Stalking Nabokov (21 page)

We understand the actions of others when we see them by partially reactivating our own experience of such actions, stored in our memories.
⁴
But more than that: we also attune ourselves to others’ actions and empathize with them, unless we perceive them as somehow opposed to us. Over the last fifteen years, psychology has begun to study the remarkably swift and precise ways we attune ourselves rapidly, and often unconsciously, to what we see in others.
⁵
Van and Nabokov appeal here to our shared experience, to our recollection of our pride in reaching a new stage in life, like learning to walk, starting school, or, here, mastering the rudiments of sex.

Research in grounded cognition in recent neuroscience shows that thought is not primarily linguistic, as many had supposed, but multimodal, partially reactivating relevant multimodal experiences in our past, involving multiple senses, emotions and associations. Just as seeing someone grasp something activates mirror neurons, even hearing the
word
“grasp” activates the appropriate area of the motor cortex.
⁶
Our brains encode multimodal memories of objects and actions, and these are partially reactivated as percepts or concepts come into consciousness.

Nabokov rightly stressed that imagination is rooted in memory: indeed, that was the very point of entitling his autobiography
Speak, Memory
. Since the early 1930s it has been known that we store episodic memories, memories of our experiences, as
gist
, as reduced summaries of the core sense or feel of situations, rather than all their surface details.
⁷
Our stored knowledge of past situations and stimuli allows us later, as it were, to unzip the compressed file of a memory and to reconstruct an image of the original. Recent evidence shows that memory’s compression into gist evolved not only to save space on our mental hard drives but also to make it easier to activate relevant memories and to recombine them with present perception or imagination of future or other states not experienced.
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If memories were stored in detail and the details had to match exactly, mental search would be slow and rarely successful. But once memories have been compressed into gist, many memories can be appropriate enough to a new situation or a new imaginative moment to be partially reactivated, as it were, according to their common mental keywords or search terms.

Minds evolved to deal with immediate experience, and although human minds can now specialize in abstract thought or free-roaming imagination, we still respond most vividly and multimodally to immediate experience. For that reason more of our multimodal memories can be activated by language that prompts us to recreate experience, as fiction does, rather than more abstract, less personal, less sequential texts.
⁹
Nabokov was right to insist on the power of the specific in art to stimulate the imagination. Here, he and Van appeal to the groundedness of cognition through their use of details like the velvet side-loop and the gloved hand to activate our multimodal memories of the look and feel of gloves, velvet, and side-loops in trains or cars.

So far I have stressed how these first few words appeal to what we share in experience. But despite its appeal to what we share, the passage also implies different kinds of distance. There’s the distance between Van as adult narrator—as by this stage we already know him to be, despite his third- person presentation of young Van as character—and Van as a fourteen-year-old feeling himself “very much a man of the world.” The word “one,” which generalizes from his situation, as if adolescent Van can now grandly sum up a new truth he has reached from his lofty vantage point of experience, can only seem absurd to Van many years later, after much more sexual exploration than a few furtive convulsions with a shop girl. As nonagerian narrator, he can see a fourteen-year-old’s pride in his experience as proof of his past self’s relative innocence. But that distance between Van as character and Van as narrator
also
sets up something for us to share with Van as narrator: we have all reflected ironically later in life upon satisfactions that had seemed robust when we first felt them. We see here how memory compression into gist may help us retrieve a whiff of similar episodes we have experienced or witnessed.

But apart from this multiple appeal to what we share, Van and especially Nabokov behind him also know that his way of wording his recollection will also establish a different kind of distance between Van and reader. Many readers never travel first class, and few men, however “elegant,” now wear gloves on a summer’s day. Van, in his “elegant first-class compartment,” with his gloved hand in a velvet loop, has a strong element of dandified class consciousness mingling with his pride at being “very much a man of the world.” The generalizing pronoun “one,” which on one level invites readers to share a common experience, on another also discloses Van’s intellectual pride in arriving at the new generalization and his foppish indulgence in his sense of superiority to others. The upper-class English use of “one” applied to oneself, seen as a mark of high-toned speech, reinforces the snobbery that amplifies Van’s self-satisfaction and complicates the appeal to our identification with him—although we, too, will recognize moments when we have felt superior to others.

