by Brian Boyd
(SoVN 499)
That sentence seems to me a key to Nabokov’s sense of humor and to the sense in his humor. Sineusov, the narrator, has recently met someone from his past, a man named Falter, who has perhaps become insane, or at least somehow utterly remote from “conventions of everyday life, systems, persons,” after he has had a mental explosion in which the truth of things was revealed to him (within the story, Nabokov makes this seem quite plausible). Because Falter happens to be physically strong, this explosion of truth didn’t quite shatter him completely, but when he passed on to someone else the solution to the riddle of life, the other person died of insight or fright. In the bothersome aftermath of that death, Falter won’t pass on his secret to anyone else, especially not to Sineusov, who’s desperate to find out if there is something beyond mortal existence, something that will suggest he isn’t forever separated from his dead wife.
When Sineusov writes to his wife, then, about their shared inkling that laughter “is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world,” it seems a kind of analogy to the experience of Falter, who seems himself a chance big ape of truth astray in our world. Laughter, Nabokov suggests along with Sineusov, is something let loose in our world that bespeaks a much richer but inarticulate truth about things than our little understandings can have within this world. What could that mean?
Nabokov wanted to be funny at every level, and in every way. That doesn’t mean he was a standup comedian, or an Oscar Wilde, who has to get in a certain number of similar laughs or of precious paradoxes per minute or per page. He once said “All writers that are worth anything are humorists. I’m not P. G. Wodehouse. I’m not a funny man, but give me an example of a great writer who is not a humorist… . Dostoevsky’s slapstick is wonderful, but in his tragedy he is a journalist” (Meras interview).
What Nabokov tried for in his own fiction was to mingle laughter and its opposites: humor and horror, laughter and loss. He insisted that “genuine art mixes categories.” He also tried to find as many different kinds of humor as possible, some fast, some slow-release, some local, some global, some verbal, some situational, some sympathetic, some barbed.
He never thought much of his spontaneous powers because he felt he could do so much better if he had time to prepare. But his spontaneity had its own moments. When Alfred Appel Jr. was visiting in the late sixties, he told Nabokov about a nun who complained to him after class that a couple in the back of the lecture theater wouldn’t stop spooning. Pleased with his response, Appel told Nabokov he had had replied: “In this day and age you’re lucky that’s all they were doing.” Nabokov let out a mock groan: “What an opportunity you missed: you should have said ‘You’re lucky they weren’t forking!’ ” Or when Lionel Trilling interviewed him in New York for a live television broadcast—in the days before he began to insist on only written questions submitted in advance, to which he would supply written answers he would read from during the “interview”—he was talking about Lolita and used the word “philistine.” Trilling asked him to explain what he meant by philistines. He shot back: “Readymade souls in plastic bags.”
But it’s the humor of his art, his planned play, that really deserves our attention. Humor runs all through his work. Nabokov was a respected composer of chess problems, and his problems are famous not for their difficulty—the usual measure of a good chess problem—but for their wit, their startling novelty of conception. So, for instance, he devised a problem in which the queen was the obstacle to the successful solution—“such a powerful piece—and in the way!” (Glory xiii), as he himself commented. Or another that seems to have an obvious solution but that the sophisticated solver is invited to doubt because there’s the shadow of a fashionable chess theme planted—but it’s an exotic wild goose chase, ultimately sending the “by now ultrasophisticated solver” back to something like the original solution (SM 291).
The same playful originality of overall conception characterizes all his novels. His first, Mary, rests on one simple joke: the heroine of the novel, whose arrival the whole book builds toward, doesn’t appear after all. His second, King, Queen, Knave, already a good deal more complex, leads up to a murder, but the victim survives. One of the murderers dies instead, and her death paradoxically brings the other would-be murderer back to life.
His longest and greatest Russian novel, The Gift, starts on April Fool’s Day (and that turns out to be a joke with several false bottoms) and ends with a marvelous situational joke half-hidden for the good reader to find. And it takes a Nabokov to invent a novel in the wildly unnovelistic form of poem and line-by-line commentary and then to have the commentary bear no relation to the poem, or to write a long lyrical novel about a long-lasting, lyrically happy incestuous love.
Nabokov offers humor at every level from the pun (Humbert’s “pin,” his name for gin and pineapple, or “Parkington,” one of those nondescript American towns whose center and soul is a parking lot), to the allusion (in Ada, Antiterra’s randy nineteenth-century King Victor replaces our history’s prim Queen Victoria), to character (pseudo-seductive Charlotte Haze, mishappy Pnin, Kinbote frantically spying on his neighbor and force-feeding him the story of Zembla), to situation (Humbert stuffing Lolita with sleeping pills, which don’t work, or stuffing Quilty with bullets, which also don’t seem to work), to structure and social satire.
Why so much humor? To show he’s funny, to impress others? Some read Nabokov’s compulsion to be original—which he certainly had—as a compulsion to demonstrate his superiority to others. This kind of reader responds to Nabokov’s deliberateness, to his display of style, as evidence that he has no substance. It was to combat this response to Nabokov, more than any other misconception, that I was motivated to write his biography, to reach the wide audience a biography could command.
