Daniel Albright on Nabokov — Excerpts from his "Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov and Schoenberg" (U. of Chicago Press, 1981) — Search inside (67 results) nabokov Page n0 Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, and Schoenberg Page n1 Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, and Schoenberg Page n1 This book is an investigation of a modern paradox: that artists who try to make of their work a magical seizure of reality — not a representation of reality but the thing itself, as if art could compete in realness with the world of experience — tend to reduce art to a condition of abstraction and impoverishment; while artists who aim at abstraction find solid objects precipitating out of their worldless fields. Daniel Albright approaches this paradox by understanding hyperrealism and abstraction as obverse and reverse of the same coin, since both result from a breakdown in the mimetic function of art. Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, Schoenberg, and, to a lesser extent, Kandinsky, Heidegger, and Auden, are used as examples to support this hypothesis. Page n1 The music of Arnold Schoenberg illustrates the close relation between the too-concrete and the too-abstract; he began his career trying to embody in music the actual shocks and tremors of the unconscious mind, but progressed to a kind of music that seeks to abolish every kind of image or representation. Readings of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett show how all three authors subvert conventional representation, push it to the point where distortion and incredibility are inevitable. Page n4 Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, and Schoenberg Page n6 Nabokov 52 Page 6 Beckett and Schoenberg seem disgusted with images because images cannot be more than images; what Schoenberg calls God, what Beckett calls the “ideal real,” cannot be attained through the mediation of art, at least not through their art. Kafka and, in places, Nabokov are con¬ cerned with more pervasive diseases of the imagination. To them, it is not only the transgression of art into magic that is futile or vain; every act of imagining is tainted, delusory, a contamination of the unreal. Page 7 Nabokov, alone of the four men treated here, believed that the goals of traditional fiction were neither trivial nor impossible, and he left por¬ traits of vigorous, sane, and successful artists, ambitious but not overreaching — notably Shade in Pale Fire and Fyodor in The Gift. But many of his most probing and memorable studies concern men who live in falsely invented worlds, atrocities extorted from nightmares. Page 52 2 Nabokov Page 53 NABOKOV Page 55 NABOKOV Page 57 NABOKOV Page 59 NABOKOV Page 61 NABOKOV Page 61 This pencil, the first and probably the finest of several literary pencils we shall enjoy in this essay, is the temporary property of Hugh Person in Nabokov’s Transparent Things. I own a pencil somewhat similar to it, and I am looking at it. I notice that Nabokov is exact in his descrip¬ tion of the discoloration of the wood circumjacent to the graphite, and, further, that the outer paint has soaked into the wood and stained it a color slightly different from the color of the paint; the sharpener has imparted a mossy texture to the conical tip, and left it scored, rayed, peaked with fine intersecting lines. This is the sort of description Nabokov provides at the beginning of the passage, impressions of color and texture — mostly the secondary qualities, to use Locke’s term, of the pencil. But when the narrator starts his account of the history of the pencil, I am lost. I am ignorant of the manufacture of pencils; though I could look up pencil-making in an encyclopedia, as I presume Nabokov has done, nothing I could do would ever show me the site of the particular tree cut down for my particular pencil. The more closely I attend to my pencil, the more obscure it grows; if I assigned myself to write a page, a chapter, about my pencil I would increasingly have to lie or plagiarize. Or, if sheer truthfulness were my goal, I would have to write in a more and more attenuated and obtuse manner about my incomprehension and nescience; that is, the more concrete a repre¬ sentation I attempt, the more I am driven to either fantasy or abstrac¬ tion. These are, I believe inevitably, the two directions to which ex¬ treme representation will lead: either to making exact representations of wholly imaginary objects, as Nabokov does in this passage, trying to pretend with a sickly grin that his cylindrical hallucination bears re- Page 62 In this way my pencil mocks my attempts to represent it, traces idle scrawls when I wish it to write the most devastating word; and it will be extinguished by my sharpener or stolen by a student before I can make it utter itself. But why should I bother to try? This particular pencil means nothing to me; indeed, in my hypothetical representation of the pencil I would be driven to write about my own disinterest, fatigue, and boredom at the necessity of continuing this tedious translation from wood to word. One of the jokes of Nabokov’s passage is that the narrator pretends that the pencil, which has no consequence in the plot of the novel and no significance to any of the characters, is so infinitely precious that the very