Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  But by about 1925, Nabokov started to stick to the world we see and know and to suggest something more beyond this world only as if by inversion. In “The Return of Chorb,” for instance, the husband’s attempt to retrace the route of his brief life with the wife he has just lost stresses only the impossibility, in human terms, of travelling back in time as we can in space and the desperation of the human craving for a freer kind of time. My guess, but it is only that, is that Nabokov’s sense of a designing force that creates a world for us to rediscover develops into a central part of his metaphysics mostly after the 1920s, perhaps as a result of his deepening knowledge of mimicry or of his exposure to the surprises of his scientific discoveries. Or perhaps this is an illusion, and the change simply reflects his own increasing capacity in his work to create a world that we as readers have to rediscover.

  In the 1969 article in Time that led to my reading Pale Fire and my “conversion” into a passionate Nabokovian, Nabokov’s own words provided the headline: “I have never met a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.”7 That combination of lucid, lonely, and mad almost suggests to me, now, that Nabokov thought he had buried his metaphysical secrets—the secrets of Fyodor’s dead father’s participation in Fyodor’s life, or dead Hazel Shade’s participation in Kinbote’s and Shade’s lives, for instance, if these readings are right—had buried them so deep that they would perhaps never be discovered. Was it for this reason that, although the skeptical note sounds more and more strongly in his later works, there are also more explicit pointers past the skeptical reading, at least in the acrostic of “The Vane Sisters” and the ghostly narrator or narrators of Transparent Things? Did Nabokov write these two works partly in order to provide the key to what is safely stored but locked away in his other work?

  But what I want to focus on here is not questions about the nature of Nabokov’s metaphysics, its impact on his style or works, or its origins and development, but some quite different kinds of questions that seem appropriate now that so much has been done on his metaphysics, now that it threatens to settle into an orthodoxy in Nabokov criticism.

  The first question is: What difference does his metaphysics make? Or, less crudely: Why stress the metaphysics so much, as such a central part of his work, when it is possible to respond with great pleasure to Nabokov and not even notice his metaphysics—as Harry Levin and, at least in Véra Nabokov’s eyes, everybody before she wrote her introduction to Stikhi, had done? There are utterly committed Nabokovians, like Dieter E. Zimmer—who has worked on Nabokov longer and more selflessly than anyone else—who find Nabokov’s work astonishingly fertile but who have no interest in or sympathy for his metaphysics. How can a response like this be possible, if, as I have argued, Nabokov’s metaphysics shapes his style and structures many of his stories, and if one of his claims to originality is the originality of his philosophical world and of the artistic measures he has found to express it?

  What if, simply, we dislike or disagree with his metaphysics? Can we then like what he writes? We can easily not share Homer’s metaphysics, or Dante’s, and still admire his work. I’m not sure it’s so easy closer to our own times. I know I would prefer Yeats much more, although I value him highly, if he were not so often “away with the fairies,” and I know that T. S. Eliot’s craving for traditional belief, especially traditional Christianity, is at least one strong obstacle to my responding to his work (as it was, too, for Nabokov).

  I happen not to share Nabokov’s metaphysics, yet I find it a fascinating intellectual achievement—as I do not find the irrationalist credulism of Yeats or the traditionalism-as-refuge of Eliot. Nabokov’s metaphysics seems, indeed, an intellectual achievement like Homer’s or Dante’s, a comprehensive vision that, unlike theirs, of course, can reflect and incorporate modern skepticism even as it refines and fulfils age-old human ways of making ultimate sense of our world.

  Being agents ourselves, and particularly attuned to social action, we human beings tend to think of cause in terms of agency and to explain unknown causes in terms of unseen agents: hence all the gods, spirits, witches, fairies, and so on that have appealed to humankind for as long as we have had language capable of telling stories.8 Nabokov knows he cannot know directly whether there is unseen agency behind this world, but something in the world’s inexhaustibleness, which he reads as generosity, and in its intricacy, which he reads as design—even design seemingly hidden for rediscovery by our intelligent eyes—suggests to him there is some mindlike agent ultimately behind things.

  And because we explain things in terms of the difference between the material and the mental, or between the physical and the spiritual (we can cause a material object to move by touching it in the right way, but we can cause a “mental object,” another person, to move without our needing to physically touch them), we also have an age-old conviction that the spiritual is not subject to the same laws as the physical. That being so, and the mental or spiritual being unseen, we have often come to the conclusion that perhaps our spirits, our nonmaterial parts, survive, unseen, the material decay brought on by death. Nabokov again knows he cannot know that we survive death, but as in the case of conscious agency as ultimate cause, he uses the very fact that we have no direct evidence of the survival of mortal consciousness as the beginnings of his argument. We cannot know because an existence beyond death would have to be so inconceivably different from the conditions of mortal consciousness that it is beyond our apprehension.