To me—I’m a simple man—it seems fairer to say that Nabokov is funny because he wants to amuse us, just as he’s stylish because he wants to excite our imaginations and to make us realize what the imagination can do.
One of his characters refers to “knight moves of the mind.” That’s just what Nabokov offers again and again: “I guess it’s your father under that oak, isn’t it?” Greg Erminin asks Ada. “No, it’s an elm,” she answers (Ada 92). “I was born in 1910, in Paris” Humbert tells us. “My father was a gentle, easygoing person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera… . My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three” (Lolita 11–12; the greatest parenthesis in all of literature, Tom Stoppard has said).
Nabokov makes these and other knight moves of the mind because he wants to wean us from the habitual and to show us the room for surprise everywhere in our world. One character in Look at the Harlequins! tells the hero, a kind of mock Nabokov, when he’s still just a boy: “Stop moping! … Look at the harlequins!” “What harlequins! Where?” “Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together—jokes, images—and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!” (LATH 8–9). Since Nabokov has called the image or the figure of speech “the main, sacred quiddity and eye-spot of a poet’s genius” (SO 234), the juxtaposition here of “jokes, images” proves it’s no mean role he assigns to humor.
In both imagery and humor we bring things together in unexpected ways. Now, it’s possible to do that quietly, and Nabokov can be stealthy indeed. But it’s also possible to foreground what is being done, to stress the power of the mind behind an image or a joke. Like the metaphysical poets, Nabokov often displays the power of his own artifice, in images often deliberately playful and far-fetched.
Let me give just one instance of the overlap of joke and image in Nabokov. Charles II of Zembla, not yet crowned, is homosexual and misogynistic but under
half-hearted amorous siege from the wonderfully named Fleur de Fyler, the daughter of the ambitious Countess de Fyler, who has set her daughter on the king.
She wore on the second day of their ridiculous cohabitation nothing except a kind of buttonless and sleeveless pajama top.
The sight of her four bare limbs and three mousepits (Zemblan anatomy) irritated him.
(PF 110)
By foregrounding themselves, Nabokov’s images often suggest the presence of the mind behind them, and often, curiously enough, the presence of the mind—or the possibility of its presence—in things themselves: “The rain would stop one moment and the next start pouring again, as if practicing” (KQK 248).
Nabokov highlights presence of mind and contrasts it with absence of mind, what he calls poshlost’: a taking things for granted, an unquestioned acceptance of things, ideas, judgments, especially when they pretend to mental distinction, to classiness. Both his imagery and his jokes stress the activity of mind, in himself as their inventor, in his audience, and often in what he writes about, whether animate or a playfully personified inanimate.
He stresses the unruly freedom and power of the mind, as opposed to the glossy parade of poshlost’. For that reason, he is pointedly original in his imagery and his humor. He once suggested, “Perhaps humor is simply seeing things in a singular, unique, extraordinary way. This almost always sounds funny to the average person” (Meras interview). He is also compulsively disconcerting: and he once defined humor as “loss of balance—and appreciation of losing it” (Newsweek interview).
His refusal to accept the way things have commonly been perceived, his urge to see new juxtapositions, no matter how incongruous, unites his sense of humor to something that might not seem to fit with the humorist: his rigorous, painstaking scholarship, whether devoting a year to his hilarious but meticulously researched Life of Chernyshevsky in The Gift, or a decade and his eyesight to the laboratory study of butterflies, or another decade to translating and annotating Eugene Onegin.
He refuses to accept fixed categories. For that reason he confounds the distinction between humor and horror in the nightmare of Bend Sinister or the sick fairytale of Lolita. Humor saturates what ought to be tragic scenes. Humbert has lusted after Lolita but left her untouched until the morning after the night at the Enchanted Hunters when she enters Humbert’s “world, umber and black Humberland” (Lolita 168). It’s a scene of great tension and disastrous consequence, but because of Nabokov’s humor and Humbert’s we are tense on Humbert’s behalf more than Lolita’s. The sleeping pills haven’t put Lolita to sleep; the loud noises in the hotel make ironic comments from the wings on Humbert poised over his prey,
Lolita curved with her spine to Humbert, Humbert resting his head on his hand and burning with desire and dyspepsia.
The latter necessitated a trip to the bathroom for a draft of water, which is the best medicine I know in my case, except perhaps milk with radishes; and when I re-entered the strange pale-striped fastness where Lolita’s old and new clothes reclined in various attitudes of enchantment on pieces of furniture that seemed vaguely afloat, my impossible daughter sat up and in clear tones demanded a drink, too.
(Lolita 132–33)
The night of unbearable tension, of oscillating hope and frustration, at last draws to an end, and Humbert addresses us: “Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but by six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me” (134).
