Stalking Nabokov (31 page)
Ganin thinks he can
return to his past
with Mary or resume where he left off. But the central surprise of the novel’s plot, the essential twist of the novel’s
strategy
, is that the title character does not arrive, despite the steady countdown. When Ganin realizes that he has his past with him in memory and need not return to it, he heads away from Mary toward an open future. The novel’s title seemed to guarantee her arrival, but as the novel ends it is left unrealized and no longer matters.
Hugh feels less sanguine about returning to his past with Armande, especially as it was so often torment, yet he feels compelled to try to revisit the first and only summer of their “love.” But his foray through space in search of lost time fails dismally, to the point where the narrator taunts: “What had you expected of your pilgrimage, Person? A mere mirror rerun of hoary torments?” (
TT
94).
If
Transparent Things
mocks the myth of the return to the past, it undermines the myth that we can know the future we will arrive at. As readers, outside Hugh’s world and aware of the narrators’ failed attempt to divert him from the hotel where he plans to stay, we can see images of death, fire, and falling that appear to signal that Hugh will die by jumping to escape a fire that the narrators have already seen in the making. But because of a last-minute change of room, his death does not happen as so insistently foreseen. Hugh does die in the fire, but by suffocation, and he is welcomed, in a dizzying and unexpected final scene, onto the level of being of the spectral narrators, especially the ghost of R., whom he had been visiting when he first met Armande. Again, the novel as strategy depends on the surprise of the ending: not a plunge into death but a heady dance of imagery that leads Hugh to a threshold beyond the story and onto the level of its tellers.
Since adultery, planned or performed, sets the tone for both
Mary
and
Transparent Things
, one might expect it to result in the clash of wills so familiar in story from Agamemnon and Clytemnestra to Anna and Karenin and beyond. But Nabokov writes in “The Tragedy of Tragedy”:
The idea of conflict tends to endow life with a logic it never has. Tragedies based exclusively in the logic of conflict are as untrue to life as an all-pervading class-struggle is untrue to history. Most of the worst and deepest human tragedies, far from following the marble rules of tragic conflict, are tossed on the stormy element of chance.
(
MUSSR
340)
For Nabokov, conflict is a convenient but conventional trap for story and one that he springs open again and again. Ganin plans to take Mary from her husband, but neither Alfyorov nor Mary will ever know, after Ganin quietly slips away, having changed his mind, with no one but himself the wiser. Hugh Person kills Armande not as a consequence of her infidelities, for which he has never reproached her, but only in the throes of the dream of someone who has always been as lurching and lumbering in sleep as in waking life.
In “The Tragedy of Tragedy” Nabokov envisages “the higher form of tragedy”—but it could in fact be the higher form of plot, whether tragic or not or theatrical or not—as
the creation of a certain unique pattern of life in which the sorrows and passions
[10]
of a particular man will follow the rules of his own individuality, not the rules of the theatre as we know them…a writer of genius may discover exactly the right harmony of…accidental occurrences, and…this harmony, without suggesting anything like the iron laws of tragic fatality, will express certain definite combinations that occur in life.
(
MUSSR
341)
In his own work Nabokov does not impose the character’s individual mark with the stark irony of Hardyesque fate but with a delicacy that it can often take the eye of sensitive retrospection to spot, in a pattern that once seen, cannot be unseen, like Ganin in stasis and then suddenly moving again or Hugh awkwardly emerging to cross a new threshold.
In
Mary
Nabokov establishes a stiff rhythm to Ganin’s existence as he alternates between present and recollections of the past, but in fact he fails to provide Ganin with much of a past beyond his love for Mary, much of a present beyond his reminiscences of her and plans for escape with her, much of a future except his no longer needing Mary to help him cope with the present and beyond. These are not deliberate decisions, like Tolstoy’s refusal to give his characters background lives, but simply youthful inexperience. As early as the Franz of his next novel, Nabokov will use backfill and infill to build up the patterns of a life that can extend even into the moment of death. In Hugh’s case, the aggressive overtness and humiliating insistence of the patterns, from his unhappy years as a youthful somnambulist to his waking to death by fire, disturb us, as does so much about the novel. The overt patterning of time here stands in stark contrast to the complex, covert, celebratory layering of past on past in Nabokov’s immediately previous novel,
Ada
.
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The difference reflects the gulf between Van’s character, his love, his triumphant fate, and his role as fond retrospector, with Ada, of the past he shares with her, and Hugh’s character, his love, his sad fate, and the power the narrators of his story have to search his past with a more than human, indeed quite inhuman, freedom.
THE IMPLIED WORLDS OF NABOKOVIAN NARRATIVE
Because he rejects determinism, because he refuses to see life in terms of action and counteraction meshing like teeth on interconnecting cogs, Nabokov’s stories minimize the conflict that ticks its way through so much of story. He constructs
his
stories to reflect the unique, unpredictable rhythm of an individual character’s life.
He also shapes his stories so that each poses an overarching problem where the force of characters’ moves and countermoves often seems less significant than their combining into an artfully playful and puzzling authorial design. He famously explains this by analogy with chess-problem composition (
SM
288–93), and some chess-problem aficionados indeed feel that in his problems he is too ingenious, that he does not maximize the tension between black and white but instead focuses too much on the tension between problemist and solver, between the solver’s expectations and the problemist’s radical inventiveness. In the same way, resistant readers of his fiction prefer the simpler rhythm of action and reaction—the powerful clash of character and character, which, after all, our ancestors evolved to notice even before they were hominids or humans—to Nabokov’s focus on the subtle tension between author and reader.
