Stalking Nabokov (71 page)

Hubert H. Hubert feels tender love for his dead Daisy, and would like to offer the same to Flora, but Flora understands only sex, not love, not tenderness, and repays his attentions with a kick in the groin. Through the Hubert name and other
Lolita
echoes, Nabokov dupes us at first into misreading the scene just as hard-bitten Flora does. But in this novel of human erasures, Daisy’s death has
not
been erased for her father, who remembers his lost child so painfully, so hopelessly. Nabokov has hidden under our noses the beating core of tenderness in this apparently heartlessly hard novel: Flora as potential Daisy, not as Lolita, is one of
this
novel’s “secret points.”

My sixth problem was that Philip Wild’s obsession with willing his own death, erasing himself by inches so that he can restore himself by inches—so that death can dance to his tune—seems so remote from our experience and our desires. Wild’s quest is certainly singular. But many of us have wished to shed intense pain or discard excess weight. Wild wants both. Many have sought to train the mind to control and transcend self, through meditation, and Wild has not only the shape of the fattest Buddha but the same urge to reach nirvana (the text makes reference to both) and to eliminate the self. In Wild’s case life has pained him, with his vast bulk, abscessed toes, writhing gut, and the “anthology of humiliation” (219) his life has been since he married Flora. The word
anthology
derives from the Greek for “collecting flowers,” but in Wild’s case, his Flora casually plucks and casually or viciously jettisons other men.

Nabokov has some sympathy with Wild in his humiliation, and so should we, but he is no Pnin. All of us might wish at times we could control our own death or restoration, but Nabokov surely presents Wild’s as exactly the wrong way to transcend death. Eliminating the self promises no worthwhile passage beyond life. The only transcending of death Nabokov could imagine wanting would take the self
through
death to a freer realm of being but not deny its accumulation of experience: “I am ready to become a floweret / Or a fat fly,” John Shade writes in
Pale Fire
, “but never, to forget” (
PF
52–53). In
Ada
, Van Veen explains “the worst part of dying”: “the wrench of relinquishing forever all one’s memories—that’s a commonplace, but what courage man must have had to go through that commonplace again and again and not give up the rigmarole of accumulating again and again the riches of consciousness that will be snatched away!” (
Ada
585).

Wild obsessively tries to will his own elimination, but for Nabokov self-elimination can only be the falsest kind of self-transcendence. Wild’s ingrown toenails cause him agony. One time, as he lies in a mattress in his bath, again willing away what he can, he not only seems to erase his toes but decides not to restore them when he emerges from his hypnotrance. Opening his eyes, his heart sinks when he sees his toes are intact, but when he scrambles out of the tub, he falls flat on the tiled floor. To his “intense joy,” his toes are “in a state of indescribable numbness. They looked all right, though … all was rubber and rot. The immediate setting-in of decay was especially sensational” (167).

For many over many millennia, but never more than for Nabokov, transcending death has seemed somehow akin to escaping earth’s gravity. Fat Philip Wild flopping over on erased toes succumbs to gravity more grotesquely than ever. And his obsessive quest seems an apotheosis of self and of stasis, a self-fixated and self-enclosed attempt to circumvent the limits to the self that death imposes. To the extent that Nabokov imagines possibly passing through death—and that’s to a very considerable extent—he sees it as a transition that hurtles the self into a state retaining accumulated selfhood but no longer subjected to “the solitary confinement of [the] soul” (
CE
217)

Wild conjures up an image of an “I,” “our favorite pronoun” (137), on his mental blackboard, its three bars representing his legs, torso, and head, and he sees his auto-hypnosis as akin to successively rubbing out each bar. Images of erasure or self-deletion pervade the whole novel in ways that reveal Nabokov’s customary care in constructing and concealing his patterns. To take one example: Wild feels delight and relief at erasing his ingrown toenails. Flora, by contrast, wipes not a mental blackboard but her own flesh: she requires her menfolk to withdraw before ejaculation and promptly wipes the semen off her groin or, as the novel once phrases it, her “inguen” (121). How many know this word for “groin”?
Ingrown
-
inguen
: Nabokov covertly links Wild erasing his own life, rubbing out his toes, with Flora briskly wiping off the possibility of new life. The Roman Flora was a fertility goddess; Nabokov’s Flora, a sterility goddess.

Art can offer a kind of immortality, a different promise of transcending death. But not here, not in this novel. Flora’s grandfather, a painter of once-admired sentimental landscapes, falls forever out of favor: “What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion invading his once famous pictures such as ‘April in Yalta’ or ‘The Old Bridge’?” (43–45) His son, a photographer, films his own suicide,
his
being rubbed out. The photographer’s wife, Flora’s mother, a ballerina known only as Lanskaya, finds her art fading as her body ages. Flora herself becomes the subject of a kiss-and-tell novel,
My Laura
, which aims not to immortalize but to expunge her: “The ‘I’ of the book is a neurotic and hesitant man of letters who destroys his mistress in the act of portraying her” (121). The laurel was associated with literary immortality because its leaves last so long after they detach. Flora, so eager to be deflowered, remains alive at the end of the novel; unlike her husband, obsessed with his own death, she ends
The Original of Laura
refusing to look at the novel
My Laura
lying on her lap and at what a friend recommends as “your wonderful death….the craziest death in the world” (227).

