Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  Roughly speaking, there are three types of such representatives. Let us inspect them.

  First, the narrator insofar as he speaks in the first person, the capital I of the story, its moving pillar. The narrator can appear in various forms: he may be the author himself or a first-person protagonist; or the writer may invent an author whom he quotes, as Cervantes does with his Arabic historian; or one of the third-person characters in the book may be a part-time narrator, after which the master's voice takes over again. The main point is that, whatever the method, there is a certain capital I who tells a certain story.

  Second, a type of author's representative, what I call the sifting agent. This sifting agent may or may not be coincident with the narrator. In fact, the most typical sifting agents I know, such as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park or Emma Bovary in the scene of the ball, are not first-person narrators but third-person characters. Again, they may or may not be representative of the author's own ideas; but their main feature is that whatever happens in the book, every event and every image and every landscape and every character is seen through the eyes, is perceived through the senses, of a main character, a he or she who is the sifting agent, who sifts the story through his-her own emotions and notions.

  The third type is the so-called perry, possibly derived from periscope, despite the double r, or perhaps from parry in vague connection with foil as in fencing. But this does not matter much since anyway I invented the term myself many years ago. It denotes the lowest kind of author's minion: the character or characters who, throughout the book, or at least in certain parts of the book, are so to speak on duty; whose only purpose, whose only reason for being, is that they visit the places which the author wishes the reader to visit and meet the characters whom the author wishes the reader to meet. In such chapters the perry has hardly an identity of his own. He has no will, no soul, no heart, nothing—he is a mere peregrinating perry although of course he can regain his identity in some other part of the book. The perry visits some household only because the author wants to describe the characters in that household. He is very helpful, the perry. Without the perry a story is sometimes difficult to direct and propel; but better kill the story than have a perry drag its thread about like a lame insect dragging a dusty bit of cobweb.

  Now in Bleak House Esther is all things: she is a part-time narrator, a kind of baby-sitter replacing the author, as I shall presently explain. She is also, in some chapters at least, a sifting agent, seeing things for herself, in her own way, although the master's voice is prone to drown hers even when she speaks in the first person; and, thirdly, the author often uses her, alas, as a perry to move to this or that place while this or that character or event has to be described.

  Eight particular structural features are to be noticed in Bleak House.

  Nabokov's outline of the main structural features in Bleak House

  1. ESTHER'S BOOK

  In chapter 3 Esther, brought up by a godmother (Lady Dedlock's sister), for the first time appears as the narrator, and here Dickens commits a little mistake for which he will have to pay dearly. He begins Esther's story in a kind of would-be girlish style, in bubbling baby talk (the "my dear old doll" is an easy trick), but he will see very soon that it is an impossible medium for telling a robust story and we shall see very soon his own vigorous and colorful style breaking through artificial baby talk, as is represented by: "My dear old doll! I was such a shy little thing that I seldom dared to open my lips, and never dared to open my heart, to anybody else. It almost makes me cry to think what a relief it used to be to me, when I came home from school of a day, to run upstairs to my room, and say, 'O you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be expecting me!' and then to sit down on the floor, leaning on the elbow of her great chair, and tell her all I had noticed since we parted. I had always rather a noticing way—not a quick way, O no!—a silent way of noticing what passed before me, and thinking I should like to understand it better. I have not by any means a quick understanding. When I love a person very tenderly indeed, it seems to brighten. But even that may be my vanity." Note that in these first pages of Esther's story there are practically no figures of speech, no vivid comparisons, etc. Yet certain features of the baby style begin to break down, as in the Dickensian alliteration "the clock ticked, the fire clicked," when Esther and her godmother are sitting before the fire, which is not in keeping with the schoolgirl style of Esther.