She wakes, and shortly bends over to whisper in his ear,
and gradually the odd sense of living in a brand new, mad new dream world, where everything was permissible, came over me as I realized what she was suggesting. I answered I did not know what game she and Charlie played. “You mean you have never—?” her features twisted into a stare of disgusted incredulity. “You have never—” she started again. I took time out by nuzzling her a little. “Lay off, will you,” she said with a twangy whine, hastily removing her brown shoulder from my lips. (It was very curious the way she considered—and kept doing so for a long time—all caresses except kisses on the mouth or the stark act of love either “romantic slosh” or “abnormal”.) …
She saw the stark act merely as part of a youngster’s furtive world, unknown to adults. What adults did for purposes of procreation was no business of hers. My life was handled by little Lo in an energetic, matter-of-fact manner as if it were an insensate gadget unconnected with me.
(Lolita 135–36)
A childhood has just been destroyed, and still we can’t help smiling.
“Invent reality!” the mock muse of Look at the Harlequins! tells Vadim, our mock Vladimir. Nabokov’s refusal to accept the fixity of common categories, received evaluations, and rigid frameworks of all kinds, his subversion of standard notions, far from constituting an evasion of the real, has direct implications in the real world. “Curiosity,” he proposes in Bend Sinister, “is insubordination in its purest form” (46), and laughter, he suggests in “Tyrants Destroyed,” is the way to defeat tyrants, to stop our minds being colonized or tyrannized.
Nabokov claims he has “no moral in tow” (Lolita 316). “Satire is a lesson,” he says, “parody is a game” (SO 75), and it’s parody he admits to. Not because he has nothing to teach, in fact, but because he believes that games get us closer to truth than stolid lessons: the surprise of the game or the imagination can reveal more than the earnest plod of instruction or the strict sequence of logic.
Although he would not have accepted the old definition of comedy as corrective, showing, as Sir Philip Sidney put it, “the common errors of our life” “in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be; so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one,”1 he did in fact have a very strong corrective impulse.
His critical humor, his barbs, could be directed even at friends. After noticing that Harry Levin always implied he had read absolutely everything, Nabokov as he talked to him one night invented a nineteenth-century novelist and elaborated in great detail upon his life and works while Levin nodded as if of course he knew this person and his work. Nabokov’s could also turn his corrective humor on literary enemies. In the emigration, the critic Georgy Adamovich regularly panned Nabokov’s work, so Nabokov published two poems under the name of “Vasily Shishkov,” and when Adamovich hailed them as works of genius Nabokov then rubbed salt in the wound by publishing a story called “Vasily Shishkov” that toyed with the question of the relationship between Shishkov and Nabokov.
If really provoked, Nabokov could aim his critical humor at his own critics. When William Rowe insisted on seeing sexual allusions everywhere, Nabokov denounced his “torrent of Freudian drivel, which allows him to construe ‘metrical length’ as an erection and ‘rhyme’ as a sexual climax. No less ludicrous is his examination of Lolita’s tennis and his claim that the tennis balls represent testicles (those of a giant albino, no doubt)” (SO 306). He could apply caustic correctives to literary reputations, to snobbery or racism or pretentiousness, to poshlost’, to Freud, to Marx, to Hitler, to all he saw as opponents of freedom.
For Nabokov a sense of humor is closely related to a capacity for freedom, to the mind’s consciousness of its own freedom. He felt strongly the tension between the extraordinary freedom of the mind and its entrapment within the limits of the human: the powers of the mind are triumphant, its limits absurd and humiliating. He explores that tension and that irony again and again, in a Herman, a Humbert, a Kinbote, or, in a different way, in his own person.
In the opening chapter of his autobiography he describes the shock of becoming aware of time, “so boundless at first blush,” the shock of “the awakening of consciousness.” He recalls the particular scene, with his father in the resplendent uniform of the Horse Guards, and adds: “My father, let it be noted, had served his term of military traini
ng long before I was born, so I suppose he had that day put on the trappings of his old regiment as a festive joke. To a joke, then, I owe my first glimpse of complete consciousness—which again has recapitulatory implications, since the first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile” (SM 22).
His humor, like his style, offers a chance to see and savor the freedom of the mind, to see how easily we leap from invention to invention, how our minds can twist in midair. Nabokov wants to suggest that we should respond to our world not passively but actively, that we should not dully impose standard expectations on things but notice with surprise and delight when they do not fit what we expect. That incongruity between expectation and actuality is fundamental to humor. “The unusual is funny in itself,” he once said. “A man slips and falls down. It is the contrary of gravity in both sense” (Meras interview).
He wants to show us how active, how nimble, how unexpected our minds can be—how we can put our own spin on our world when we put two things together, a joke, an image, and invent reality, when we become not the passive products of our immediate world but its active shapers. Yet at the same time he asks us to respect our world and let it catch us by surprise, if we watch closely enough.
Beyond that, Nabokov wants his humor to connect us with the surprises that might lie beyond the understanding of the world that our minds trap us within. “Life is a great surprise,” he makes John Shade say, “and I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.” As a child, Nabokov notes, in the passage where he describes that first flush of excitement at being “plunged into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time,” he was “unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison” (SM 21, 20). He came to feel that beyond the prison of conscious time, beyond the “solitary confinement of the self,” there must be freer, less restricted modes of existence, which perhaps we might reach through the doorway of death.