We come to my seventh concern, the novel’s style. For an older and still sterner Martin Amis, this by itself would be decisive. In 1999, for the centenary of Nabokov’s birth, the oldest of the five journals devoted to him, the
Nabokovian
, decided to stage a Nabokov write-alike contest. A panel of judges selected three submissions, which appeared alongside what were announced as two “never before published pieces of Nabokov’s prose”—both from
The Original of Laura—
that, readers were informed, Dmitri had supplied. Subscribers were invited to pick the original of Vladimir. Delightfully, most picked as Nabokov’s a passage by Charles Nicol, an academic and writer who has been publishing superb work on Nabokov for more than thirty years, and
no one
picked the passages from
The Original Of Laura
. Nobody picked Nabokov as the one who wrote most like Nabokov.

What does that tell us? I think it indicates that even Nabokovians either misconstrue Nabokov’s style or underestimate how new it can be from work to work. We can recognize on sight many hallmarks of his style when we see them “on site,” and we can find many of them already on his construction site for
The Original of Laura
. But we have not sufficiently recognized how much Nabokov also modifies his style and reweights particular features in each work. To take his best English works: the high, controlled elegance of
Speak, Memory
differs radically from
Lolita’
s neurotic twitchiness, and both from
Pale Fire’
s would-be cloudless craziness, and all three from
Ada’
s rococo supersaturation—and all four from
The Original of Laura
.

That no one picked the
Laura
passages in the write-alike contest suggests to me not that Nabokov isn’t writing up to par here but, on the contrary, that he’s playing his usual game of
changing
or reinventing his game subtly to suit the special world of the work.

Nabokov has a reputation as a great prose stylist, perhaps even the greatest.
The Original of Laura
makes me want to rethink what constitutes the distinctively Nabokovian: not just elevated prose, a recondite lexicon, elegant quicksilver sentences, minute precision of visual detail, pointed allusion, foregrounded verbal combinatory play, lucid elusiveness. His style may be most extraordinary not so much as
prose
but as
story
. Unlike “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins,” the thirteen words of the opening sentence of
The Original of Laura
would win no place in dictionaries of quotations and no prizes as prose. I won’t quote them yet, but taken out of context, the first sentence offers plain words that muffle even their plain declarative force with a doubled concession—but as storytelling, the sentence astounds. It does more as
story
than we had any right to expect of a first sentence, until now.

All his writing life Nabokov stressed transition among character, description, report, speech, and reflection as the most demanding skill in storytelling. He sought new ways to shift from one to another, new ways to speed up the shifts or slow them down or highlight or veil them. He wanted both to extend the possibilities in narrative at every moment and to show readers how nimbly their minds can move from present to past or possible future, from outside a character to inside, from here to there, from actual to possible or impossible, counterfactual or suppositional. In
On the Origin of Stories
, I marshal the evidence that we have evolved into a storytelling species and that the key reason we have done so is because stories improve still further the social cognition and hence the perspectival shifts that had already reached such a high level in our species. From childhood pretend play to adult fiction, we speed up the capacity of our minds to leap beyond our here and now by taking on new roles, sidling and sliding this way and that through time, space, minds, and modalities, thanks to the intense doses of social information we deal with in fiction. No one has taken this further than Nabokov does in his last novel. Narratologists and novelists alike will focus for a long time on the opening chapter of
The Original of Laura
as proof of the new finds still to be made in fiction.

The Original of Laura
starts with an answer, but we never learn the question, and we never quite keep up with the pace of the story. It reminds me of the myth of Atalanta and the golden apples. At top speed it picks up a stray fact, darts aside, nonchalantly drops one subject, gathers up another, and still races ahead—unless it slows down and all but stops, with Philip Wild, as he tries again and again to erase himself.

Nabokov not only rewrites narrative texture but from novel to novel reshapes narrative structure. In
The Original of Laura
he plays with the erasure of human selves. Philip Wild tries to dispense with his body by degrees. The author of
My Laura
aims to eliminate Flora. As you read the novel’s first chapter, look for the unprecedented way Nabokov makes the narrator imply himself and conceal or erase himself throughout—while Laura disregards her new lover, dumps an old one, and ignores her husband.

Do not expect in
The Original of Laura
the high lyricism of sentiment and sentence found in
Lolita
,
Pale Fire
, and
Ada
. Instead, look for how much Nabokov does once again by inverting what he values most but, as always, in a new way. He inverts love as a path to self-transcendence (through procreation, through the tender attunement of lovemaking, through sharing a life with another) in Flora—as sterility goddess wiping the sperm off her groin, in her heartless promiscuity, in the “anthology of humiliation” she offers her husband. Art becomes not a way to self-transcendence here but, rather, the vengeful obliteration of others or the skulking effacement of the tattle-tale self. Nabokov sees death as a possible release from the confines of the self, not an erasing of the self like Philip Wild’s or an evasion of its limits like Flora’s.

Nabokov offers us, in the suppleness and speed of our imaginations as he sends us hurtling along the black trails of his story, a route beyond the rapacity of the sexual self in Flora or the stagnation of the cerebral self in Philip—and, if we invert his inversions, what he famously called “a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” (
Lolita
316–17).

In some of the many interviews
The Original of Laura
has provoked I have sometimes illustrated the reasons for my reversal of judgment in terms of the excitement I now feel at the opening of the novel and its narrative novelty. David Gates, in the
New York Times Book Review
, quotes me and asks: “Does Boyd mean the device of beginning a novel
in medias res
, with a character answering a question we don’t get to hear? Virginia Woolf did the same thing in the first sentence of
To the Lighthouse
.” True, Woolf’s landmark novel does begin “ ‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added.” The suddenness of that opening, and its clear announcement of a planned excursion, magnificently sets up the thwarted expedition to the lighthouse.