Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  “O.K., son.”

  (TT 31)

  We can eventually discover, therefore, that that ungainly parenthesis is one more clue that the unidentified speaker or narrator at the start of the novel is none other than the ghost of Mr. R.—who, when alive, learned the information it imparts from Hugh in this very scene.

  A crucial and unique aspect of Nabokov’s storytelling, especially in a tale like this, is that the strategy is as important as the story, that in this case the riddle of who tells the tale is as important as the role of the hero. It’s crucial, too, that the strategy nevertheless arises out of the story, that this is a story of someone finding his way out of a life of mounting frustration when he is welcomed across the threshold of death by perhaps the only person in his recent life who had taken an interest in him and who cares enough now to tell his story. And it’s crucial, as so often in Nabokov, that there is a story behind the story—although Nabokov, with his love of surprise, of posing new kinds of problems in novel after novel, begins Transparent Things, paradoxically and unprecedentedly, with the story behind the story (“Hullo person. Doesn’t hear me”), and in this case the immediate riddle the novel poses is to discover that the speaker in the story behind the story was a character in the story while he was alive.

  But long before we can see that, we see long-limbed Hugh clambering out of the taxi. Nabokov renders the scene vividly. He attends, as always, to human movement, seen from the outside but also felt from the inside, here in the irritation of “an opening meant for emerging dwarfs” that infects the narrating voice. He attends to visual detail, not that there’s much of it— Hugh’s “angular bulk,” the driver’s “helpful gesture,” the hotel’s “gray stone and brown wood,” “cherry-red shutters,” and “electrified carriage lamps on a pair of iron posts”—just enough to render in full color and movement the scene of arrival and the pseudo-chalet setting, but he also attends to the character registering the details, to Hugh’s distaste for the town, his effort in emerging, his recoil at the “dreadful” building, his memory of the shutters as green.

  Not that the narration confines itself to Hugh’s perspective. Although visually alert to the outer details of the scene and alert to Hugh’s mind within the scene at all sorts of levels (his larger context, “one fifth of his life, engrained by grief”; his current mood of distaste for “this shoddy mountain resort”; his bodily ungainliness, which will prove so unfortunately important; his sudden perception of a misrecollection), although it pays such attention to the outer and inner within the scene, the paragraph also shifts easily from the scene, to an aside on etymology or to highlight its own verbal surface (“the aspect of the Ascot Hotel,” “cherry-red shutters (not all of them shut)”: and in this second case, notice how the visual attention to the scene and the verbal attention to the sentence do not at all exclude each other).

  The long first sentence moves effortlessly back and forth from outer to inner, from locomotion to perception, from scene to language, from the long term (“one fifth of his life”) to the immediate and even the instant (the sudden snort of derision in that parenthetical “(Ascot!)”—presumably at the inappropriateness of the name’s social pretensions for an alpine hotel). The sentence renders the scene, but even as it does so, it draws attention to the mind of Hugh within the scene, the mind of the narrator recording the scene, the mind of the reader registering the scene both with and beyond Hugh and with and yet somehow behind the narrator, but able to catch up.

  In the sentence that follows, what “mnemoptical trick” causes Hugh to remember the cherry-red shutters as apple-green? It doesn’t matter. It’s amusing in itself, the complementary color, the contrasting fruit; but two pages later the person introduced as “an aproned valet” will be described slightly more fully as “the apple-green-aproned valet,” and we can recognize with more amusement what has caused Hugh’s confusion and what a game of attention Nabokov is playing with his audience, what rewards he can hide behind any detail.

  We have to keep attention up across a gap like this, but we have to exercise attention even within the sentence: the aproned valet came tripping down those steps “to take the two bags, and (under one arm) the shoebox, all of which the driver had alertly removed from the yawning boot.” Are we alert enough to notice the alert driver versus the yawning boot, or the shoebox removed from a boot? And to see the humor in the driver so pointedly alert just when he can earn a tip?

  As an observer, a naturalist, and an artist, Nabokov renders the scene of Hugh’s arrival in Witt with precision—the milieu, the occasion, the activity, the character as he takes in the scene or moves his awkward body within it or imposes his temperament and mood on it—but what makes it so uniquely Nabokovian is that at the same time as he renders the inner and outer scene so sharply, he can shift from the scene to the mind evoking it in words or to the mind of the reader, engaged with the scene seen from outside Hugh and seen and felt from within him, engaged with the unseen storyteller behind the words, and engaged with the words seen on the page. That multiplicity of levels we already sense here will only be compounded when we become aware both of the layers of Hugh’s past that fold over onto this moment and of exactly what level of being the transparent things observe him from.

  Every mature Nabokov novel is a demanding but exhilarating workout in what Fyodor calls “multilevel thinking” (Gift 175). What especially distinguishes Nabokov’s stories, on small scale and large, is that they are saturated by mind: the hero’s, the narrator’s, the author’s, and the reader’s. Nothing could be further from Hemingway’s presentation of a story through objective actions and utterances that only imply the subjective.