  This is why I find it so annoying when readers of Nabokov, aware of the ways in which the shape and structure of his metaphysics have been described, tend at once to look for explanations in terms of the metaphysics.9 This is not at all how Nabokov has written since his work began to mature, in 1925, apart from the unique exception of Transparent Things, where we see the story through the eyes of the dead narrator. In the vast bulk of his work, there is no presumption of the otherworldly. He presents a seemingly self-sufficient material world, with human beings in it who are certainly mental agents, who may have a conviction or a strong curiosity about something mindlike behind or beyond matter (as in the case of, say, Fyodor or Shade), but whose conviction never seems supported, or whose curiosity never seems answered, within the fiction. Fyodor imagines fate on his and Zina’s side, but they are then locked out of the apartment where they could be together at last. Shade feels as confident that his daughter is somewhere alive as that he will wake up the next morning, but he is killed that very day. It is only after we have mastered all the details of the particular world of a novel, forming a relationship to its parts and its time quite unlike that of the characters as they live it, that we can see that the very evidence that seems to refute the hopes of a Fyodor or a Shade actually testifies to their being fulfilled in a way greater than even they could imagine.

  Another reason Nabokov’s metaphysics seems to me such an amazing intellectual achievement is that in his efforts to encompass modern skepticism, he finds himself prompted to such extraordinary artistic achievements. His metaphysics forces Nabokov to invent worlds that are self-sufficient, on one level, more or less akin to our normal modern way of reading our world—although of course he sees these worlds more exactly and more imaginatively than the rest of us—but worlds that nevertheless, the more closely we look, seem to require a deeper and utterly unexpected level of explanation. No one else has ever been able to create such hidden worlds of discovery within stories so fascinating and original and moving on a first reading.

  Whether or not one shares Nabokov’s sense of a designer behind the world and some sort of deliverance beyond death, it seems to me, does not matter artistically. Of course personally it would be wonderful if Nabokov’s metaphysics were true and one could believe it, but I cannot do so: it seems to result from hopes rather than sober recognitions. The mimicry, for instance, that Nabokov took as such strong evidence of a conscious design concealed behind nature, a cosmic hide-and-seek, can in fact now be explained perfectly well, even in it
s most intricate forms, in terms of evolution by Darwinian natural selection.

  But as a matter of attitude, Nabokov’s response to his world is wonderfully refreshing and fertile. If the optimist sees a glass half filled with water as half-full and the pessimist sees it as half-empty, Nabokov sees the empty glass as overfull: merely looking at the reflections of the scene around the glass and the refracted distortions of the scene behind the glass are more than enough to quench the mind’s thirst. But he also sees the full glass as empty: his thirst to savor and understand the world is infinitely greater than even the full glass can provide.

  Nabokov has a sense of the inexhaustible riches of the world, even a small aspect of the world (the butterfly genus Lycaenidae, for instance), yet this, nevertheless, seems to drive him in quest of an even more inexhaustible relationship to his world. “Though I personally would be satisfied to spend the whole of eternity gazing at a blue hill or a butterfly,” he wrote in 1940, “I would feel the poorer if I accepted the idea of there not existing still more vivid means of knowing butterflies and hills.”10 We may or may not share his sense that the very riches of the world amount to a generosity offering hope that there is some even more inexhaustible surprise beyond what our mortal minds can see. But whether we share that sense or not, we can appreciate the power of his drive to know this world and to know what might lie beyond it and his capacity to awaken us to the surprise of this world and the surprises that perhaps lie behind it, if only we could know more.

  What matters in Nabokov’s metaphysics is not so much his answers, then, although these are wonderfully elegant, intellectually and artistically, as the fact that both his questions and his answers arise from such a full appreciation of this world and from such a desire for more.

  7. Nabokov’s Afterlife

  Don Barton Johnson, who was a cryptologist and a Slavic linguist before the Russian literary scholar, editor, and publisher Carl Proffer invited him to solve Nabokovian puzzles, had become by 1985, with the publication of Worlds In Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov, the leading American Nabokovian of his day. He later founded the journal Nabokov Studies and the electronic listserv, Nabokv-L, both still running.

  Despite his own work on the relation between this world and a next or other world in Nabokov, this natural skeptic came to feel that the metaphysics was almost superfluous icing on the Nabokovian cake. At the Nabokov centenary conference in Cambridge in 1999—where Zoran Kuzmanovich stirred so much discussion when he asked about the place of the metaphysics in Nabokov—Jane Grayson, the conference organizer, invited a concluding discussion on future directions in Nabokov scholarship. Among other things, Don Johnson and I addressed Zoran’s question, and I later persuaded Don that we should write up our remarks for a dialogical prologue to the twovolume record of the conference. Here’s my contribution. I try to explain the relationship between Nabokov’s imagination, as we see it in his writing, and his ethics, metaphysics, and psychology—or to show the depths beneath the dazzling surface and the surface as an entrance to the depths.

  Don Johnson concludes with a series of linked questions about responding to and evaluating Nabokov. Let me follow his cue and start with my own series. Do we respond to Nabokov, and do we rate him highly, because of his ethical seriousness or his metaphysical range or his epistemological depth? Or do we respond to him and rate him rather for his gifts of word and image, character and story, fictional detail and form? Or for less usual literary values, such as his unique relationship to his curious readers, the challenges and rewards he offers us? Or for his humor, his irony, his pathos? Or for his alertness to nature or art, to individual cognition or social interaction?

