Dear List,
In his biography of Gogol, Nabokov remarked that "The
crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in a style peculiar to the
undersigner. I doubt whether you can even give your telephone number without
giving something of yourself". This observation shows
that he recognizes that a person is more than the total sum
of traits and memories of which he/she is aware. Even a single
word is more that all the extended meanings and derivations collected in all the
world's dictionaries. If, as a writer, one needs to
exert absolute control over one's character-types, one's
enterprise is doomed to fail: there'll be always a peculiar flapping of an
author's wings escaping from his conscious awareness.
As Chesterton's Father Brown notes "the best way
to hide a leaf is in a forest." Nabokov's perverse and mad creatures
constitute his artificial forest in which he can disguise his
occasional idiosyncrasies. Fortunately, unlike his people, his other characters
(now, his words) are allowed to wander and signifiy away in freedom.
Pale Fire is an excellent example of this
sylvan procedure on Nabokov's part. Kinbote is his jack-of-all-trades,
through whom he can exert his authorial ploys in safety. Kinbote
realistically has to eavesdrop Shade's home and may be hindered
by bushes and closed windows. However, this is not the case when Kinbote
describes the movements and progress of Gradus. Once in a while Kinbote
admits that his omniscient stance derives from his position on "an invented
cloudlet" ( "We must assume, I think, that the forward
projection of what imagination he had, stopped at the act, on the brink of all
its possible consequences; ghost consequences, comparable to the ghost toes of
an amputee or to the fanning out of additional squares which a chess knight
(that skip-space piece), standing on a marginal file, "feels" in phantom
extensions beyond the board, but which have no effect whatever on his real
moves, on the real play." [...] "We can even make out (as, head-on but
quite safely, phantom-like, we pass through him, through the shimmering
propeller of his flying machine, through the delegates waving and grinning at
us) his magenta and mulberry insides") or that the detailed
information was obtained by a factual interview with an imprisoned
murderer ("My reader will, I hope, appreciate all the minute
particulars I have taken such trouble to present to him after a long talk I had
with the killer...One can only hope that an impartial search will turn up the
trilby forgotten in the Library — or in Mr. Emerald’s
car.")
There's something pathetic in Botkin's or CK's
delusions about Gradus and the Zemblan King Charles but, as long as CK
remains unidentified to Shade everything is kept hidden in Nabokov's
forest. This is why I think that the critics who sustain the
Catholic "three in one" theory must break in front of an
invisible wall, a wall that is related to Nabokov's authorial intentions.
Inspite of all the shivering leaves, VN needs the reader to conclude that John
Shade and C.Kinbote are two different people ( he may not have
been successful in this project! Or, as Jim Twiggs notes: "If the
N-LN's sole function is to be Nabokov's stand-in as creator of
the novel, this is only slightly more interesting than Hitchcock strolling
into one of his own movies...structurally it is trivial." )
I'm not familiar with Nabokov's pro/contra
theories about determinism and randomness in nature* but I'm sure that he
rejects all the Freudian views concerning determinism, as it operates in our
unconscious to find expression through dreams, parapraxis, pathological
symptoms. Perhaps Nabokov also tries to control, even reinvent, equivalents
of Freud's description of unconscious mechanisms, besides all the parodies of
"freudian symbolism" in his novels, such as the primal scene in "Pnin" or
related to an "Oedipus complex."
In Pale Fire, for example, Gradus's automatic
behavior and poor awareness of himself is unrelated to this kind of project
( Cf. He ...was endowed with a modicum of self-awareness,
some duration consciousness...Spiritually he did not exist), but I
think that Nabokov has something more sophisticated in store for the
readers . There's something in the Freudian theories about the unconscious
mind to which Nabokov keeps returning over and over again. Why wouldn't part of
Nabokov's rejection of Freud gain expression by the way in which he dwells over
his character's perversions or madness, and that he'd apply his
"combinatorial talents" to invent automannikins, clockwork robots and
demiurgical cosmic traps to give visibility, in the outside world, to what Freud
found hidden in the unconscious mind?
When, in
Pale Fire, John Shade states his "faint hope" concerning "a web of sense"
(discrediting life as meaningless, disorderly and subject to random events) he
is admitting to the influence of unknown cosmic forces over mankind, even when
such powers seldom appear to be loving or protective entities. In a way,
coincidences and mischievous ghosts mimic important aspects of the freudian
theory about the influence of the unconscious over an individual's life.
