by Brian Boyd
Nabokov rethinks story, scene, structure, and narrative situation out of an impatience with convention, a desire for artistic originality, a search for a singular way of revealing the singular circumstances of a new story, and a unique sense of both the scope and the limits of consciousness that inspires him to make the most of the gaps and the links between character, reader, and author. And because the human mind’s capacity to represent, or meta-represent, is central to its power,6 and because he is always preoccupied with the relationship between the inner (the individual consciousness) and the outer (the world outside the individual consciousness), Nabokov also incorporates in his stories an extraordinary number and variety of metarepresentations of the story, of parts that reflect the whole.
While it engages our curiosity and emotions as a story, a Nabokov novel always intimates that the narrative is also something else, a strategy as much as a story: an image or a metaphor, a joke, a problem, a design, a playful puzzle, or a series of interlocking puzzles prepared by the author for us somehow to solve. The riddling strategy nevertheless arises out of the particular circumstances of the story, out of some special constraint or situation in the story, rather than being imposed on it arbitrarily, and is therefore different from work to work.
Throughout his stories, from the local to the global level, Nabokov attends to what we and his characters can know at a particular point and to the difference between the characters’ knowledge and what we as readers might be able to infer from our position outside their world. He stokes our expectations and rewards our capacity to notice, imagine, infer, recall. He becomes a kind of personal trainer in mental flexibility, his novels workouts that stretch our capacity for attention, curiosity, imagination, and memory not to stress our limits, as so often in twentieth-century literature, but to extend them.
FAMILY LIKENESSES
Nabokov’s stories may resemble others in their timeless preoccupation with love and death, and they may be different from one another because of the special strategy he devises for each, but they also have a family likeness that sets them apart from other fiction.
A recurrent plot structure can identify an author’s key concerns. In Austen, for instance, it is the difficult and potentially dangerous choice of marriage partner, because in her world nothing matters more than people reading other people with maximum care, and never do we need to read others more carefully than when considering the commitment of marriage. In Dickens, it is a legacy, contested, denied, or imposed, because he senses that the world’s real riches are often cruelly hoarded from those who deserve them. As we follow the characters’ approach to a more equitable redistribution of life’s bounty at the end of the novel, Dickens’s exuberant invention dispenses for us imaginative riches to match those he finds in his world.
In Nabokov the key structure is the hero’s obsession. On the one hand, it fires up an invaluable private intensity in the protagonist; on the other, it keeps him apart both from his immediate world and from the world of freedom and fulfillment he compulsively imagines—and here lies the source of so much of the humor, poignancy, and irony of Nabokov’s fiction and the emotional charge of his unreliable narrators.
Partly because of the dominating role of the hero’s obsession, Nabokov’s stories tend to avoid what we think of as a “dramatic” development of plot, plot advancing through conflict, through the clash of character actions, reactions, and interactions. Precisely because conflict catches our attention so easily, Nabokov feels, it has become a convention and a trap for storytelling. It generates a false picture of life as a series of forced moves leading to an inescapable outcome. And it seems to imply that our lives are shaped by our engagement, and especially our clashes, with others, when for him there is so much more to the mind’s involvement in and detachment from its world.
Instead of the standard drama of action and reaction, Nabokov’s plots tend to show the accumulating pattern of a single life, the whole distinctive pattern of a hero’s past, the unique rhythms of his “fate,” the special design of a person’s individuality that extends through a life and often into the moment of death. His stories are not biographies; they do not attempt to cover the whole of a life with the same consistency. They tend to focus on a key time, often not short enough to be a crisis, usually not long enough for a lifetime.
In Nabokov’s fiction each life follows its own distinct pattern, indiscernible in advance, ever clearer in retrospect. But certain moves recur again and again. First, the myth of return: the futile attempt to return to or relive the past. Next, the myth of arrival: the futile attempt to foresee or control the future. Third, the surprise of the ending, a new possibility that undercuts what we and the heroes have foreseen but in a way that sends us, and perhaps them, back to the beginning. The ending may mark the failure to reach a coveted past or a coveted future or both at once. Often, it can crack the solid surface of the work’s world, yet it may also send us spinning back to the beginning, returning to all that accumulates in the course of the hero’s life but with an answer to the puzzle of the whole perhaps somehow nearer and a way of closing the gap between character, author, and reader somehow more possible.
MARY: ZOOM IN ON OPENING
How does Nabokovian narration operate at the local level? Let us focus on two opening scenes: the first chapter of Nabokov’s first novel, Mary (1926), where Ganin and Alfyorov are stuck in the elevator, and the first two chapters of his second-to-last novel, Transparent Things (1972), where Hugh Person is hailed by the narrator as he arrives at a hotel in a Swiss mountain resort. These examples of Nabokov’s very early and very late work are not his strongest stories and have little of the force of The Defense or Pnin, let alone Lolita or Pale Fire, but much of what is true here should therefore be true a fortiori elsewhere in Nabokov.