  But when her godmother, Miss Barbary (really her aunt), dies and the lawyer Kenge takes matters into his hands, the style of Esther's narrative reverts to a general Dickensian style. For instance, Kenge petting his glasses: " 'Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?' said Mr. Kenge, looking over his glasses at me, and softly turning the case about and about, as if he were petting something." One can see what is happening. Dickens starts painting the delightful picture of Kenge, smooth round Kenge, Conversation Kenge (as he is nicknamed), and quite forgets it is a naive girl who is supposed to be writing all this. And within a few pages we already find samples of Dickensian imagery creeping into her narrative, rich comparisons and the like. "When [Mrs. Rachael] gave me one cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw-drop from the stone porch—it was a very frosty day—I felt so miserable" or "I sat ... watching the frosty trees, that were like beautiful pieces of spar; and the fields all smooth and white with last night's snow; and the sun, so red but yielding so little heat; and the ice, dark like metal, where the skaters and sliders had brushed the snow away." Or Esther's description of Mrs. Jellyby's slovenly attire: "we could not help noticing that her dress didn't nearly meet up the back, and that the open space was railed across with a lattice-work of stay-lace—like a summer-house." The intonation and irony of her description of Peepy Jellyby's head caught between the bars is thoroughly Dickensian: "I made my way to the poor child, who was one of the dirtiest little unfortunates I ever saw, and found him very hot and frightened, and crying loudly, fixed by the neck between two iron railings, while a milkman and a beadle, with the kindest intentions possible, were endeavouring to drag him back by the legs, under a general impression that his skull was compressible by those means. As I found (after pacifying him), that he was a little boy, with a naturally large head, I thought that, perhaps, where his head could go, his body could follow, and mentioned that the best mode of extrication might be to push him forward. This was so favourably received by the milkman and beadle, that he would immediately have been pushed into the area, if I had not held his pinafore, while Richard and Mr. Guppy ran down through the kitchen, to catch him when he should be released."

  Dickensian incantatory eloquence is prominent in such passages as Esther's description of her meeting with Lady Dedlock, her mother: "I explained, as nearly as I could then, or can recall now—for my agitation and distress throughout were so great that I scarcely understood myself, though every word that was uttered in the mother's voice, so unfamiliar and so melancholy to me; which in my childhood I had never learned to love and recognise, had never been sung to sleep with, had never heard a blessing from, had never had a hope inspired by; made an enduring impression on my memory—I say I explained, or tried to do it, how I had only hoped that Mr. Jarndyce, who had been the best of fathers to me, might be able to afford some counsel and support to her. But my mother answered no, it was impossible; no one could help her. Through the desert that lay before her, she must go alone."

  By midstream, Dickens, writing through Esther, can take up the narration in a more fluent, supple, and conventional style than he did under his own name. This and the absence of vividly listed descriptive details in the beginnings of chapters are the only true points of difference between their respective styles. Esther and the author more or less grow accustomed to their different points of view as reflected in their styles: Dickens with all kinds of musical, humorous, metaphorical, oratorical, booming effects and breaks in style on the one hand; and Esther, on the other, starting chapters with flowing conservative phrases. But in the description at Westminster Hall
of the close of the Jarndyce suit, already quoted, when the whole estate is found to have been absorbed by the costs, Dickens at last merges almost completely with Esther. Stylistically, the whole book is a gradual sliding into the matrimonial state between the two. And when they insert word pictures or render conversations, there is no difference between them.

  Seven years after the event, as we learn in chapter 64, Esther writes her book, which amounts to thirty-three of the chapters, or a half of the whole novel, composed of sixty-seven chapters. A wonderful memory! I must say that despite the superb planning of the novel, the main mistake was to let Esther tell part of the story. I would not have let the girl near!