John Shade's belief that he'd wake up the next day, associated to his conviction
that "his darling somewhere is alive," is amply demonstrated as false by having
him die right after penning these verses. His white fountain or, as B. Boyd
describes, his experiences with ghostly benevolent influences, or that his
daughter is alive "somewhere," are obviously a product of Shade's wishful
thinking. And yet, there is a deterministic pattern coursing through the entire
novel that seems to escape Nabokov's eventual parody of mental illnes and
which I think we can follow through Charles Kinbote's moments
of omniscient narration and design. Would Nabokov, through Kinbote, be
intent on demonstrating that no cosmic force determines life's recurrent
patterns and coincidences, that everything is fictional, just like Gradus is
Kinbote's figment? ["The fact that his weapon was a real
one, and his quarry a highly developed human being, this fact belonged to our
world of events; in his, it had no meaning." - this is is a statement
made by Kinbote, of all people!]
Kinbote affirms that Shade's poem "was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after
midnight July 1...and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his
annotator’s temptation to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from
Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left
Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5." This part of the text suggests
that Gradus leads a life that is independent from Kinbote's
invention! Kinbote demonstrates, at least in the beginning of his
commentary, that he'd have loved to synchronize the motion of Shade's hand
and the assassin's itinerary towards the Zemblan King and that only his
adherence to facts hinders him in this project. However, he's
already asserting the tight connections between the destinies that await
Gradus, Shade and himself. Kinbote returns to the same idea soon afterwards,
with an added information. Gradus's "departure for
Western Europe...took place on the very day that an innocent poet in an innocent
land was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire." His regal omniscience ("We")
is explicit: "We shall accompany Gradus in constant
thought, as he makes his way ...following the road of its rhythm, riding past in
a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura,
swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to
branch, hiding between two words... reappearing on the horizon of a new canto,
steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his
valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of
thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade
blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the
night." Here we may begin to suspect that it's Kinbote who creates Gradus
and he who makes him shadow Shade's written progress, derive from it
("the force propelling him is...Shade’s poem), or
seal his fate (to write = to court death).
In his note to Lines 120-121 Kinbote interrupts his antecipatory
inclusions and he sets down an actual date (July 4). He shows how
"Gradus the Gunman was getting ready to leave Zembla for his
steady blunderings through two hemispheres." However, when writing about
line 132, he admits that Gradus serves as a metaphor, that he is not merely
a figment of his imagination because he is endowed with a particular kind
of "reality." (Cf. After a " 'feigned remoteness' has
indeed performed its dreadful duty, and the poem we have is the only "shadow"
that remains, we cannot help reading into these lines something more than
mirrorplay and mirage shimmer. We feel doom, in the image of Gradus, eating away
the miles and miles of 'feigned remoteness' between him and poor Shade. He, too,
is to meet, in his urgent and blind flight, a reflection that will shatter
him....The force propelling him is the magic action of Shade’s poem itself, the
very mechanism and sweep of verse, the powerful iambic motor. Never before has
the inexorable advance of fate received such a sensuous form..." )
The back and forth travellings in time, related to Shade's poetic activity, are
soon resumed. Now we return to July 2, and we learn that Gradus "insisted later that when he found himself designated to track down
and murder the King, the choice was decided by a show of cards — but let us not
forget that it was Nodo who shuffled and dealt them out...the ace of spades
lying on the tiled floor...We place this fatidic
moment at 0:05, July 2, 1959 — which happens to be also the date upon which an
innocent poet penned the first lines of his last poem." Apparently
Kinbote has managed, at last, to set the dice rolling towards Shade's demise in
such a way that it coincides with his picking up the pen in the early hours of
July 2 (he doesn't mention it, but he must have calculated the time-differences
between Europe and America?). The temporal discrepancy is now explained
away.
Very often Kinbote describes Gradus as an automaton, a clockwork
man( a product of deterministic forces): "Mere springs and
coils produced the inward movements of our clockwork man. He might be termed a
Puritan...He called unjust and deceitful everything that surpassed his
understanding....All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus" In
the same manner that " Spacetime itself is decay; Gradus is
flying west...He has sped through this verse and is gone — presently to darken
our pages again." And the promise is fulfilled: " Who
could have guessed that on the very day (July 7) Shade penned this lambent line
Gradus... had flown...! Even in Arcady am I, says Death in the tombal
scripture."
