Joseph Aisenberg’s message strikes me as both witty and perceptive. I’m glad to have his support, of course, but he goes beyond anything I said and does so in provocative ways. I think he’s right that Shade’s epiphany has less to do with the afterlife than with the writing and reading of poetry. The epiphany seems to me more Nabokovian than Shadean.

Before I respond to Jansy, I wish to recommend her essay “Time Before and Time After in Nabokov’s Novels,” which, when I sent my message, I had not yet read:

Although I disagree with some of her key assertions, it is still a fine essay.

As for Jansy’s response to my message, here’s my reply:

JM: Jim Twiggs's last point . . . stimulated me to offer a fourth possibility: instead of skepticism and/or faith, an increase in self-awareness and consciousness (for that demands no logical certainty, nor faith).

JT: I assume that JM is here talking about the effect on the reader, not on Shade or VN. If that’s true, then I’d say not “instead of” skepticism, faith, or undecidability, but rather “in addition to.” If JM will allow that, then I would say of course--but it would be wrong to imagine that reading VN is unique in the matter of providing an expansion of self-awareness and consciousness. Such obvious things as learning language, growing up, being trained in various practical activities of life, falling in and out of love, watching loved ones be born and die, growing old--all these represent vast expansions in self-awareness and consciousness. But considering only the arts, my own consciousness has been formed and expanded far more by (for example) Mark Twain and Nathanael West, Walker Evans and Diane Arbus, Rembrandt and Warhol, Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, Errol Morris and David Lynch, Aristotle and Wittgenstein, than by VN. My list would run to at least a hundred names before his. In other words, although he wrote two of my favorite novels and several others that I’ve greatly enjoyed, and although I like to read about VN and his work, I’m neither a Nabokovian nor a Nabokophile. In the breadth and depth of her knowledge of VN and his work, JM can run rings around me. My contributions to the List are pretty much limited to discussions of Lolita and Pale Fire.

JM: . . . to get to its "contexture" one needs to establish what it is that Shade means. However, it's exactly "meaning" that which, for him, will have to be abandoned to reach "texture," thereby moving beyond a textual meaning.

JT: I take it that dropping either “that” or “which” in the second sentence yields Jansy’s intended meaning. If so, she has touched on one of the most vexing problems in understanding VN (and, in this case, Shade). This is the question of how to speak about something that by definition lies outside language. In his book on Ada, Boyd answers the question in this way:

. . . Whereas the relentless pursuit of rectilinear logic eventually leads us, on this small planet, around in circles, a work of genuinely inspired art may draw on all that is best in human thought and at the same time be penetrated “by the beyond’s fresh breath.” (SO 227)

The declaration Van (or anyone) makes from within this world that the beyond remains philosophically unknowable could prove (for those able to look from the without) to be the very confirmation that where they are is a beyond. (Otherwise it would be humanly graspable, it simply would not remain beyond.) That conclusion, surely, lies at the heart of Nabokov’s thinking.

The problem here, as Boyd himself shows with numerous quotations, is that VN is forever spelling out his private theology. He is always describing for us, or nodding in the direction of, the very thing that supposedly can’t be described or seen. And Boyd’s own formulation (his attempt to use “rectilinear logic” in support of his point) simply begs the question--that question being whether “those able to look from the without” (and the “without” itself), exist or not.

It’s not only philosophers and poets and religious thinkers who have tried, from time immemorial, to grasp the ungraspable, but a whole host of cult and genre writers as well. The Otherworld theme--far from being a breath of fresh air from the beyond, is the stalest thing in VN’s writing. Thank goodness that in Pale Fire at least, if not in all those tendentious and sentimental ghost stories he wrote, he can give skepticism its due in a fine work of pitch-black comedy, which is perhaps best seen as a furious argument within himself.

I’ll close by offering links to essays that are relevant to the present discussion. The first is about trying to say the unsayable; the second shows how far some readers of VN have come to turning their studies into a cult, and for whom reading the master’s work is itself a near-mystical experience.