Uncharacteristically, Mary starts with direct speech: “Lev Glevo. Lev Glebovich? A name like that’s enough to twist your tongue off, my dear fellow.”7 Helmut Bonheim has shown that in the search for dramatic immediacy in narrative, direct speech, once a rare start for stories, became almost the normal beginning for fiction in the twentieth century.8 Nabokov rarely conforms to twentieth-century norms, but this was his first book—and as he said, its autobiographical basis, its offering the writer “the relief of getting rid of oneself” in a first novel, “is one of the very few common rules I have accepted” (Mary, xi). Yet although Nabokov was much less original in Mary than even in the start of his next novel, he was already inventive, already himself. Ganin’s tongue-twister name is funny, of course, and Nabokov’s humor will never be far from his storytelling. But beneath the immediate humor lies more.
Stories, Aristotle says, must have beginnings, middles, and ends, and the beginnings of stories need exposition to orient us. Exposition had become stylized and slick on the stage, as Nabokov knew well. He writes in “The Tragedy of Tragedy”:
A more sophisticated form of the French “dusting the furniture” exposition is when, instead of the valet and the maid discovered onstage, we have two visitors arriving on the stage as the curtain is going up, speaking of what brought them, and of the people in the house. It is a pathetic attempt to comply with the request of critics and teachers who demand that the exposition coincide with action, and actually the entrance of two visitors is action. But why on earth should two people who arrived on the same train and who had ample time to discuss everything during the journey, why must they struggle to keep silent till the minute of arrival whereupon they start talking of their hosts in the wrongest place imaginable—the parlor of the house where they are guests? Why? Because the author must have them explode right here with a time-bomb explosion.
The next trick, to take the most obvious ones, is the promise of somebody’s arrival. So and-so is expected. We know that so-and-so will invariably come.
(MUSSR 334–35)
Mary’s ending overturns that last expectation, and its beginning radically reworks the “dusting the furniture” exposition through dialogue. The
dialogue does take place, but comically, in the dark, with neither participant able to see the other, and it involves an effusive Alfyorov, whose very cheerfulness and garrulity irritate the peevish Ganin still further. The situation in the lift, with time to kill and with Alfyorov happily prattling away, introduces on the first page the name of his wife, Mary, due to arrive in six days’ time. And since the scene, although it records the speech of both, clearly focuses on Ganin and his perceptions and thoughts, since it therefore identifies him as the likely protagonist, and since the novel is called Mary, we are primed to expect that some relationship will link Ganin and Alfyorov’s wife.
Nabokov’s economy, his comic inventiveness of situation, his critical attitude to narrative convention even in this exposition, his ability to rework exposition by way of the personalities and moods of the two characters are all already in evidence long before we discover how the story’s ending undermines the expectation that a novel called Mary and the announcement of her arrival in its exposition will lead to her arriving, as it were, “on stage.” Nabokov’s attention to exposition and preparation and the wit with which he reworks them already operate at a high level.
Nabokov pays keen attention to what characters and readers can know at a particular point: his epistemology is very much present in the texture of his telling. The second paragraph of Mary is this, in response to Alfyorov’s comment that Ganin’s name is a tongue twister:
“Yes it is,” Ganin agreed somewhat coldly, trying to make out the face of his interlocutor in the unexpected darkness. He was annoyed by the absurd situation in which they both found themselves and by this enforced conversation with a stranger.
(Mary, 1)
Nabokov does not spell out at once what the absurd situation is, but offers us a little challenge and lets us have the pleasure of deducing, if not immediately, then within a few lines, that what has caused this “unexpected darkness” must be a stalled elevator. At the same time, he is true to Ganin’s inability to see Alfyorov or recall what he looks like, and in being true to this, he cheerily toys with the expectation that a novelist will describe characters as they step on stage and shows that the self-contained Ganin has paid no heed, before they found themselves stuck in the elevator together, to this newcomer to his pension.
Nabokov attends closely to and makes the most of what his characters can know: think of Albinus’s ignorance of Axel Rex’s presence, Krug’s blindness to the pressure being exerted on those near to him, the inability of the narrator of “The Vane Sisters” to see the message Cynthia and Sybil spell out for him, Humbert’s cluelessness as to the identity of Lolita’s “abductor,” or Van’s uncertainty about Ada’s involvement with Percy de Prey despite his seeing all too clearly the evidence of Percy’s interest. Nabokov also attends to what we as readers cannot yet know but might be able to infer from our position outside the characters—unable to know as soon as Ganin and Alfyorov do that they are stuck in an elevator but able as soon as Mary is mentioned to see that in a novel entitled Mary she will somehow connect these two men. He stokes our expectations and rewards us for our inferences, our capacity to notice, imagine, deduce, and remember. Joyce, by contrast, pays too little attention to what the reader knows; Faulkner tries to match Joyce by being deliberately difficult; Robbe-Grillet thwarts the reader’s accumulating knowledge; but nobody else shows such alertness to what the reader can know and infer or dripfeeds such constant rewards for attention.