Kinbote establishes a list of items about which Gradus
is totally unaware (unconscious?): "from the way Gradus
displayed his empty palm before shaking hands or made a slight bow after every
sip, and other tricks of demeanor (which Gradus himself did not notice in people
but had acquired from them) that wherever he had been born he had certainly
lived for a considerable time in a low-class Zemblan environment...Gradus was
also unaware that the ombrioles Lavender collected combined exquisite
beauty with highly indecent subject matter..." A passing premonitory
reference, but to a different patterning, is now made: "Gradus as he stood there...wondered if he should not hang around
for a bit to make sure he had not been bamboozled. From far below mounted the
clink and tinkle of distant masonry work...and John Shade took a fresh
card." (it echoes the events with gardener, butterfly,
clinks related to the evening of Shade's murder and to a former apparition
of this theme in KQKn). We also find his reference to "combinational
fate" in: "Shade composed these lines on Tuesday,
July 14th. What was Gradus doing that day? Nothing. Combinational fate rests on
its laurels." Again Kinbote goes back to his synchronization: "As my dear friend was beginning with this line his July 20 batch
of cards (card seventy-one to card seventy-six, ending with line 948), Gradus,
at the Orly airport, was walking aboard a jetliner, fastening his seat belt,
reading a newspaper, rising, soaring, desecrating the
sky."
The puzzling commentary at the end of the novel
mingles mad Kinbote and his creator, Vladimir Nabokov, as if reasserting the
reader about Gradus's, and also now Kinbote's non-fictional, metaphorical,
status: "God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any
desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall
continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to
exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy,
heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile ...sans fame, sans future, sans
audience, sans anything but his art ....I may ... cook up a stage play, an
old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an
imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a
distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and
perishes in the clash between the two figments...But whatever happens, wherever
the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out — somebody has
already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding
a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking ...and presently he will ring at
my door — a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus." For Jim
Twiggs (Sept.2010 Nab-L) here "Kinbote goes in and out of his two identities. In
describing a possible play, he gives away the plot of the novel (as he sees it)
and shows a clear awareness that he is a deranged figment of his (as it turns
out, Botkin's) own imagination. In the final possibility (and I believe the one
that has come true)-- 'I may huddle and groan in a madhouse'."
If we change our perspective, and abandon our conjectures
concerning Botkin/Kinbote's awareness of some mental infirmity, to focus
solely on the nature of their creator's plans (unlike Kinbote, he is not one of
the "two other characters in this work"...), we return to the
self-referential quandary presented at the end of "Bend Sinister." (or to
Shakespeare's lines in "As you like it," hinted at by Kinbote).
If, in the former chapters, it was possible to
find clues about Nabokov's intention to present fate as mimicking of the
freudian unconscious determinants, here something else is taking place and it
relates solely to the author (nothing excludes the possibility of that Nabokov
could surprise himself with what he set down in his apparently totally
controlled novel. In this case, Kinbote's atypical paragraph (I mean,
atypical in Kinbote and not in Nabokov) results from the author's
sudden impulse to swerve away from what he discovered...
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................
* Jim Twiggs (off-list):
With regard to the question of VN and determinism, no doubt you've read this
1993 essay by Vladimir E. Alexandrov "How Can Ethics Exist in Nabokov’s
Fated Worlds?"(http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/document.html?id=1282) At the end of his contribution to the same
conference, Boyd says:"Since conferences need controversies, I’ll end my paper
here, with Dreyer fighting the determinism of Dreiser, and with Boyd declaring
against Alexandrov that Nabokov’s worlds, whatever part fate plays in them, are
always free." Whether Boyd ever followed up on this statement or not, I don't
know. For my part, I find Alexandrov's argument pretty convincing. If he's
right, doesn't it follow that a "random" event in one world would not be random
if seen from the viewpoint of the next world up? (Cf. VN's exercising complete
control over his characters.) If this is so, the difference between Freudian and
Nabokovian determinism is that the former is a bottom-up (naturalistic) view,
while the latter is a top-down (transcendental) view. If VN was aware of the
implications of his worlds-in-regression idea, he could hardly object to Freud
simply on the grounds of being against determinism. He could only object to the
kind of determinism espoused by Freud. And here, it seems to me, Freud has all
the best of the argument.
JM:Abrupt excerpts from Alexandrov's
paper:
I would like to suggest that there is an
unresolvable paradox in Nabokov’s art and in his world view: although on a
number of occasions he professed faith in freedom and contingency, he did not in
fact dramatize or embody them in his fictions or his autobiography. By contrast,
he demonstrates remarkably well how both he and his characters are trapped in
fatidic webs that abut a transcendent realm.I would like to suggest in addition
that this paradox is inevitable for two interrelated reasons: one is the world
view that Nabokov had and that underlies all that he wrote; and the other, which
is particularly interesting, is the kind of reading process that his works
activate. Indeed, if one pays attention to the hermeneutic guides in his novels,
which should serve as models for how to seek and construct the works’ meanings,
it becomes impossible to find room in Nabokov’s world for freedom of any kind.