shavings from its point are worthy of study and recovery. Thus the passage is a sophistication, expansion, and bur- esque upon the nineteenth-century novel’s doting on the homely and beloved minutiae of domesticity. Just as the true subject of George Eliot’s representation is the plastic stress of her affection, which alters and infuses things until they are obligingly available for display, so Nabokov has imbued his pencil with a phony glamor and a specious openness, so that the universe of pines and fat sheep that is responsible for its provenance may be educed from the narrator’s close attention. The parenthetical interjections, as if the narrator were making a com¬ mentary for a child’s documentary film about a pencil, heighten the falseness of tone, the falseness of the narrator’s stance with respect to the reader. Just as the pencil grows more and more egregious as the description keeps embellishing it, the narrator too grows deformed by the unsavory intensity of his concentration on the pencil; he becomes panicked as he speaks of the atomic dispersal of the pencil shavings, as if the attender saw his own fate in the object of his attention; and when he examines the pencil-cutter, old Elias Borrowdale — it is, after all, a borrowed pencil — he seems to dwindle to a free-floating eyeball, a mouse that can run up Elias’s forearm. This is another lesson to be gained from Transparent Things: not only does the desire for a too- exact representation lead to an explicit sense of the unreality of the object represented, it also makes the representer himself increasingly unreal, puts him in a false and untenable relation to his object; and in fact in extreme cases the representer may lose his identity and unite himself with what he scrutinizes, dissipate, as his pencil slowly dis¬ integrates into wood shavings and dust. It is not surprising that the pencil should be dismissed from the novel with the cry, “Alas, the solid pencil itself. . . still somehow eludes us!” for when it was only a casual Page 63 NABOKOV Page 63 Thus Nabokov warns the novelist to investigate the farther reaches of representation only at his peril, at the peril of getting lost in the pul¬ lulating and irrelevant universe that the simplest object can provoke the imagination into loosing, a welter in which the representer and the represented alike founder, drown. Page 64 point toward Hugh’s pencil. This worldlet, whose prime minister is Elias Borrowdale and in which Shakespeare exists only as a calendar entry to fix the discovery of pencil lead, is eerily unrelated either to the world of experience or to the world of the action of the novel; it is doubly a sham, a flippant invention developed only to satisfy the needs of representation. I have said that, from the point of view of the world of experience, every object is a black hole that swallows words; and Nabokov speaks somewhat similarly of the unknowability of things: Page 64 The pencil of Transparent Things, which at once creates and destroys, devises and eats up the little world of Elias Borrowdale, seems to me one of the greatest expressions of this popular theme of the twentieth century, the unintelligibility of the objective world. Research, atten¬ tiveness, anatomy have never gotten to the core of anything; but we may relish the middle of the onion so greatly that we cannot be sad that we never attain to the center. The description of Hugh’s pencil is not only a representation of the impossibility of seizing the object, but a representation of the delight, the sheer friskiness of the imagination in its clever evasions of responsibility, its deformities, grotesqueries. We have tried to draw a lion and unfortunately a griffin came out instead; so let us be connoisseurs of griffins in the absence of lions. Nabokov does not suggest that we should abandon the search for the innermost reality we can discover; his perseverance, his eyestrain, as a specialist Page 65 NABOKOV Page 65 Despite Nabokov’s archness and exaggeration, the description of Hugh’s pencil is, at last, a kind of celebration of the real. The mad narrator who flouts and flogs the pencil for three pages only to discover that it was never there in the first place belies another narrative con¬ sciousness who goes about the ever-frustrated task of representation with a kind of love; the crazy declarations of the pencil’s uniqueness, a haecceitas that makes that pencil visible like Michaelangelo’s sculptures in the raw material from which it will be cut, belie a hidden affection for its homely serviceability. To Nabokov the necessary angel of the imagination, reconciling man to the inhuman world, is a flighty and potbellied fellow, sometimes a heroin addict and a sexual pervert like Clare Quilty in Lolita, but with many simple tastes as well, never able to succeed long at his job, impotent, deserving murder, but no less necessary or angelic for all that. In a short story written forty-five years before Transparent Things, Nabokov describes a museum in the year 2120 in which a writer looks at a Berlin streetcar: Page 65 Here the narrator is not so strained and antic, fatuous, as the narrator of Transparent Things, nor is he a lunatic pervert like Clare Quilty, but he has been injured in the war and is so mutilated that people shudder to look at him; again, in these works of art in