We’re not far into this passage yet. Let’s move on one clause: “one feels very much a man of the world as one surveys the capable landscape capably skimming by.” Here Van and VN comically evoke our human tendency to see the world through the tinted lenses of our emotions, or even to project our emotions onto what we perceive. “Capable” applies legitimately only to agents; Van and VN absurdly apply it to the landscape and then, adverbially, to the way the landscape skims past Van’s train window. Narrator and author know the comedy of twice misapplying this term, which suits only Van’s sense of himself, to the landscape. Nabokov suddenly confronts us in this surprising, vivid, ironic, amusing way with an instance of our human tendency to project our emotions onto our world. Psychologists study this kind of projection through priming, in terms, say, of what we notice or think of first if we have been primed with (just exposed to) either positive or negative images. Yet despite the comedy of Van’s emotional “priming,” Nabokov and Van also appeal to our imaginations through our memories, in that landscape “skimming by.”

We’re hurtling along now, at the last sentence already: “And every now and then the passenger’s roving eyes paused for a moment as he listened inwardly to a nether itch.” Van-and-VN activate our own multimodal memories and awareness: our proprioceptive sense (our awareness, from inside, of our bodily positions and sensations) of the ways our eyes move as we attend to an inner discomfort or pain and our memories of others glancing sideways in thought or hurt. The surprise and yet the naturalness of the metaphor, “
listened
to a nether
itch
,” trigger another multimodal activation (roving eyes, inner ears, touch) of multimodal memories of monitoring our inner sensations—and perhaps arise out of the synesthesia that Nabokov rendered so exactly in
Speak, Memory
that his description has become a classic of synesthesia studies.
¹⁰

But Van, attending to this nether itch, supposed it “to be (correctly, thank Log) only a minor irritation of the epithelium.” We are invited to infer that Van has a few momentary worries about a venereal disease he could have contracted from the “fubsy pig-pink whorelet” at the shop near his school and that some time later, when the itch does not recur, he confirms to himself that there was no cause for alarm. Nabokov stresses the importance in the development of modern fiction of writers’ learning to trust readers’ powers of inference because we prefer to imagine actively, to see in our mind’s eye much more than what the page spells out explicitly. We intuit Van’s concern through our familiarity with his context: because we now share that common ground with him, things
don’t
have to be spelled out for us to infer the whole situation, and that successful inference further confirms our sense of the ground we share with Van.

Van’s unfounded fears of venereal disease may add another note of comedy, but they also prepare us structurally both for the romance of love and sex with Ada at Ardis, where Van’s train will take him, a romance highlighted by contrast with the schoolboy line-up for paid sex, and the tragic aspects of Ardis as sexual paradise, not least in the venereal disease that, through Blanche, enfolds itself into the romantic myth of Van and Ada at Ardis.

This brief paragraph, immediately accessible, immediately evocative of multiple senses, emotions, and memories, typically embodies a multiple awareness: of Van at fourteen on the train; of him a little later that summer, when he can feel sure he has not caught a venereal disease; of him as a much older narrator recalling his young self and inviting his readers to sense what we share with him but also to recognize young Van’s cocky sense of what makes him privileged and apart. As narrator Van evokes and reactivates the experience, yet he also sees himself from outside: “And every now and then
the passenger’s
roving eyes paused.” Psychologists distinguish between a field and an observer relationship to an experience or a memory: an inner view, as if amid the field of experience, and an outer view, observing oneself as if from outside. Ordinarily we experience life in the “field” condition, but precisely because we can compress memories into “gist,” we can also afterward recall our experience as if from the outside, as in the radical recombinations of our memories in our dreams. As we read, we also tend to toggle or glide between imagining ourselves within the experience of a focal character— Van seeing the landscape swimming by or listening to his nether itch—and an outer view: seeing Van with gloved hand in the velvet side-loop.