But despite the glimpses of Nabokov at his future best we catch in Mary’s superb opening, the novel settles from its second chapter into a rather conventional description of the pension and Ganin’s situation within it. A finely observed report of a Russian émigré milieu, with Nabokov’s naturalist’s eye and artist’s hand working closely together, it sketches a revealing picture of Ganin’s dissatisfied life, but it is the sort of thing many writers could have managed or come close to. Nabokov has not yet quite become the unique writer he soon would be.
TRANSPARENT THINGS: ZOOM IN
By the time of Transparent Things, Nabokov had long been a nonpareil. The novel opens:
Here’s the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn’t hear me.
Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.
But the future has no such reality (as the pictured past and the perceived present possess); the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought.
Hullo, person! What’s the matter, don’t pull me. I’m not bothering him. Oh, all right. Hullo, person…(last time, in a very small voice).
(TT 1)
So far as we can make out, this is not one character speaking to another but the narrator trying to speak to a character, although why the character should be hailed in that clumsy “Hullo, person!” fashion is quite unclear. Nor is it clear why the person doesn’t hear, nor why the sudden shift to this interesting philosophical discussion of the future should occur here, nor what the relationship between “Persons” in the second paragraph might be to the “person” hailed in the first, nor who it is who doesn’t want the speaker or narrator to bother this person or why. Here we cannot make out, even though we want to, speaker, addressee, bystanders, setting, or situation, although we can sense that these are all present, if only we knew how. The “exposition” exposes little but our uncertainty about where we are.
Never before has Nabokov pushed quite so far, and he’s too much of a storyteller not to know that we couldn’t stand much of this, that we need a story. He gives us one, at the start of the second chapter: “As Hugh Person extricated his angular bulk from the taxi that had brought him to this shoddy mountain resort from Trux, his eyes went up to check the aspect of the Ascot Hotel against an eight-year-old recollection. A dreadful building of gray stone and brown wood, it sported cherry-red shutters which he remembered as apple green.” Here is storytelling as we know it: an identifiable character named and described, performing an identifiable action in a recognizable world, in a setting described and named. What, then, is so special about Nabokovian storytelling, even late Nabokov storytelling, after the disconcerting chapter 1?
What’s special is everything I have omitted. Here’s how chapter 2 of Transparent Things actually begins, with all the Nabokovian peculiarity reinstated:
As the person, Hugh Person (corrupted “Peterson” and pronounced “Parson” by some) extricated his angular bulk from the taxi that had brought him to this shoddy mountain resort from Trux, and while his head was still lowered in an opening meant for emerging dwarfs, his eyes went up—not to acknowledge the helpful gesture sketched by the driver who had opened the door for him but to check the aspect of the Ascot Hotel (Ascot!) against an eight-year-old recollection, one fifth of his life, engrained by grief. A dreadful building of gray stone and brown wood, it sported cherry-red shutters (not all of them shut) which by some mnemoptical trick he remembered as apple green. The steps of the porch were flanked with electrified carriage lamps on a pair of iron posts. Down those steps an aproned valet came tripping to take the two bags, and (under one arm) the shoebox, all of which the driver had alertly removed from the yawning boot. Person pays alert driver.
(TT 3)
Earlier I contrasted Nabokov the stylist with Nabokov the storyteller. It may be an artificial distinction, certainly not an absolute one, but it is true that a story’s needs may be at odds with sheer style. This is high-energy prose, yet it will never appear in any anthology of fine flourishes: it’s no “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins,” or “the cradle rocks above an abyss.” This is what I mean by saying that Nabokov, like late Shakespeare, subordinates style to story. Shakespeare was an immeasurably more sophisticated dramatic storyteller in his late play Cymbeline than in his youthful Romeo and Juliet. He had to write with m
ore compression to achieve more complex aims, but where the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations includes phrases from Romeo and Juliet as early as the play’s first speech and then from scene after scene, it cites nothing of Cymbeline until almost a thousand lines into the play and then not dialogue but an inset song. Like Shakespeare, Nabokov can exude eloquence but subdues it to the local needs of his story. His language works wonders in situ but does not necessarily seem stylish out of its situation.
“As the person, Hugh Person (corrupted ‘Peterson’ and pronounced ‘Parson’ by some)” would be off-putting as an isolated line of prose but is beguiling in context. We notice with surprise, amusement, and relief the echo of the “person” of “Hullo, person” in chapter 1: this is presumably the person whom the disembodied voice was addressing, and his name, absurdly, is actually Person. The parenthetical aside about Person as a surname is comically clumsy pedantry, when the protagonist and his name have just been introduced, but it proves of a piece with the clumsiness of “Hullo, person” in the first line of the novel or “easy, you know, does it, son,” in the last, or Mr. R.’s awkward and pedantic introduction of his editor Mr. Person and his secretary Mr. Tamworth:
“I don’t think you met Mr. Tamworth. Person, pronounced Parson; and Tamworth: like the English breed of black-botched swine.”
“No,” said Hugh, “it does not come from Parson, but rather from Peterson.”