which Nabokov describes the extreme reaches of the imagination the narrator is often distorted by the intensity of his own imaginative processes. This story, “A Guide to Berlin,” ends with the narrator’s realization of his own memorability, his knowing that the child who sees his twisted face will never forget him; the narrator is himself an object in his own hall of Page 67 NABOKOV Page 67 each other — sees a nature that is already verging on artifice, a world of experience laid out in novelistic fashion and asking to be written down. Genius, for Nabokov, usually has these two components, on one hand, the faculty of intensely knowing the special object, and on the other the faculty of discovering wild, remote, but intrinsic resemblances: Page 67 This is Fyodor in The Gift, one of Nabokov’s most vivid geniuses, who has X-ray vision into the thing-in-itself, has the creator’s absolute knowledge of the inner workings, and who yet has such a motile, acute, and multiplex eye that he sees the crushed ant sleeping in the tele¬ phone. The happiest fictions are those in which the two faculties work harmoniously together, in which accurate representation is combined with the melting perspectives, the sleights of hand, the invisible links of the artistic conjurer; in which what one sees looking from the actual to the verbal and what one sees looking back from the verbal to the actual converge, become identical. But they do not readily converge, and Transparent Things is a witness to the jarring, the clashing of perspec¬ tives; the “transparent things’’ remain outside the fable, unassimilated, as if the novel could not treat what is too oppressively actual. Hugh’s pencil cannot be tamed by witty metaphor; it recalcitrantly resists any attempt to be related to the action of the story. From the perspective of the verbal — and this is true of many writers besides Nabokov — images of things take priority over the things they represent; a description of a tennis match has greater ontological dignity than a real tennis match, which is sweaty, messy, and insufficiently coordinated. The main ac¬ tion of Transparent Things emphasizes this primacy of image by an unusual device: images are allowed to become voodoo dolls, controll¬ ing and altering the things of which they are representations. For in- Page 69 NABOKOV Page 71 NABOKOV Page 73 NABOKOV Page 74 When we look at the actual practice of such great contemporaries of Heidegger as Auden, Nabokov, and Beckett, we see a somewhat gloomier and more limited view of the rights and duties of art. Art still attempts to mediate between intelligible inventions and fables — what Heidegger would call world — and the point-blank and ignorant earth of our experience; but the artist attempts to pull them together not across the infinitesimal rift line of Heidegger, but across a vast distance over which his arms can scarcely reach. To Auden, as we have seen, it is the artist’s responsibility to show that the gap cannot be bridged, to sub¬ vert the mediating function of his own art. The description of Hugh’s pencil in Transparent Things is interesting in that it seems to begin with assumptions like those of Heidegger — that art is adequate to embrace the whole sensuous universe by the exact grasping of one particular — but it ends with the pencil’s escape from the narrator’s clutches, an effect of sabotage akin to that for which Auden calls; instead of an exhilarat¬ ing world-disclosure like Van Gogh’s shoes, the pencil has turned out to be as involute and self-concealing as a stone. Instead of Heidegger’s world, the matrix that nourishes us and in which our deeds have meaning, the modern novelist offers brittle artifices, privately real or self-consciously unreal; instead of Heidegger’s earth he offers the spectacle of a blind and nerveless impingingness, the dim impression of ponderousness, gravity, in the absence of a representable dwelling place. Page 75 NABOKOV Page 75 quaint, even dreamlike. To a character in a novel, an intelligence grown a little too articulate, verbal, human, whose very body is articu¬ lated in sentence form, the terra firma that is outside the boundary of the novel and yet the locus imitated, alluded to by the furniture that surrounds him, must appear as an invisible massiveness, a distant rumor, an inaudibly deep noise, finally a kind of myth of a life elsewhere from which he is, for no good reason, excluded. Both Kingsley Amis and Nabokov have written novels about imaginary places in which our commonplace earth is a science fiction tale dis¬ missed as balderdash by most of the enlightened. The main point is not, I think, that homely earth is every bit as preposterous and invented as the verbal kingdoms erected in the text — though Nabokov says exactly that in Pale Fire, canto 2, lines 214-20 — but that a kind of shock of disillusion, the sabotage on which Auden dotes, can be made by piling up two self-canceling illusions on each other. We are told, in Nabokov’s Ada, that the novel takes place on a world called Demonia or Antiterra, in which countries resembling Russia and America coexist amiably on the same continent, in which no major war has occurred in a century, and in which electricity has long been forbidden — a world where the scrambled Russian-American heritage of Nabokov, his memories, prejudices, and