Subject
RJ:"Recruiting" (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITORIAL NOTE: The following discussion of Nabokov's story "Recruiting" is
part of a weekly series by Roy Johnson <Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk>. The
materials are drawn from his book manuscripton VN's short stories. They
are presented as materialfor discussion and comment. Please address your
comments to NABOKV-L.
-----------------------------------------------
This week's story - RECRUITING
-----------------------------------------------
"Recruiting" (July 1935) starts off as if it is offering yet
another character sketch from emigre life, but in the end it
turns out to be concerned with the joys of literary composition.
Vasily Ivanovich is a tired old Russian emigre who has lost all
his relatives and is now desperately poor, having "reached the
point where a man no longer asks himself on what he will live
tomorrow, but merely wonders what he had lived on the day before"
(TD,p.103). His beloved sister is dead, and on the day of the
story he has visited her grave whilst at the burial of another
emigre, Professor D. The story switches from third to first
person mode to describe a curious sense of spiritual uplift he
nevertheless feels whilst viewing the world around him as he sits
in a public garden enjoying the sunshine:
"A wet red hose lay across the entire lawn in the
centre of the ... garden and, a little way off,
radiant water gushed from it, with a ghostly
iridescence in the aura of its spray" (p.107)
A man with a newspaper comes to sit beside him on the bench and
reveals that what we have learned so far is in fact his
own speculation about Vasily, and that he might not even be
Russian at all. This suddenly-appearing narrator tells us that
Vasily's sister has been assembled out of the details of someone
else, and that both these sketches have been created to fill
spaces in a novel on which he has been working. The narrator then
indulges in one of those speculations regarding the relationship
between one level of fictionality and another which can make
readers feel that they are being asked to turn their own minds
inside-out:
"I felt I was infecting that stranger with the blazing
creative happiness that sends a chill over an artist's
skin ... [and that happiness ought to] be accessible
to two people at least, becoming their topic of
conversation and thus acquiring rights to routine
existence" (p.109)
Before the narrator can speak with this man onto whom he has
projected his own wellbeing, Vasily gets up from the bench and
walks away. But the narrator feels that he has anyway captured
his character forever for his own literary purposes, and he tells
us that the man will appear in a future chapter of his novel.
But then another narrator steps into the story, reducing the
inner narrator to "my representative, the man with the Russian
newspaper" and reveals that we have not two but three levels of
fictionality.
It might be misleading to dwell too much on parallels between two
writers so dissimilar as Nabokov and Virginia Woolf, but
"Recruiting" is remarkably similar to her story 'An Unwritten
Novel' which deal with this subject of imagined lives and their
imprecise connexion with a 'true identity' which is itself
fictional. In the light of the fictions-within-fictions which
have become such a tiresome cliche of postmodernism, it is worth
noting that although this sudden appearance of a hitherto
concealed outer narrator is something of a trick against which
the reader has no defense, Nabokov only uses the device once
(rather like his acrostic at the end of 'The Vane Sisters'). And
is the story merely a trick? Well, no, because it is in the end
designed to create a character, whether his name is Vasily or
not, who carries his emigre status, his age, and his poverty with
a certain amount of dignity and pride. He is another actor in the
large cast of Nabokov's record of the emigration, and if he is
produced via a certain amount of literary sleight of hand, he
lives nonetheless for that.
-------------------------------------------------------
Next week's story - A SLICE OF LIFE
-------------------------------------------------------
--
Roy Johnson | Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk
PO Box 100 | Tel +44 0161 432 5811
Manchester 20 | Fax +44 0161 443 2766
part of a weekly series by Roy Johnson <Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk>. The
materials are drawn from his book manuscripton VN's short stories. They
are presented as materialfor discussion and comment. Please address your
comments to NABOKV-L.
-----------------------------------------------
This week's story - RECRUITING
-----------------------------------------------
"Recruiting" (July 1935) starts off as if it is offering yet
another character sketch from emigre life, but in the end it
turns out to be concerned with the joys of literary composition.
Vasily Ivanovich is a tired old Russian emigre who has lost all
his relatives and is now desperately poor, having "reached the
point where a man no longer asks himself on what he will live
tomorrow, but merely wonders what he had lived on the day before"
(TD,p.103). His beloved sister is dead, and on the day of the
story he has visited her grave whilst at the burial of another
emigre, Professor D. The story switches from third to first
person mode to describe a curious sense of spiritual uplift he
nevertheless feels whilst viewing the world around him as he sits
in a public garden enjoying the sunshine:
"A wet red hose lay across the entire lawn in the
centre of the ... garden and, a little way off,
radiant water gushed from it, with a ghostly
iridescence in the aura of its spray" (p.107)
A man with a newspaper comes to sit beside him on the bench and
reveals that what we have learned so far is in fact his
own speculation about Vasily, and that he might not even be
Russian at all. This suddenly-appearing narrator tells us that
Vasily's sister has been assembled out of the details of someone
else, and that both these sketches have been created to fill
spaces in a novel on which he has been working. The narrator then
indulges in one of those speculations regarding the relationship
between one level of fictionality and another which can make
readers feel that they are being asked to turn their own minds
inside-out:
"I felt I was infecting that stranger with the blazing
creative happiness that sends a chill over an artist's
skin ... [and that happiness ought to] be accessible
to two people at least, becoming their topic of
conversation and thus acquiring rights to routine
existence" (p.109)
Before the narrator can speak with this man onto whom he has
projected his own wellbeing, Vasily gets up from the bench and
walks away. But the narrator feels that he has anyway captured
his character forever for his own literary purposes, and he tells
us that the man will appear in a future chapter of his novel.
But then another narrator steps into the story, reducing the
inner narrator to "my representative, the man with the Russian
newspaper" and reveals that we have not two but three levels of
fictionality.
It might be misleading to dwell too much on parallels between two
writers so dissimilar as Nabokov and Virginia Woolf, but
"Recruiting" is remarkably similar to her story 'An Unwritten
Novel' which deal with this subject of imagined lives and their
imprecise connexion with a 'true identity' which is itself
fictional. In the light of the fictions-within-fictions which
have become such a tiresome cliche of postmodernism, it is worth
noting that although this sudden appearance of a hitherto
concealed outer narrator is something of a trick against which
the reader has no defense, Nabokov only uses the device once
(rather like his acrostic at the end of 'The Vane Sisters'). And
is the story merely a trick? Well, no, because it is in the end
designed to create a character, whether his name is Vasily or
not, who carries his emigre status, his age, and his poverty with
a certain amount of dignity and pride. He is another actor in the
large cast of Nabokov's record of the emigration, and if he is
produced via a certain amount of literary sleight of hand, he
lives nonetheless for that.
-------------------------------------------------------
Next week's story - A SLICE OF LIFE
-------------------------------------------------------
--
Roy Johnson | Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk
PO Box 100 | Tel +44 0161 432 5811
Manchester 20 | Fax +44 0161 443 2766