Stalking Nabokov (46 page)

Machado and Nabokov in strikingly similar ways resist the determinism of literary naturalism, from Machado’s 1878 review of Eça de Queirós’
O Primo Basilio
through all the novels that followed, and from Nabokov’s anti-deterministic parody of Theodore Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
in his own
King, Queen, Knave
. In Machado’s story “Funeral March,” Cordovil becomes obsessed with what he interprets as signs that he will die that evening, yet he lives on many years, just as in Nabokov’s “A Busy Man” Grafitski recalls a dream that he will die in his thirty-third year and lives out the year in increasing panic only to find that he has been reprieved.

Time and love may be common literary themes, but darting a hundred years ahead to reevaluate what seems valueless in the present or analyzing jealousy as hypocritical vanity are rarities. Such specific overlaps testify to a singular congruence between Machado’s imagination and Nabokov’s.

Both novelists attend with the same care to often-unremarked aspects of the art of fiction or independently arrive at similar artistic ploys. Nabokov loved Chekhov and even named him as his desert-island author. But he also thought that in his drama Chekhov was caught “by the very conventions he thought he had broken— . . . he had not studied the art of drama completely enough, . . . was not critical enough about certain aspects of his medium” (cited in
VNAY
31). Nabokov did not make the same mistake in his apprenticeship for fiction, nor did Machado. Nabokov paid close attention, in the work of other writers, and in his own practice, for instance, to what he calls the “art of preparation and transition” (
SIC
10). He can make preparation singularly stealthy and transition remarkably fluid or comically or tragically jolting. Machado too explicitly and parodically deals with both preparation and transition: Brás Cubas writes at one point, “And now watch the skill, the art with which I make the greatest transition in this book” (
BC
22) just before a would-be elegant but in fact comically forced transition; Bento Santiago raises the level of apprehension when he announces, “Let this chapter serve as preparation—and preparation is important, dear reader” (
DC
116). One transition Machado and Nabokov particularly like to disguise or blur, to decisive effect, is the shift between objective reality and imagination: without any warning, description segues into conversations that can last for pages, as in Machado’s story “Mariana” or Nabokov’s novel
The Gift
, before we discover that these scenes have taken place only in the heroes’ imaginations.

Both Machado and Nabokov distort chronological order to introduce their heroines before or after we are ready. Virgilia features teasingly in the first chapter of Brás Cubas’s memoirs, only to be announced later in regular chronological order, and then delayed chapter after chapter. In Nabokov’s
Mary
, the name of Mary, the great love of the hero’s life, is mentioned on the first page of the novel without the hero realizing it, but Mary herself, despite providing the novel’s title, never appears on its stage. In
The Defense
, Luzhin’s future wife appears unannounced and unexpected at the end of one chapter, only for the narrative to have to backtrack, in a key move, before resuming the interrupted scene in the next chapter but one. Similarly the opening chapter of
Quincas Borba
introduces Rubião filled with hope that Sofia feels as keenly for him as he does for her, only for Machado to interrupt (“Come with me, reader. Let’s have a look at him months earlier”) before returning us to the same morning thirteen chapters later.

Machado and Nabokov independently invent or at least deploy one authorial device after another. Both repeatedly issue memory tests to the reader. Brás Cubas, for instance, reports that Virgilia’s father “introduced me to his wife—an estimable lady—and his daughter, who in no way belied my father’s panegyric. I swear to you, in no way. Reread Chapter XXVII” (89). In
Ada
, Van Veen in 1892 describes a series of photographs of 1884 that require us to recollect in similar detail events from three hundred pages earlier, then in 1967 refers back to that early summer one final time, after
five
hundred pages, in precise but oblique details that challenge our powers of recollection.

Both writers can dangle clues in front of our noses but seem to dismiss them, as Bento Santiago in the opening chapter of
Dom Casmurro
tells us, “Don’t consult your dictionaries” for the special meaning of “
casmurro”
that has supplied his nickname, or Kinbote twice divulges the context in Shake-speare that provides the title for
Pale Fire
, without his or our realizing it. Like magicians, both writers slip in key information after engaging our attention elsewhere, like the casual reference to slave trading when we are waiting for Brás Cubas as a boy to avenge himself in some spectacular way on Villaças, or Van’s disclosing in a subordinate clause his vile treatment of a would-be blackmailer while we are preoccupied with the agony of his parting from Ada.

And both writers explicitly conceal deeper meanings beneath dazzling surfaces. Machado explains that he writes “one utterance but with two meanings”;
⁵
Nabokov tells the
New Yorker
that “most of the stories I am contemplating (and some I have written in the past—you have actually published one with such an ‘inside’ . . .) will be composed on these lines, according to this system where a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one” (
SL
116–17).

Both writers challenge and reward their readers. Nabokov stressed that he wrote for “the artistic reader” (
SO
40), “the creative reader” (
NG
140). “The authentic writer of genius,” he maintained, “writes for an ideal audience, for readers or spectators whom he would like to possess the same power of comprehension as his own power of expression.”
⁶
He prefers the reader with “some artistic sense—which I propose to develop in myself and others whenever I have the chance” (
LL
3). Machado’s playful tweaking of imagined incompetents in his audience both deters the uncreative reader and instructs creative readers in exactly Nabokov’s spirit.