dreams, are elevated into a shared, dignified, public realm, the author’s human uniqueness turned inside out and made the basis of a world. The inhabitants of Antiterra believe themselves to be dwelling in a disorderly, even hellish place — the Russian word ada is the genitive of Hades — but they dream of a vibrant, tumultuous, ideally dramatic, aesthetically pleasing, light-years-distant planet called Terra. By means of the diligent schol¬ arship of the hero, Van Veen, who combs asylums looking for vision¬ ary lunatics with news about Terra, this planet elaborates itself from a trite and insipid afterlife, with soulful angels playing harps, into a well-focused world greatly resembling our own, complete with World Wars I and II. It never attains full identity — for instance, the Fiihrer is named Athaulf Hindler or Mittler — but it is continually ramifying, de¬ volving, into identity with the reader’s known earth. At the end of the novel Van Veen is angry with a director who has made a film of his book about Terra, for the director has employed artistic license and distorted the events to make them more cinematically effective; but the reader sees that every distortion brings Terra closer to historical earth. Near the beginning of the novel Van Veen explains the differences between Antiterra and Terra as follows; Page 76 Both Burnt Norton and Ada are studies in the use of the imagination to point to, indicate, that which can never be directly said or embodied in words, the realness of reality. Nabokov has erected this interlocking folderol, this dance of worlds, to point an outstretched member at that deaf and dumb, unspeakable earth that Terra and Antiterra are com¬ peting images of. Terra intricately qualifies, modifies, reshapes Anti¬ terra; because Terra is an invention within an invention, it can revise, reform, correct the built-in errors of the original invention, Antiterra, the inaccuracies of representation inherent in any verbal construct. Ada is a machine devised to give off increasingly accurate approxima¬ tions of reality. All great novels try , in a sense, to sum up and terminate the genre of the novel, but the claims of Ada are better than those of many. Page 76 But why has Nabokov made the residents of Antiterra — so clearly fabulous and frisky, labile, amenable — consider their home nasty and chaotic, while they regard war-ridden Terra as the seat of art and order, Page 77 NABOKOV Page 78 Antiterra, which seemed at times so squalid and disorderly to them, as figured, literary, fabulous, and at last ascend into the elysium of art; while aesthetic Terra impends, swells, gains weight, looms, a great molten drop about to fall. Each readjusts itself, shifts from the in¬ versions of fiction into what it ought to be. Antiterra and Terra, which wore each other’s clothes at the beginning of the novel — Antiterra seemed like stable disenchanted ground, while Terra seemed to be the heaven of human invention — at last show themselves as Heidegger’s world and Heidegger’s earth, respectively. It is a process of mutual subversion, in which the conventions of fiction unravel, in which, as artifice ceases to pretend to be real, acknowledges its own artificiality, there descends from the sky like some New Year’s celebration in Times Square the great gilded ball of earth, the reality that falls ef¬ fortlessly on the reader as he puts down the novel. This effect of disillusionment, this manner of resolving illusion so satisfactorily that it evaporates before the reader’s eye, as I have said, is one of the major purposes of traditional fiction as well; but Nabokov wishes to calcu¬ late, to control the effect so precisely that he introduces into Ada Terra, a surrogate earth, a kind of tumor of disillusion, a fetus growing in the novel until the dehiscence of the final page. Page 78 In a way, not only world and earth but Heidegger and Auden as well are reconciled by the strategy of Ada. Auden’s insistence upon the estrangement of art from life, of our invented, intuited paradises from our hideous, fallen earth, finds expression in the antithesis of Terra and Antiterra. In Nabokov’s Pale Fire there is a fantastic organization of regicidal conspirators, one of whom loses his leg trying to make anti¬ matter; and to an extent the Terra and Antiterra of Ada, as they draw close to each other and touch, seem to explode, cancel each other out, dismiss each other as insubstantial wrack, spume. The ruining effect on which Auden dotes could scarcely be improved. And yet in another sense Terra and Antiterra draw upon each other’s substance, grow rich and fruitful by the joining together of the Active and the earthy, the lunatic and the commonsensical, moon and sun and terra firma. Nabokov, though he professed to despise the novel’s hero. Van Veen, never wrote a happier book than Ada, except perhaps for Speak, Memory. In this autobiography Nabokov testifies movingly to the joy of discovering the design, the “intricate watermark’’ unique to one’s own life; and he tells one of his finest parables, Kuropatkin and the Match Theme, in order to show the origin of this knowledge, the en¬ graving of the Nabokov monogram. Page 79 NABOKOV Page 79 The experiment with the toy trains was performed because the five- year-old Nabokov had read how the Japanese hoped that the Russian trains would founder