Effing the Ineffable

How do we express what cannot be said?

http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/columns/roger-scruton/effing-the-ineffable

Behind the Glass Pane: Vladimir Nabokov’s “Perfection” and Transcendence

http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/IFR/bin/get.cgi?directory=Vol.25/&filename=Wiesner.htm

As for me, I’ll stick with the old hymn “Farther Along”--provided, of course, that one adds “or not” in all the right places.

Jim Twiggs

From: Nabokv-L <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Mon, February 28, 2011 11:07:10 AM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] VN and Freud--reply to J. Friedman

Subject:

Re: [NABOKV-L] VN and Freud--reply to Friedman

From:

joseph Aisenberg <vanveen13@sbcglobal.net>

Date:

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 21:37:00 -0800

To:

Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>

And again, I think one of the more interesting problems with Nabokov the fictionist's constructions of "shades" of the after-life is that they are almost always hung around a first-person narrator. Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister are pretty much the only ones of the novels that use outside narration to suggest that writers-construct-worlds-therefore-the-world-might-have-been-constructed-by-something-analogous-to-a-writer. None of these books are actual answers but tantalizing questions. Nabokov seems to be trying to dramatize the sensation of the mysterious and trying to find that gray line, or perhaps a gleaming red one in Nabokov's case, where an intuition of the Other World or some Other Worldly agent grades into an externalization of subjectivity, crazy in the case of what Kinbote wants to make of the poem Pale Fire, all too sane and more or less touching in the case of a bereaved father like Shade; that line is where poet, annotator, critic and reader meet. As poetically appealing as Shade's synchronized view of the universe is, with a possible provided after life in which we go on as we were only divested of physicality, it has been conceived in terms so parallel to literary tropes that it seems cramped and trivialized and ultimately just literary; I thought that was actually the point to the poltergeists and ghosts and homologerie. There's an important point somewhere, I think, in one of Shade's sample poems given in the commentary by Kinbote where Shade theorizes that light might be an expression of immortal souls, a charming idea until he makes a qualitative distinction between the amount of light that Shakespeare would generate, a whole city, versus a lesser poet, maybe a street lamp I think. In other words, the greater the artist the more and the better his immortality will be; it's an afterlife as caste system, not terribly immaterial. One can't help snickering over this kind of personification of the spiritual--it almost seems like a joke on literary ranking only knowing Nabokov's strong opinions it probably wasn't. Still I don't believe that we're meant to take this idea that seriously, but to view it as a capricious possibility, one of the of the many doors imagination gives us until death closes them all with a great slam, and it doesn't cost us any extra to consider. Or does it? Think about what Shade's saying in terms of other occupations. Would a soccer player who had won more championships get more of an afterlife? Would the best door to door bible salesman light up more blocks than his coevals? Would he provide more or less light than a soccer player or a mediocre poet? Surely the best plumber would beat even Shakespeare! Pale Fire, ultimately, I think, is about the price of all this toying with transcendent possibilities, makes us doubt as much as hope. What if we're just fooling ourselves about what we think or want because our lives are miserable failures, like Kinbotes'? That pathos has more legs and life to it than Shade's metaphysics or his eternity; frustration, accidents, loss and death have literally wiped everything in the past away, we know from experience, but for most of us ideas of slipping into some infernal eternal realm or reading room designed by a waggish creative designer are pretty much just ideas, literature. Despite what Nabokov experienced during his childhood illness, beautifully discussed in Speak Memory and transformed with equal brilliance in The Gift, he always wistfully withholds any objective straight forward confirmation--we reach out for what we want but it's always something WE have to find, WE have to piece together; WE have to give it significance. So what I'm saying is that spirits disguised or coded in first person accounts that have been built in the text along with very key to the riddle we're meant to discover, such as happens in The Vane Sisters, very aptly titled--referring to vanity and vane hopes--can never really satisfy. I don't think it's supposed to; I think N's writing about living with the exciting uncertainties of existence, working with them, trying triumph over them and not step on everything else in the process. Meaning, in short, that I agree with Twiggs take.

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