Picked-Up Pieces (30 page)

Though the Library appears to be eternal, the men within it are not, and they have a history punctuated by certain discoveries and certain deductions now considered axiomatic. Five hundred years ago, in an upper hexagon, two pages of homogeneous lines were discovered that within a century were identified as “a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní, with classical Arabic inflections” and translated. The contents of these two pages—“notions of combinational analysis”—led to the deduction that the Library is total; that is, its shelves contain all possible combinations of the orthographic symbols:

Men greeted this revelation with joy; “the universe suddenly expanded to the limitless dimensions of hope.” They surged onto the stairs, searching for Vindications—books that would vindicate and explain his life to each man. Sects sprang up. One used dice and metal letters in an attempt to “mimic the divine disorder” and compose by chance the canonical volumes. Another, the Purifiers, destroyed millions of books, hurling them down the air shafts. They believed in “the Crimson Hexagon: books of a smaller than ordinary format, omnipotent, illustrated, magical.” A third sect worshipped the Man of the Book—a hypothetical librarian who, in some remote hexagon, must have perused a book “which is the cipher and perfect compendium of
all the rest
.” This librarian is a god. “Many pilgrimages have sought Him out.”

The analogies with Christianity are pursued inventively and without the tedium of satire. The narrator himself confides, “To me, it does not seem unlikely that on some shelf of the universe there lies a total book. I pray the unknown gods that some man—even if only one man, and though it have been thousands of years ago!—may have examined and read it.” But in his own person he has only the “elegant hope” that the Library, if traversed far enough, would repeat itself in the same disorder, which then would constitute an order. At hand, in the illegible chaos, are only tiny rays of momentary sense, conglomerations of letters spelling
O Time your pyramids, Combed Clap of Thunder
, or
The Plaster Cramp
.

This kind of comedy and desperation, these themes of vindication and unattainability, suggest Kafka. But
The Castle
is a more human work, more personal and neurotic; the fantastic realities of Kafka’s fiction are projections of the narrator-hero’s anxieties, and have no communion, no interlocking structure, without him. The Library of Babel instead has an adamant solidity. Built of mathematics and science, it will certainly survive the weary voice describing it, and outlast all its librarians, already decimated, we learn in a footnote, by “suicide and pulmonary diseases.” We move, with Borges, beyond psychology, beyond the human, and confront, in his work, the world atomized and vacant. Perhaps not since Lucretius has a poet so definitely felt men as incidents in space.

What are we to make of him? The economy of his prose, the tact of his imagery, the courage of his thought are there to be admired and emulated. In resounding the note of the marvellous last struck in English by Wells and Chesterton, in permitting infinity to enter and distort his imagination, he has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place. Yet discouragingly large areas of truth seem excluded from his vision. Though the population of the Library somehow replenishes itself, and “fecal necessities” are provided for, neither food nor fornication is mentioned—and in truth they are not generally seen in libraries. I feel in Borges a curious implication: the unrealities of physical science and the senseless repetitions of history have made the world outside the library an uninhabitable vacuum. Literature—that European empire augmented with translations from remote kingdoms—is now the only world capable of housing and sustaining new literature. Is this too curious? Did not Eliot recommend
forty years ago, in reviewing
Ulysses
, that new novels be retellings of old myths? Is not the greatest of modern novels,
Remembrance of Things Past
, about its own inspiration? Have not many books already been written from within Homer and the Bible? Did not Cervantes write from within Ariosto and Shakespeare from within Holinshed? Borges, by predilection and by program, carries these inklings toward a logical extreme: the view of books as, in sum, an alternate creation, vast, accessible, highly colored, rich in arcana, possibly sacred. Just as physical man, in his cities, has manufactured an environment whose scope and challenge and hostility eclipse that of the natural world, so literate man has heaped up a counterfeit universe capable of supporting life. Certainly the traditional novel as a transparent imitation of human circumstance has “a distracted or tired air.” Ironic and blasphemous as Borges’ hidden message may seem, the texture and method of his creations, though strictly inimitable, answer to a deep need in contemporary fiction—the need to confess the fact of artifice.

THE SEA

THE ENIGMAS

THE LABYRINTH

NABOKOV

S
PEAK
, M
EMORY
:
An Autobiography Revisited
, by Vladimir Nabokov. 316 pp. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966.