in Lake Baikal if the Russians tried to lay track over the ice. The inherent pattern that Nabokov has found — it is a zigzag, like the “stormy sea” matchsticks of 1904 — is a Heideggerian Riss, a rift-design at the delicate juncture of world and earth. In the midst of a universal lapsing, the scattering of matches and the drowning of toy trains and real ones, the artistic imagination has sought out the radiant design, expansive, even hilarious in the heart of ruin. The known tumbles into the unknown and reemerges, stumbles back into the light, disguised, wearing a peasant’s sheepskin coat; and the im¬ manence of the rift-design is a kind of theophany, or what takes the place of a theophany in a world where artists are the only gods. Page 80 Nabokov was always coy when asked whether he believed in God; but Virginia Woolf, like Heidegger, offers an explicitly secular description of feelings of pattemedness, rift-experiences. If Heidegger had seen this passage, written about two years after his first lectures on the origin of the work of art, he might have thought Virginia Woolf a remarkably earthless woman, so literary, so caught up in verbal con¬ structions, so exclusively residing in world that when earth rose up before her it seemed monstrous, the enemy, Leviathan with a blunt instrument. It is true that Virginia Woolf, like Nabokov in the Kuropatkin parable, speaks both as an author and as a character in a novel; these blows, these accessions into reality, provide for her a feeling of authoredness in the absence of an author. It is strange that the combination of cotton wool — the commonplace daily life we all spin out of ourselves like a spider’s web — world — and the hammer shocks of earth would give a sense of profound order, like a Beethoven quartet; but that is the mystery of the rift-design, the lovely tracing that is itself an abyss. Previously in this passage she has described her passivity in the face of these hidden intense realities, and she, unlike Nabokov, seems to tremble at the edge of self-abnegation, vertigo; but she does herself exert creative force, tames and anesthetizes these effusions of reality on her spine by verbalizing them, making novels Page 81 NABOKOV Page 81 that demonstrate at once the brutal shock and the concealed harmony, the vital pulse, within the shock. The Heideggerian artist, whose cen¬ tral mission is not self-expression but the disclosure of a world that rises out of and falls back into a great concealedness, a carpenter of windows looking out into a world much hidden by the very frames of the panes of glass, may be described either as a creator or as an instru¬ ment almost passively receptive to the huge tensions of earth and world, the slipping and sliding of the continental plates on which our life is founded. Indeed, Virginia Woolf attributes her becoming an artist to her seismographic sensitivities. To have what Joyce’s Stephen Hero calls an epiphany, one must be sensitive to a circumambient and perva¬ sive meaningfulness; it is only a matter of spiritual focus, of choosing which object to attend to in the great ubiquity of meaning. But a rift- experience is the discovery of patterns of collapse, the tape measure across the Grand Canyon, the cartography of undersea mountain ranges after the floor of the earth has sunk; and such authors are always intimate with catastrophe, earthquake, unmeaning. In Nabokov’s Ada the heroine once describes herself as “a pale wild girl with gipsy hair in a deathless ballad, in a nulliverse . . . where the only principle is random variation” (p. 416). The ballad of Ada, that is, the text of the novel, is deathless precisely because the world on which it operates is a nul¬ liverse; intrinsic lack of meaningfulness is a necessary precondition of this kind of art. The first principle of semiotics is the arbitrariness of the sign; and the alogical patterns of which Nabokov is so fond — Kuropatkin and the matches have no logical affiliation — range them¬ selves over the velvet backdrop of despair, the blessed failure of omens to be ominous. Because signs have no inherent, mechanical meaning- identifications — and this is nearly the whole of Nabokov’s quarrel with Freud — because the symbol is a thing, freestanding and independent, random, before it is a symbol, the imagination is liberated, able to devise its own patterns of meanings without prior constraint from the racial unconsciousness, from the book of all dream interpretation, from any old, weary manual of emblems. The world’s randomness is the artist’s strength. If one imagines the Ada of the “deathless ballad” as someone like the girl in Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West,” I think he will not be far wrong. Ada, caught in a world of stray symmetries and scrambled myths — Cinderella is one of her father’s servants — sees herself as a persistent motif absurdly rearranged. But the principle of random variation can itself be elevated into art, song, ballad; indeed, aleatory music, in which the position of raisins in a fruitcake or birds on telephone wires is translated into musical nota¬ tion, is a fine example of rift-design, the art of the uncomprehended lifted up into utterance, into purely arbitrary pattern, the art of the Page 83 NABOKOV Page 84 The imagination becomes insatiable when it feeds on airy