  2. ESTHER'S LOOKS

  Esther had so strong a resemblance to her mother that Mr. Guppy is much struck by a familiarity that he cannot at first place, when on a country jaunt he tours Chesney Wold, in Lincolnshire, and sees Lady Dedlock's portrait. Mr. George is also disturbed about her looks, without realizing that he sees a resemblance to his dead friend Captain Hawdon, who was Esthers father. And Jo, when he is "moved on" and trudges through the storm to be rescued at Bleak House, can scarcely be persuaded in his fear that Esther is not the unknown lady to whom he showed Nemo's house and the graveyard. But a tragedy strikes her. In retrospect, as she writes chapter 31, Esther mentions that she had a foreboding the day Jo fell sick, an omen that is all too well justified, for Charley catches smallpox from Jo and when Esther nurses her back to health (her looks spared), it is passed on to Esther, who is not so fortunate, for she at length recovers with her face disfigured by ugly scars that completely destroy her looks. As she recovers, she realizes that all mirrors have been removed from her room, and she knows the reason why. But when she goes to Mr. Boythorn's country place in Lincolnshire, next to Chesney Wold, she finally looks at herself. "For I had not yet looked in the glass, and had never asked to have my own restored to me. I knew this to be a weakness which must be overcome; but I had always said to myself that I would begin afresh, when I got to where I now was. Therefore I had wanted to be alone, and therefore I said, now alone, in my own room, 'Esther, if you are to be happy, if you are to have any right to pray to be true-hearted, you must keep your word, my dear.' I was quite resolved to keep it; but I sat down for a little while first, to reflect upon all my blessings. And then I said my prayers, and thought a little more.

  "My hair had not been cut off, though it had been in danger more than once. It was long and thick: I let it down, and shook it out, and went up to the glass upon the dressing-table. There was a little muslin curtain drawn across it. I drew it back: and stood for a moment looking through such a veil of my own hair, that I could see nothing else. Then I put my hair aside, and looked at the reflection in the mirror; encouraged by seeing how placidly it looked at me. I was very much changed—O very, very much. At first, my face was so strange to me, that I think I should have put my hands before it and started back, but for the encouragement I have mentioned. Very soon it became more familiar, and then I knew the extent of the alteration in it better than I had done at first. It was not like what I had expected; but I had expected nothing definite, and I dare say anything definite would have surprised me.

  "I had never been a beauty, and had never thought myself one; but I had been very different from this. It was all gone now. Heaven was so good to me, that I could let it go with a few not bitter tears, and could stand there arranging my hair for the night quite thankfully."

  She confesses to herself that she could have loved Allan Woodcourt and been devoted to him, but that it must now be over. Worrying about some flowers he had given her and which she had dried, "At last I came to the conclusion that I might keep them; if I treasured them only as a remembrance of what was irrevocably past and gone, never to be looked back on any more, in any other light. I hope this may not seem trivial. I was very much in earnest." This prepares the reader for her accepting Jarndyce's proposal at a later time. She had firmly given up all dreams of Woodcourt.

  Dickens has handled the problem shrewdly in this scene, for a certain vagueness must be left veiling her altered features so that the reader's imagination may not be embarrassed when at the end of the book she becomes Woodcourt's bride, and when in the very last pages a doubt, charmingly phrased, is cast on the question whether her good looks have gone after all. So it is that though Esther sees her face in the mirror, the reader does not, nor are details provided at any later time. When at the inevitable reunion of mother and daughter Lady Dedlock catches her to her breast, kisses her, weeps, etc., the resemblance theme culminates in the curious reflection Esther makes, "I felt ... a burst of gratitude to the providence of God that I was so changed as that I never could disgrace her by any trace of likeness; so that nobody could ever now look at me, and look at her, and remotely think of any near tie between us." All this is very unreal (within the limits of the novel), and one wonders was it really necessary to disfigure the poor girl for this rather abstract purpose; indeed, can smallpox kill a family resemblance? But the closest a reader can come to any view of the changed Esther is when Ada holds to her lovely cheek Esther's "scarred [pockmarked] face."