More conventional novels, even those of major writers, build to dramatic crises and climaxes. Both Machado and Nabokov thought this falsified life. Brás Cubas writes: “in order to titillate the nerves of fantasy I should have suffered great despair, shed a few tears, and not eaten lunch. It would have been like a novel, but it wouldn’t have been biography” (
BC
160). Nabokov explicitly stated his opposition to the conventions of drama: “The idea of conflict tends to endow life with a logic it never has” (
MUSSR
340). He proposes instead “the creation of a certain unique pattern of life in which the sorrows and passions
^[7]
of a particular man will follow the rules of his own individuality” (
MUSSR
341). Both Nabokov and Machado in their best fiction tend to follow not the contours of rising dramatic conflict but the unique pattern of a life: the life rhythms of a Brás Cubas, a Dom Casmurro, a Humbert, or a Van Veen.

What makes Nabokov and Machado, who knew nothing of each other, more alike than either of them was to writers they
did
know? Each of them, I think, had a powerful independence of mind and spirit and a powerful sense that independence matters. Both of them detested the iron-clad determinism in literary naturalism. But even realism, even as perfected by Flaubert and Tolstoy, did not satisfy them. Realism at its best seems to place us right inside the situations of the characters. Like all animals, we have evolved to respond to our immediate surroundings, especially, in the case of our ultrasocial species, to our immediate social environment. Our senses have evolved to pick up cues from this immediate world and our emotions have evolved to assign them instant value.

But unlike other animals, we have uniquely evolved ways to step outside our here and now, to remember the remote past, to imagine possible futures or different perspectives, to generalize or connect, and to direct others to these remote vistas, improbable options, and unprecedented images. Machado and Nabokov always want to keep, as Nabokov once wrote, “all the shutters and lids and doors of the mind . . . open at once” (
RLSK
67) and to develop that imaginative openness in their styles and their readers. They can engage us intensely in situations, but they also remind us always of the power of thought to make what Nabokov calls knight moves of the mind.
⁸
Their natural sense of independence explains their self-conscious awareness of not just the scenes before them but the worlds of actuality and possibility around them. It explains their gleeful challenges to literary and intellectual conventions. It explains their readiness to step beyond the immediate or the sudden leaps into distant perspectives that simultaneously testify to our freedom and expose our vulnerability in the infinitude of time and space.

The high value Machado and Nabokov set on independence finds its reflection in their social attitudes. Machado offers a critical analysis of economic dependence in clientelist nineteenth-century Brazil, and, of course, a particularly stinging critique of slavery, still in force in Brazil until 1888. Nabokov, by contrast, living in a more economically liberal world, could celebrate independence—even in the poverty he and his fellow émigrés experienced in Russian Europe—and denounce the authoritarian regimes he escaped from in Russia and Germany. To an early reader of his book on Nikolay Gogol who noted Gogol did not object to serfdom, Nabokov replied, maybe not, but “the interior moral standards of [
Dead Souls
] bristle against it” (
VNAY
56).

Being so independent of mind, Machado and Nabokov tended to swim against the tide: as Nabokov instructed young writers, “Avoid the cliché of your time” (Givan interview). But since in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the prevailing tides of thought flowed in opposite directions, Machado and Nabokov faced in contrary ways.

Machado’s independence made him an instinctive critic of the widespread nineteenth-century confidence in inevitable progress. In his delirium, Brás Cubas sees the cavalcade of folly in human history and beyond and the delusions of the nineteenth century, “in the end as miserable as the ones before” (
BC
20). Machado satirizes would-be improvers in stories like “The Alienist” and “Alexandrian Tale” or in his critique of positivism and social Darwinism in Quincas Borba’s humanitism. Throughout his work he stresses the mixed nature of humanity, the egotism and vanity likely to taint even the rare acts of altruism, and the tangle of good sometimes emerging from bad and bad from good. Even the competition between different possible versions of what we see as good can lead to disaster or distress in the fever of indecision that kills Flora in
Esau and Jacob
(1904) or the young love that triumphs at the cost of the godparents’ happiness in
Counselor Ayres’ Memorial
(1908).

If Machado was a pessimist in a century of optimism, Nabokov was an optimist in a century of pessimism. The carnage of World War I, the tyrannies of communist Russia and fascist Europe, the Holocaust, the threat of nuclear warfare, and the prospect of technological apocalypse have made gloom the dominant mood of modern intellectual life. Where Machado resisted the optimism of his century, the still darker Beckett resonated perfectly with the pessimism of the next. Nabokov, by contrast, remained an optimist, despite exile and poverty, a father assassinated by Russian monarchists, and family and friends at risk or killed in the Holocaust. Nabokov’s strong disagreement with Spengler’s
Decline of the West
and similar fare inspired him to write a novel set in the present,
Glory
, which he first planned to call
Romanticheskiy vek
(
Romantic Age
). By having the insanely erratic Quincas Borba endorse Pangloss, Machado marks his own distance from optimism. Nabokov, by contrast, declared himself ready to agree with the eighteenth-century philosophers who thought humans are fundamentally good (
PF
225,
LL
375).

Yet many have understood Nabokov differently: “How terrible, to see life as [Nabokov] does” (
VNRY
343); why does he live “among such depressing people” (
Lolita
318)? His novels swarm with prominent suicides (five of seventeen novels) and violent deaths, including prominent murders and on- or offstage executions (eleven of seventeen novels). In
Lolita
even murder pales beside child abuse. How can I, and how can Nabokov, read Nabokov as an optimist?

Here the chase hots up as we focus on not the similarities but the differences between Machado and Nabokov. Machado stresses, never more clearly than in “The Devil’s Church,” that human lives are inevitably mixed. Even positive forces can conflict, as in his most serene mature novel,
Counselor Ayres’ Memorial
. In his emphasis that even the clash of positive factors can compound human sorrow Machado anticipates the twentieth-century philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who emphasizes that even ideals we may agree on, like love, freedom, justice, and tolerance, may conflict rather than converge.