nothings, and this is why Kinbote seems so much more imaginative, more attrac¬ tive even, than the true hero of the novel, John Shade. For Shade there is truth to be told, and when it is told he is finished, can die content; but Kinbote, whose imagination lacks its proper object, must exuberate into ever more vertiginous and nonsensical constructions. Shade is the master of restricted form, the heroic couplet, while the phantasmagoria of Kinbote requires the amplitude of prose. Indeed, it is hard for Nabokov not to make his first-person narrators into models of the novelist; and Kinbote, though he is only a demented professor and editor, is nevertheless an ideal novelist, useful for defining problems of the relations of fiction to reality. Our first hint that there is something wrong with the verbal surface of the text comes on the first page: Page 85 NABOKOV Page 85 Nabokov employs, then, two different kinds of fantasy: heroic fan¬ tasy, which is a continual convergence upon the earth of experience, the leap of a flying fish gliding ever closer to the surface of the sea, a metamorphosis in a prolonged state of disenchanting itself back to its original form, Proteus about to achieve the shape of an old man after his dazzling experiments in identity — the kind of fantasy found in Antiterra or in the autobiographical poem of John Shade or in the Central Asian exploration of Fyodor in The Gift — and evasive fantasy, which is a continual exclusion of the earth of experience, the leap of a flying fish drowning in the upper air from the effort of holding itself out of the water, Proteus the dragon claiming that he never was and never will be an old man. This latter kind of fantasy is also common in Nabokov’s novels and is highly elaborated in Pale Fire and in the Page 86 unfinished novel on which Pale Fire was to some extent based, two chapters of which became the short stories “Ultima Thule” and “Solux Rex.” In these stories a destitute painter, Sineusov, receives a mysterious commission to illustrate a poem, Ultima Thule, written in a Scandinavian language he does not know, a poem he dimly gathers to be about the king of a distant northern land and the political machina¬ tions against him. Sineusov, despondent over the death of his wife, grows so engrossed in the visual world he imagines around the unread¬ able text that his days and his nights lose touch with sensuous reality, become absorbed in the contemplation of the northern king, K, who becomes a fantastic surrogate. It is as if the reader were shown what is only hinted at in Pale Fire, the process by which Kinbote constructs his fantasy of being Charles the Beloved, king of Zembla; and these two stories also show how ingeniously dismal a fantastic world can grow without the counterbalance of the stable earth provided by John Shade in Pale Fire. One can see why Nabokov had to abandon the tale, for as the distant northern land proliferates it grows sterile, untenable, impossible for the novelist to support. “Solus Rex” and Pale Fire, taken together, will enable us to set forth a list of rules for distinguish¬ ing good imaginary worlds from bad ones, heroic from evasive fantasy. Page 87 NABOKOV Page 89 NABOKOV Page 90 There remains only one more aspect of Nabokov’s fantasy worlds to be discussed: the manner in which solid objects take the shape of words. The infiltration of verbal relationships into the Active worlds of Nabokov is often remarkable. Sineusov in “Ultima Thule” apos¬ trophizes to his dead wife, “Oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like ‘dental’ and ‘transcendental’” (p. 153); and it is often the case in Nabokov that purely verbal transformations can effect strange metamorphoses. The sensitive man, looking at his environment, sees an alphabet trying to form messages before his eyes, as if the world itself were possessed a verbal will, an eagerness to resolve created things into verbal significance. The hero of Nabokov’s early short story “A Guide to Berlin” writes, Page 91 NABOKOV Page 91 John Shade, who is unequivocally sane — in an interview Nabokov points to him and to Fyodor in The Gift as preeminent examples of healthy and attractive geniuses ( Strong Opinions, p. 119) — speaks of his world as replete, wealthy with verbal signs; his heroic fantasy is every bit as word-dominated as Kinbote’s evasive one. In the first few lines of Shade’s poem a pheasant’s tracks in the snow become a kind of code (p. 23); and this motif, the uncanny settling of natural phenomena into rebus, semaphore, or alphabet, continues throughout the poem, as a bicycle leaves a lemniscate track on wet pavement (p. 26), as a rubber- band drops into an accidental ampersand (p. 37). Indeed, the great revelation of Shade’s life is his discovery that verbal manipulations take precedence over physical laws, that the real taxonomy of the universe is that of rhyme. He has a heart attack and is, in a sense, dead for a few moments; during this syncope he sees a tall white fountain playing on a dark background. He reads a magazine article about a woman who has undergone a similar experience, seen a similar foun¬ tain. In his desire to find further confirmation of his unexpectedly pub¬ lic, verified vision of the truth of the afterlife, he visits the author of the article: Page 92 I take it that “not text, but texture” means “not the meaning of the words, but the alogical relations of them” — such relations as rhyme, such accidents as typographical botches, misprints. I have said that, for Nabokov and his more respectable characters, the earth has no intrinsic meaning, is a nulliverse or black backdrop upon which unex¬ pected illuminations, miracles of insight, take place. Shade’s shift up¬ ward from prosaic, logical meanings to accidents and ornaments of trope, sound pattern, and typesetting is an example of this tendency in Nabokov’s thought: if the universe is verbal, its meaning is ob¬ scure, but verbal sensitivity can reveal important cross-references, rhyme-coincidences, homonym-identities. The story of Kuropatkin is an investigation of the recurrent imagery of fate, not of fate’s meaning. Thus Shade can write “ Man’s life as commentary to abstruse I Unfinished poem” (p. 48), as if our lives were lived in annotations to an illegible text, that is, the universe itself— just as Kinbote lives his life in the annotation to the text of Shade’s poem, abstruse and illegible only to him. Fyodor in The Gift is still more explicit: Page 93 NABOKOV Page 93 such moments of superposition as the end of Shade’s poem, it seems as if earth rises into an approximation of verbal form in order to greet the fantasy that is collapsing, merging into it. The concealedness of Heidegger’s earth — the obscure ground of our experience, supersensi- bly concrete — assumes, as it ascends to the light, the aspect of the written word, for perhaps only the verbal is capable of disclosure to the human mind. Heidegger himself makes poetry preeminent among the arts. The very disclosure, the rising into utterance, is in a sense a falsification; earth is unutterable, while world is glib. And yet through the metaphor of the unreadable word Nabokov holds in a tense unity both the openness and the concealment; it is one of his best devices for describing the absolute point of convergence of the fantastic and the terrestrial. It also allows us to hope that the language of the earth, though now illegible, may someday be solved, that the hiddenness at the bottom of experience will turn out to be not the dim volumes, the receding and emaciated surfaces of the unknowable, but something overt, declared, decisive. Page 93 But this accommodation, this obliging legibility of nature, is venture¬ some, and in its extreme form it is nearly madness. A lunatic in Nabokov’s short story “Signs and Symbols” suffers from “referential mania,” in which “the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality” {Nabokov’s Dozen, p. 49). In the throes of this delusion the protagonist imagines that “His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees” (p. 50). This is clearly no good state of mind. Nabokov suggests that he does not believe in the fundamental verbality either of nature or of the human mind. In a quarry of notes assembled for, but not included in, Pale Fire, he remarks, “We think not in words but in shadows of words. James Joyce’s mistake in those otherwise marvelous mental soliloquies of his consists in that he gives Page 94 If we revise this passage to be a parable, not of translation from one language to another, but of translation from an already half-verbal reality to the secondary reality of a novel, it seems to me an important refinement in the history of representation: the artist does not produce an imitation of his subject, a mimetic counterfeit, but he erects a verbal device to cast a shadow identical to the shadow cast by the thing itself, a matching of umbras and impressions of mass, comet tails, rather than of entities. In this way Nabokov becomes, for all his prodigality of fancy, the most tightfisted of realists. Page 169 we see language articulating itself into little pseudopersons like the Unnamable, whose countless cries of “Now I’ll talk about me” or “I’ve been talking about me all along’’ can be interpreted as language’s own insistence on its sealed, self-referential nature, on what is called its “autosymbolism’’ in the Proust essay (p. 60). Both in the Joyce essay and in the “Three Dialogues,’’ language is shown in competition with the world of experience. If language is a zone of being and does not express or represent, then the engrossed reader is suspended in outer space, has somehow entered a state of awareness that has noth¬ ing to do with the author or himself or the world he knows; well may Malone imagine himself to be on the moon, “To be dead, before her, on her, with her, and turn, dead on dead, about poor mankind” (p. 264), for language is in every sense extraterrestrial. The fictions art provides are self-consciously eerie, shining in Malone’s “earthlight” yet partaking not at all of the earth. This attitude, like many of Beck¬ ett’s, is derived from nineteenth-century symbolism — Nabokov has said quite aptly that Beckett’s plays derive from Maeterlinck ( Strong Opinions, p. 172) — and, as we have seen, even a little of symbolism’s claim of the superiority of the world of art persists in Beckett, as well as its claim of transcendental strangeness. In Yeats’s “Rosa Alchemica,” a story Joyce knew well and admired, Michael Robartes tells the narrator: Page 181 the Great Clock Tower. Nabokov called the characters in his novels “galley slaves,” but Beckett denies that they are