A number of times in his works Nabokov makes explicit one of his personal psychological observations about the casual, insignificant impressions suddenly locked into permanent memory when they happen to be caught in the forehaze of a major change. Here he does not refer explicitly to the forehaze, but that’s what he portrays: Van unaware that the visit to his “cousins,” from which he does not expect much, will transform his life—and, of course, will cast an entirely different light on his pride in being a man of the world merely because of a few paid orgasms with a fubsy whorelet.

As rereaders we can be highly conscious of the structural role of this scene, of the contrasts between Van in the shop with the pig-pink wench and at Ardis, in passionate embrace with Ada; between the cheap whorelet and the fancy whores he resorts to when away from Ada or when he flees Ardis, appalled at her infidelity; or between the comically fleeting anxiety about venereal disease that the whorelet causes Van and the venereal disease that Blanche, the prime celebrant of the romance of the Veen venery at Ardis, tragically passes on to her child.

Ada’
s complexities and charms invite multiple rereadings, and rereaders can sense all these multiple contexts surrounding the immediate scene. We also seek to explain anything unaccounted for by its local or larger context. I had laughed at the “capable landscape capably skimming by” but never felt it problematic. But the Kyoto Reading Circle recognized something in the conjunction of “capable” and “landscape” that anyone who knows the English eighteenth century well should recognize. Van and VN allude here to the greatest of English landscape architects, Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716–1783), particularly appropriate since Ardis, where Van is headed, is an eighteenth-century estate whose grounds display the kind of gentle naturalness Brown introduced, between earlier English formality and later romantic preferences for the wild and sublime. I find the fact that Van and VN smuggled this allusion in, and that I didn’t see it, but that it was eminently discoverable, very funny. Nabokov loves the psychology of attention, of memory, of discovery, and of humor.

On rereading we can be aware not only of what we know now but also of what we think we were being led to expect or being mentally and emotionally prepared for on a first reading, or what the author has devised to work one way for first-time readers and more richly still for rereaders. We are immediately aware here of Van as fourteen-year-old character and less vividly but still consciously aware of him as mature narrator looking back with amusement but also with pleasure at his young self and of the intricate combination of appeal to shared experience and proud Van’s sense of his own specialness. And after discovering the hidden as well as the overt joke in “capable,” we can also recall our discovery of the allusion and our state of innocence before the discovery. We can be aware, therefore, of these multiple times and levels: Van, (1) here in June 1884, (2) a few weeks later, when he can be sure he has picked up no disease from the shop girl, (3) recalling this in later life, and (4) at the moment of writing this; (5) Nabokov behind Van Veen; and readers, (6) first-time and recalling train journeys we have taken or stages in life we have triumphantly reached, (7) rereading and placing the scene in relation to Ardis, and even (8) expert enough to see the landscape architect hidden in the landscape.

Think how different this is from our experience as readers of Tolstoy characters on trains. In Tolstoy we seem to enter immediately into the minds and experience of the focal characters because he conjures up all the relevant elements of the situation, the physical presence, the personalities of those involved, the interactions between them, and relevant information about their past relations. Our imaginations seem contained entirely within the scene: we feel ourselves within the space the characters occupy. But Nabokov prefers to evoke and exercise our recognition of the manifold awareness of consciousness: the different Vans here, character now, character slightly later, narrator much later, felt from inside or seen from outside; the different appeals to recognize what we share and what holds us at a distance from Van; and the awareness, on rereading, of the appeal to first-time readers and to our accumulated knowledge of the rest of the book on rereading or our awareness of specific puzzles we can now recognize as puzzles because we have seen the solution. Tolstoy also builds up scenes gradually, coordinating characters’ actions and perceptions. Nabokov speeds us into his railroad scene without warning, without explicitness (only “first-class compartment,” “skimming,” and “passenger” specify the situation), without lingering (the scene ends here), and without spelling out the when or where until we infer them at the beginning of the next chapter. He has confidence in our pleasure in imagination, inference, and orientation.