  In fact, of course, readers respond to authors and rate them in different ways. Some, like Don himself, will particularly enjoy the local puzzles in Nabokov’s work; others, like Ellen Pifer, will pay these little heed but be passionately interested in his ethics.1 Yet all readers are likely to have their imaginations caught first, if at all, at the level of word, character, story, feeling. Some, of course, may be deterred by obscure words like “granoblastically,” by repellent characters like Axel Rex, by slow stories like Smurov’s, by perverse feelings like Humbert’s, or by a sense that Nabokov demands too much of his readers or dismisses or refuses to care for too many of us and our kind. A proportion of readers who reject Nabokov out of such considerations may gradually be won back by adequate explanations of the ethical, epistemological, metaphysical, aesthetic, scientific, psychological, or sociological reasons for this or that feature or characteristic of his work, while others who might otherwise enjoy a story once and then set it aside might be encouraged to return, to linger, and to discover more as they perceive these dimensions for themselves or with the help of others.

  A classic has to appeal to many readers over many readings and many changes in taste, personal and historical. No work can satisfy every taste (a Vermeer can do things that a Breughel cannot and vice versa), but the more dimensions of excellence and interest a work has, the more likely it is to endure, to invite us to keep returning to something that somehow still remains new. The ethical, epistemological, and other dimensions, in other words, are not extraliterary but enrich the literary experience. Their multiplicity and consistency add to the value of a literary work as their absence or inconsistency diminish it—although, again, it must be stressed that readers will respond differently to these different dimensions, as well as to their multiplicity or paucity or their consistency or inconsistency. Of course, Nabokov’s special gift is to suggest so many dimensions without ponderous system building, with the lightest and fastest of touches, keeping our imaginations off guard, jumping from one sudden foothold to another, rather than plodding along a predictable path.

  Don seems to imply that one side of Nabokov’s art (the ethical, say, or the metaphysical) is readily detachable from another (in particular, the aesthetic). This was not Nabokov’s attitude (“the forces of imagination . . . in the long run, are the forces of good”;2 “the inherent morality of uninhibited art” [SL 57]), nor is it mine.

  The imagination tries to see things from many different points of view, and that has ethical consequences. It is no accident that Shakespeare, the greatest verbal imagination the word has known, was also the greatest creator of human character. One of the many reasons he remains so perpetually fresh is that he can see from the side of an Aaron as well as a Titus, of an Angela as well as an Isabella, a Bernardine as well as a Duke Vincentio, a Caliban as well as a Prospero. For that reason he has done as much as anyone to extend our sense of humanity, to make us see the depth, flaws, and strengths in people high and low, like us or not. Nabokov works differently, depicting the egotism of the ego from within, in a way that makes us confront our own egotism, as well as encouraging us to transcend it, to exercise the full freedom of our imaginations. His work would be vastly poorer if he did not invite us to see from Lucette’s point of view and Ada’s, as well as from Van’s; from Shade’s point of view and Hazel’s, as well as from Kinbote’s; from Lolita’s point of view and Charlotte’s, as well as from Humbert’s.

  Not only does Nabokov see and realize in his fiction both the freedom and the confinement of the ego—of those characters at the periphery as well as at the centers of his stories—but his imagination also tries to look at and, again, to realize human life not only from within but from without. He talks of Gogol’s religion as “imaginative, humanly imaginative (and thus metaphysically limited)” (NG 22), and he tries to avoid such limits, to pass beyond the desperate attachment to the official version of Western metaphysics we find in T. S. Eliot or the uncritical acceptance of any not currently official version we find in Yeats.

  Hence it is for good reason that Don’s remarks focus particularly on the metaphysical side of Nabokov, a subject, as he points out, increasingly dominant in Nabokov studies over the last twenty years. He modestly underplays his own invaluable part, in Worlds in Regression and after, in this development. But he asks if
it would make any difference whether Nabokov’s otherworldly philosophy were shopworn. To me it certainly would. Eliot’s craving for the authority of tradition and Yeats’s refuge in the irrational to me seriously diminish their art. Nabokov is of such interest partly because he is such a clear and independent thinker, and his style is the way it is because he has such clarity and independence of thought. You cannot detach the style or the wit from the rest.

  Don now speaks of a plurality of “levels” or “worlds.” Advisedly so, in my view. I found his older “two-world” terminology unsatisfactory because, first, Nabokov stresses in numerous ways that the “other” world he suspects surrounds the one we see is somehow in as well as beyond this one. Second, the idea of two worlds collapses or ignores several possible levels in the Nabokovian “beyond”: a more or less personal afterlife; a more or less personal fate, designing force or forces, or series of such forces not responsible for the world but creatively contributing to or attempting to contribute to the designs of time; and a more or less ultimate conscious creative power, or god, more or less emergent, more or less responsible for and more or less providentially predesigning “this” world. Third, “two worlds” overdefines as it undercounts. Nabokov suggests possibilities and possibilities within possibilities or, if you like, worlds within worlds: worlds in regression.