  It may seem that the author becomes a little fed up with his invention of her changed looks, since Esther soon says, for him, that she will not mention them anymore. Thus when she meets her friends again her appearance is not mentioned except for a few references to its effect on other people, ranging from the astonishment of a village child at the change to Richard's thoughtful, "Always the same dear girl!" when she raises her veil, which at first she wears in public. Later on the theme plays a structural part in connection with Mr. Guppy's renouncing his love after seeing her, so she may seem after all to be strikingly ugly. But perhaps her looks will improve? Perhaps the scars will vanish? We wonder and wonder. Still later when she and Ada visit Richard in the scene that leads to Ada's revelation of her secret marriage, Richard says of Esther that her compassionate face is so like the face of old days, and when she smiles and shakes her head, and he repeats, "——So exactly like the face of old days," we wonder whether the beauty of her soul is not concealing her scars. It is here, I think, that her looks in one way or another, begin to improve—at least in the reader's mind. Towards the end of this scene she remarks on her "plain old face"; plain, after all, is not disfigured. Moreover, I still think that at the very end of the novel, after seven years have elapsed and she is twenty-eight, the scars have quietly vanished. Esther is bustling about preparing for a visit from Ada, her little son Richard, and Mr. Jarndyce, and then she sits quietly on the porch. When Allan returns and asks what she is doing there, she replies that she has been thinking: " 'I am almost ashamed to tell you, but I will. I have been thinking about my old looks—such as they were.'

  " 'And what have you been thinking about them, my busy bee?' said Allan.

  " 'I have been thinking, that I thought it was impossible that you could have loved me any better, even if I had retained them.'

  " '——Such as they were?' said Allan, laughing.

  " 'Such as they were, of course.'

  " 'My dear Dame Durden,' said Allan, drawing my arm through his, 'do you ever look in the glass?'

  " 'You know I do; you see me do it.'

  " 'And don't you know that you are prettier than you ever were?'

  "I did not know that; I am not certain that I know it now. But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling [Ada] is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen; and that they can very well do without much beauty in me—even supposing——"

  3. THE COINCIDENTAL ALLAN WOODCOURT

  In chapter 11 "a dark young man," the surgeon, appears, for the first time, at the deathbed of Nemo (Captain Hawdon, Esther's father). Two chapters later there is a very tender and serious scene in which Richard and Ada have fallen in love with each other. And at the same point—so to link things up nicely—the dark young surge
on Woodcourt appears at the chapter's end as a guest at a dinner party, and Esther, when asked if she had not thought him "sensible and agreeable," answers yes, rather wistfully perhaps. Later, just when a hint is given that Jarndyce, gray-haired Jarndyce, is in love with Esther but is silent about it, at this point Woodcourt reappears before going to China. He will be away a long, long time. He leaves some flowers for Esther. Later, Miss Flite shows Esther a newspaper cutting of Woodcourt's heroism during a shipwreck. After Esther's face has been disfigured by smallpox, she renounces her love for Woodcourt. When Esther and Charley travel to the seaport Deal to convey Ada's offer to Richard of her little inheritance, Esther runs into Woodcourt, who has come back from India. The meeting is preceded by a delightful description of the sea, a piece of artistic imagery which, I think, makes one condone the terrific coincidence. Says Esther of the nondescript face: "He was so very sorry for me that he could scarcely speak," and, at the end of the chapter, "in his last look as we drove away, I saw that he was very sorry for me. I was glad to see it. I felt for my old self as the dead may feel if they ever revisit these scenes. I was glad to be tenderly remembered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite forgotten."—A nice lyrical strain here, a little remindful of Fanny Price.

  By a second remarkable coincidence, Woodcourt comes upon the brickmaker's wife sleeping in Tom-all-Alone's, and by yet another coincidence he meets Jo here, in the presence of this woman who has also been wondering about Jo's whereabouts. Woodcourt takes the sick Jo to George's shooting gallery. There the wonderful scene of Jo's death again makes the reader condone the rather artificial means of bringing us to Jo's bedside through Woodcourt, the perry. In chapter 51 Woodcourt visits the lawyer Vholes, and then Richard. There is a curious trick here: it is Esther who is writing the chapter but she is not present at the interview between Woodcourt and Vholes or Woodcourt and Richard, both of which are reported in detail. The question is, how does she know what happened in both places? The bright reader must inevitably conclude that she got all these details from Woodcourt after she became his wife: she could not have known all these past events so circumstantially if Woodcourt had not been on terms of sufficient intimacy to tell her about them. In other words, the good reader should suspect that she will marry Woodcourt after all and hear these details from him.