As plot became less central to literary storytelling in the twentieth century, there was a general tendency, at least early in the century, to pay less attention to the clash of characters over time and to focus instead on the inner experience of the mind within the moment. But Nabokov rejects that, too, as a primary focus because he is interested in the mind as much
beyond
as
within
the moment or the self. What makes his work unique at the local level is his capacity to be true to the details of a scene but also to shift within or beyond the scene and to take responsive readers with him.
He does not eschew situations in the here and now, and in fact he can render them, a stalled elevator, a taxi outside a hotel door, with stunning immediacy, not by the sheer accumulation of detail but by catching our imaginations off guard. He knows that attention fades if we habituate to stimuli, so he refreshes and provokes it by shifting it from one point to another within a scene: not by shifting from one character’s mind to another, since life rules that out, but by retaining a focus on one mind yet freely sliding or soaring this way, aside or ahead, to another scene, another time, another plane, as smoothly or abruptly as he chooses, and expecting the reader can do so, too.
Nabokov’s storytelling allows a free choice at every moment, a perpetually open series of surprises, and his innovative subjects, structures, and stratagems, in works like
The Gift
,
Lolita
,
Pale Fire
,
Ada
,
Transparent Things
, anywhere at all, really, even as early as
Mary
, show him again and again opening up new dimensions of possibility and inviting us to enter and explore these strange new spaces. But his very desire for freedom, on the small scale and the large, at the level of the sentence, the life, and the work, means that his imagination is present and active everywhere. Some readers resist what they feel as his imposing himself throughout his fictional worlds. Others appreciate his work as inviting both readers and characters, in line after line and life after life, into something freer than even the ample and opulent prison of space, time, and the self.
Unlike so many serious storytellers of the twentieth century, Nabokov can give us the pleasures of extraordinary characters and events: Luzhin and the madness that impels him to his suicide; Humbert and the obsession that drives him to abduction and murder; Kinbote and his fantastic relocation of a thoroughly realistic poem; Van and Ada and their eighty-year-long forbidden love. But even without extraordinary events, in the quiet worlds of a Ganin or a Hugh Person, Nabokov tells his stories with so much imaginative mobility and surprise that he gives us a new confidence in what our imaginations can do to apprehend our world and to step right outside it. In a sense, he tells the same story each time, since each life leads from a similar beginning to a similar end, but he also ensures, as life does, that it could not be more different each time.
14. Nabokov’s Transition from Russian to English
I met Alexander Dolinin in 1990 in St. Petersburg, and within a couple of minutes realized he knew Nabokov better than almost any Western Nabokovian. We have since had many delightful arguments in person and in print. But his 2005 essay suggesting that in his years of world fame Nabokov deliberately mythologized his past, downplayed his Russianness, and denigrated his Russian achievements seemed to me both deeply wrong and deeply unfair to Nabokov. Invited to a Nabokov conference at Oxford where Sasha was speaking, I decided to issue a challenge in person and, at more length, in print. I also wanted to turn the essay from the critical to the constructive. I found a way to do so by explaining the exacting standards Nabokov applied to his own work as well as that of others. No one had noticed that behind his strong critical opinions stands his strong sense of cultural evolution, his conviction that civilization in general and art in particular have extended and will continue to extend human possibilities and sensitivities.
Nabokov was unsparing in criticism, but outsiders—and perhaps even insiders—are surprised how sparing Nabokovians tend to be to other Nabokovians. As editor of
Nabokov Studies
, Zoran Kuzmanovich would like more controversy in the Nabokov world. I don’t believe in controversy for his sake, or for its own sake, but I do believe we should always be ready to challenge our own and others’ strong opinions and confident claims by testing them against the evidence.
Five years ago in the
Cambridge Companion to Nabokov
, Alexander Dolinin offered a “strong” reading of Nabokov’s career.
1
He characterized Nabokov’s early years as a period of creatively combative engagement with the Russian literary tradition but his later years, some time after his switch to English, in terms of, first, a disavowal of that former engagement; second, a diminution of his own Russian achievement; and third, a “mythmaking” self-portrayal as “a born cosmopolitan” never attached to anything (53). Given that these claims were made by the foremost Russian Nabokovian in an authoritative series from a major academic press, given that they would rewrite our sense of Nabokov’s late career and his character, they deserve scrutiny. Dolinin’s claims prove far more mythical than Nabokov’s pronouncements on his own career: the evidence contradicts them at every turn.
After showing this, I pass beyond the negative to explain in a new way why Nabokov continually drove himself to develop artistically and why he was hard not just on some of his own past work but also on the work of authors he revered. High standards lurk behind his strong opinions, and these high standards are far from narrowly literary or even artistic: they derive from a broad sense of cultural development not sufficiently recognized in Nabokov.
REPUDIATING THE RUSSIAN?
Nabokov, Dolinin asserts, “worked out a peculiar strategy of presenting his earlier writings as inferior ‘outlines’ or ‘dress rehearsals’ for his English masterpieces” (50); he “never misses a chance to sneak in a favorable reference to his English writings and to subtly pit them against their Russian counterparts” (51). “Sirin fell victim to the tricky mythmaking and playacting Nabokov indulged in during his later years” (53); “this scenario automatically, by definition, sends all Nabokov’s Russian writings downhill, relegating them to a secondary role of immature, imperfect antecedents” (54). “It would be wrong…to follow Nabokov in downgrading them to the rank of apprenticeship” (56).
Dolinin finds this supposed strategy of downgrading “peculiar,” but he never questions his own scenario. He does not feel any need to
explain
why someone like Nabokov—not unappreciative of his own work, to say the least, and not unaware that the income from sales ensured his future freedom to write—would persistently diminish the value of his old work to a new audience much larger than any he had previously had, especially in forewords that might sway browsers’ decisions to purchase or not.