Alas, Nabokov doesn’t want to be an American writer after all. He has moved to Switzerland and, instead of composing the delightful, devilish, and unimaginable successor to
Pale Fire
, fusses with backward-looking projects such as ushering his minor Russian works (
Despair, The Eye, The Waltz Invention
) into English, defending in
Encounter
his sumptuous but ungratefully received version of
Eugene Onegin
, and translating
Lolita
into Russian, a virtually posthumous maneuver not likely to win much gratitude either.

The pity is, his greatness waits here. To my taste his American novels are his best, with a fiercer frivolity and a cruelty more humane than in the fiction of his European decades. In America his almost impossible style encountered, after twenty years of hermetic exile, a subject as impossible as itself, ungainly with the same affluence. He rediscovered our monstrosity. His fascinatingly astigmatic stereopticon projected not only the landscape—the eerie arboreal suburbs, the grand emptinesses, the exotic and touchingly temporary junk of roadside America—but the wistful citizens of a violent society desperately oversold, in the absence of other connectives, on love. If the perceiver of John Shade and Charlotte Haze and Clare Quilty and the Waindell College that impinged on poor Pnin devotes the rest of his days to fond rummaging in the Russian attic of his mind, the loss is national, and sadder than Sputnik.

The latest memento confided to the care of Nabokov’s American public is a revision of
Speak, Memory
, whose chapters were published one by one in (mostly)
The New Yorker
from 1948 to 1950 and assembled as
Conclusive Evidence
in 1951. As readers then already know, twelve of the fifteen chapters portray an aspect of the writer’s happy boyhood as the eldest son of a St. Petersburg aristocrat, and the last three, more briefly but as enchantingly, sketch his rootless years in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris. Nabokov has never written English better than in these reminiscences; never since has he written so sweetly. With tender precision and copious wit, exploiting a vocabulary and a sensibility enriched by the methodical pursuit of lepidoptera, inspired by an atheist’s faith in the magic of simile and the sacredness of lost time, Nabokov makes of his past a brilliant icon—bejewelled, perspectiveless, untouchable. While there are frequent passages of Joycean trickiness, Proust presides in the metaphorical arabesques, the floral rhythms, and the immobilized surrender to memory. Proust, however, by fictionalizing Illiers into Combray, threw his childhood open to everyone; whereas the Nabokov memoir is narrowed by its implication that only an expatriate Russian, a well-born and intellectual Russian at that, can know nostalgia so exquisite.

The revisions, which a laborious collation with the 1951 edition has bared to my scrutiny, tend to narrow the memoir further. The author, back in Europe, has consulted with his sisters and cousins, who have chastened his imperfect recollections. Much new information about the Nabokov tribe, bristling with parenthetic dates and hyphenated alliances with the Prussian nobility, has been foisted off on Chapter Three; a tidy dry biography of his father now inaugurates Chapter Nine. (Compare, invidiously, the fabulous epic of filial admiration worked into his novel
The Gift
.) Elsewhere gardeners and dachshunds have been named, tutors sorted out, and apologies delivered to his previously suppressed brother Sergey. Some of the interpolations are welcome (the family tennis game in Chapter Two, the wooing of Tamara in Chapter Twelve, the differentiated drawing masters in Chapter Four); but sentences at times limp under their new load of accuracy and the ending of one vignette, “Mademoiselle O” (Chapter Five), is quite dulled by the gratuitous postscript of some recent personal history. The additions, and the addition of pleasant but imagination-cramping photographs, make the book more of a family album and slightly less of a miracle of impressionistic recall.

Very few changes are stylistic. The grand evocations of the Nord-Express and the blending parks and gardens of exile are not improved—how could they be? On page 19, “sensitive youth” becomes “young chronophobiac,” and on page 284, “Dostoevskian emotion” becomes the more scornful “Dostoevskian drisk.” On page 100, a rather conventional image of “that great heavenly O shining above the Russian wilderness” has very wonderfully become “the moon, fancy’s rear-vision mirror.” And on page 48, a burned bridge has been unkindled; Nabokov has smoothly stricken an irreverent reference to a dachshund descended from a dog of Anton Chekhov’s as being “one of my few connections with the main current of Russian literature.” Alas, that now seems his hope—to rejoin, by some sparkling future rivulet beyond the grim hydroelectric dam of Sovietism, that remote Zemblan current.