ mir Nabokov. New York: The Dial Press, 1966.

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——. "'Web of Sense*: Pale Fire in the Nabokov Canon," Critique. VI (Winter 1963), 29-45.