The special interest of this topic lies in the theoretical questions it raises
about the possible limits of representing freedom or contingency in narrative
art. Thus there is a paradox in Nabokov’s ethics...without freedom the
possibility of dramatizing moral choice becomes more than
problematic...
[U]nderlying Nabokov’s entire oeuvre is a sui
generis, albeit tentative faith in a transcendent otherworld...a mysterious,
hidden, potent, and ordering force or dimension that appears to affect all that
exists... Speaking of himself in a well-known passage (SM-p.25), he concludes
that neither environment nor heredity fashioned him, and implies that whatever
may have formed him transcends the material world... It is especially noteworthy
that the discovery of patterning in his life does not depress Nabokov. On the
contrary, his ability to identify evidence for fatidic determinism is something
that he finds bracing and inspiring...Nabokov’s conception of life as filled
with patterning extends to his view of the world of nature as “made.” The most
famous example of this in Speak, Memory is his discussion of mimicry among
butterflies,...resolutely anti-Darwinian, ... a variant of the venerable
“argument from design” ...If we turn now to “man-wrought things” themselves, it
must be stressed that Nabokov’s conception of artistic creation also hinges on
the necessary involvement of the transcendent....[and] the artist’s dependence
on a mysterious otherworld...the “world” is “good”, and that “‘goodness’ is
something that is irrationally concrete”; conversely, “badness” is “the lack of
something rather than a noxious presence,” and stems from inattention,
blindness, and lack of imagination ...[However] he did insist on a number
of occasions that he believed in free will... An... example of Nabokov’s
views appears in an unpublished document in which he refers to what he calls
“the miserable idea of determinism, the prison regulation of cause and effect.”
But then he adds: “We know from real life that however obediently we may follow
the paths of causation, some queer and beautiful force, which we call free will
from want of a better expression, allows or at least appears to allow us to
escape again and again from the laws of cause and effect.” To my mind, this
quotation suggests that Nabokov’s view of free will may well have been
ambivalent, since he is willing to entertain the possibility that it is illusory
(“at least appears to allow us to escape”). Another well-known aspect of
Nabokov’s rejection of determinism is his disbelief in the existence of a
predictable future: for if it were fixed then one’s sense of freedom would
necessarily be a delusion...A striking exception to this view... is Nabokov’s
insistence that some very select individuals — namely, writers of genius — could
glimpse at least a part of their future... The resulting sense of obligation “to
get it right” that the author has with regard to the future work necessarily has
a coercive effect on his behavior; in short, the work determines the author’s
behavior...But what do we find when we turn to Nabokov’s fiction? Perhaps its
most striking feature is the extent to which it flaunts its “madeness.” We are
everywhere given to feel the presence of a manipulative and crafty author or
narrator writing a story...for the most part interpreted it in “metaliterary”
terms — as evidence for his preoccupation with the process of literary creation,
which, moreover, is understood in strictly secular narrative terms — as the
manipulation of the constituents of narrative for its own sake. But the same
kinds of “coincidences” of meaning and detail in a work that seem to support a
metaliterary reading (the patterns, puzzles, deceptions, alliterations, and
tricks of various kinds that are some of Nabokov’s stylistic signatures) can
also be interpreted in a completely different way — as a literary model of fate,
where the author stands in relation to the text in the way that God can be said
to stand in relation to the “real” world. And it is precisely in connection with
this issue that Nabokov’s discursive writings are particularly illuminating
because they show that he saw life and nature outside of literature as
characterized by the same kinds of features that also dominate the
representation of life and nature within his fictional works....Not only are
Nabokov’s novels and stories filled with myriad patterns that subtly link
details which at first glance appear to be unrelated, but his works are also
filled with characters who strive to read the worlds in which they exist as if
these worlds are encoded scripts...John Shade in Pale Fire thinks that his
ability to write poetry and recognize parodic coincidence in life may be
evidence for cosmic order. Indeed, one wonders what an instance of freely chosen
action or a chance event would look like. The reader who believes that both
exist in Nabokov’s works would have to be able to prove that there are no links
— be they semantic, thematic, acoustic, rhythmic, or structural — between any
chosen textual detail and anything else in the given text. For if there were
even one such link, then the free or contingent nature of the detail would be
put into question by the textual association it has. ...To insist, for example,
that moments of “consciousness” or “self-awareness” are examples of “freedom” in
Nabokov’s works is in effect to claim to know definitively what “consciousness”
or “self-awareness” actually are....[I]n Nabokov’s discursive and fictional
works that non-quotidian states of being impinge on what is conveniently labeled
“consciousness,” and thus undermine its seeming freedom