human; every Active identity, every predicated self is a stone, a dead lump of words. This suggests that the much-discussed passage in the first part of Molloy — in which Molloy arranges his sucking stones in such a manner that he will go through the entire sequence of sixteen without repetition, although the order of sucked stones is likely to change from one sequence to the next — is an emblem of the author’s handling of his characters and their paraphernalia. Moran’s narrative is a scrambling, a reshuffling of the elements of Molloy’s narrative. If literary art is expressive of nothing, then the aesthetic pleasure of literature is not mimesis but the abstract permutation of neutral elements, elements that have no more intrinsic meaning or reference than the sounds that make up the notes of a musical scale. If Molloy’s sucking stones had numbered twelve instead of sixteen, the principle of the intolerability of repetition would have made the whole passage a kind of parody of twelve-tone music; in¬ deed, it is easy to imagine a fourth dialogue of Beckett and Duthuit, eternal antagonists resting in heaven after their debate like the Achilles and the Tortoise of Lewis Carroll’s Eleatic fantasy, discussing the serial system of Schoenberg as the musical equivalent of van Velde’s paintings, Beckett’s novels. Murphy, in Beckett’s first novel, con¬ templates with delight the fact that he can eat his five different biscuits in 120 different orders, if only he can conquer his preferences, his desire to eat the unpleasant anonymous biscuit first and the favored ginger biscuit last, a restriction that limits to a “paltry six” (p. 96) the number of arrays possible to the biscuit-eater seeking to avoid monotony in his lunch. Similarly, the theory of twelve-tone music states that if one note is repeated before the other eleven notes of the chromatic scale have been sounded, it will tend to create a key signa¬ ture, a specific tonality, a state in which one note takes precedence over another; the twelve-tone style is an attempt to escape from this center of gravity, to treat all notes with equal dignity. Murphy’s bis¬ cuits, Molloy’s sucking stones, are emblems that teach the writer how to play with his material; Beckett has aspired to write a twelve-tone novel, in a sense, in which A, C, the bicycle, the hat, the dead dog, the shepherd, Molloy himself, and so on, are all equally important, are but arbitrary counters, inert and random, sucked in measured sequence. In part 2, many of the same elements reappear, the hat, the dog Zulu, Molloy, the bicycle, the rustic, C, and so forth — the retrograde inver¬ sion, so to speak, of the original tone row, though of course Beckett’s transformations are not rigid. The lists between the chapters of the abandoned novel Mercier and Camier, which reduce the events of the chapters to terse captions, permit in places a similar analysis. This Page 206 glecting to offer a dinner invitation to the girl on the beach. Humbert’s sexual relation with Lolita coincides with the emergence of the mon¬ strous Quilty, who seems to represent Humbert’s imagination grown detached, impersonal, horrifying. Nabokov himself states in his after¬ word to Lolita that art includes “curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy’’ (p. 317), an ample description of what is valuable in life as well as in art; but Quilty is narrower, a pure principle of play, of combinational genius, apathetic, amoral, careless of the human. Quilty is Ariel. Humbert, contemplating Quilty’ s handiwork, the tissue of puns and allusions he leaves behind as a tease for Humbert in the paper-chase scene, seems to regard Quilty as a kind of alter ego: Page 211 Biography. Andrew Field. Nabokov: His Life in Part. New York: Viking Press, 1977. Page 211 Criticism. Nabokov himself recommended the works of Alfred Appel, Jr., and Andrew Field. Page 214 A fine study of the origin of Beckett’s ideas about the lack of efficacy of language (and therefore the lack of efficacy of verbal images) can be found in an article by Linda Ben-Zvi, “Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Limits of Language,” PM LA 95, no. 2 (March 1980): 183-200. The best comparison I know of the works of Beckett and Kafka — very little has been done on the relation of Nabokov to either author — is by Ruby Cohn: “Watt in Light of The Castle in Comparative Literature, vol. 8 (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1961). Page 217 Fantasy, heroic and evasive, 85-86, 91—94; rules for distinguishing, 86-91. See also Nabokov Faust, 2 Page 217 Jarrell, Randall, 5 Jesenska, Milena, 117, 127 Joyce, James, 169; epiphanies in, 80, 81; Nabokov on, 93; Finnegans Wake (also mentioned as Work in Progress ), 3, 5, 168, 170; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 150-54, 155, 159, 170, 184— 85, 186, 205-6; Ulysses, 55, 56, 153, 169 Page 219 Nabokov, Vladimir, 1 19 and diseases of the imagination, 6 Ada, 68, 75-78, 81-82 Bend Sinister, 94 Page 223 Nabokov, Kafka, and Beckett present images that grow more detailed, specific, point-blank, until they begin to undo themselves. But in the collapse of these authors’ fictive worlds Albright finds a final paradox; for this may be the artist’s best device for giving, by oblique means, some sense of what no art can directly show or embody, reality itself.