  Hemingway was writing partly against the fashion, by the early 1920s, for the deep representation of mind in the moment, in the stream of consciousness of a Dorothy Richardson, a Joyce, a Woolf. Nabokov, too, differs markedly from stream of consciousness, but in another direction. He is interested chiefly not in the mind within the moment—although he gives this its due (Hugh’s surprise as he looks up at the Ascot Hotel)—but in minds able to transcend the moment, the mind of a character, a narrator, an author, or a reader able to flash or soar beyond a scene through a sudden shift of thought or perspective, consciousness able either to enfold or escape a scene.

  Transparent Things is an extreme example of Nabokov as storyteller. In his previous novel, Ada, he had created a whole new world, a long, passionate, rapturous, and tragic story amid bright settings and brighter characters. In Transparent Things, despite the cherry-red shutters and the apple-green aprons, we enter a grey and gloomy world where not much happens to poor Hugh except that he strangles the woman whom for some reason he loves, no matter how unlovable she is, then loses his own life in a pathetic attempt to revisit the scene of his first humiliations with her, which are all he has left. Nabokov can sweep us up in the emotions of his characters, as in the case of Van’s enthusiasm for Ada or Kinbote’s for Zembla or even, to our discomfort, Humbert’s for Lolita, but he deliberately leaves us unmoved by Hugh’s love for Armande or Hugh’s pilgrimage back to his past, and he has to use all his virtuosity as a storyteller to make this story on the brink of a death come to life. But the storytelling skills so concentrated even in the uneventful opening scene of Transparent Things can help suggest what makes Nabokovian narrative so special.

  MARY AND TRANSPARENT THINGS: ZOOM OUT

  How do Mary and Transparent Things reflect Nabokov as storyteller at the large scale rather than the small? In terms of plot, each novel focuses on love—indeed, love compounded by adultery—and death: Ganin’s love for Mary and his planned elopement with her from Berlin, an adultery anticipated, assumed, but left untried, and placed in pointed counterpoint with Podtyagin’s planned escape from Berlin, which will be thwarted by his approaching death; Hugh’s abject love for Armande, despite her flagrant infidelities, and his strangling her in his sleep not because of but despite her unlovableness, and his death by fire on his pathetic pilgrimage to the
scene of his past with her.

  Each novel is driven by character: Mary’s plot depends on Ganin’s love, his self-enclosed nature, his arrogance, his restlessness. And although neither the strangling of Armande nor his own suffocation in a hotel fire are Hugh Person’s choices, the plot of Transparent Things depends on his abjectness, his frustration, his doggedness, his misplaced sentimentality.

  Each hero is obsessed to the point of disjunction from his world and in a uniquely Nabokovian way that maximizes the tension between obsession and freedom. Although Ganin chafes at the confines of his room in a cramped pension, his obsession with Mary lets him exult in his capacity to roam Berlin streets while inhabiting his spacious past, until to his surprise and ours he walks away from Mary and memory into an open future. The much less happy Hugh, as soon as he is released from prison for killing his wife in a dream, makes the free decision to return across the Atlantic to where Armande first obsessed him, but although in Witt he still seems trapped by inimical space and oppressive time, his chance death there liberates him at last into the ampler dimensions of his future.

  Each novel deploys anticipation and recapitulation in new ways, and each exposes the myths of return to the past and arrival at the future. The numbered doors from April 1 to April 6 and the countdown from Sunday to the Saturday of Mary’s advent provide a stark and insistently unilinear means of stalking the expected climax of Nabokov’s first novel. In Transparent Things the anticipation of the future is much more multichanneled, saturated with apparent foreshadowings of Hugh’s imminent death, from the failed warning of the opening chapter, and even the narrators’ “perhaps if the future existed,” through the throng of images, real, fictional, and dreamed, of deaths, fires, and falls.

  In Mary, recapitulation plays a key structural role as the novel alternates present time, the days marking Mary’s approach, with Ganin’s memories of their past, again in rather rigid linear form, the memories proceeding with a chronological neatness that serves the novelist’s needs rather than his hero’s psychic reality.9 In Transparent Things, recapitulation takes flamboyant form in the hands of narrators, who can trace a mere pencil back centuries to the tree from which its wood was made. The story folds into Hugh’s present trip to Switzerland an account of his first trip and his father’s death and his first whore and on top of that past scene, a bravura recollection of a writer who enjoyed a whore in the same room almost a century earlier, and on top of that Hugh’s second trip, to meet the novelist R., when he also found himself sitting opposite Armande in a train.

  Ganin thinks he can return to his past with Mary or resume where he left off. But the central surprise of the novel’s plot, the essential twist of the novel’s strategy, is that the title character does not arrive, despite the steady countdown. When Ganin realizes that he has his past with him in memory and need not return to it, he heads away from Mary toward an open future. The novel’s title seemed to guarantee her arrival, but as the novel ends it is left unrealized and no longer matters.

  Hugh feels less sanguine about returning to his past with Armande, especially as it was so often torment, yet he feels compelled to try to revisit the first and only summer of their “love.” But his foray through space in search of lost time fails dismally, to the point where the narrator taunts: “What had you expected of your pilgrimage, Person? A mere mirror rerun of hoary torments?” (TT 94).

  If Transparent Things mocks the myth of the return to the past, it undermines the myth that we can know the future we will arrive at. As readers, outside Hugh’s world and aware of the narrators’ failed attempt to divert him from the hotel where he plans to stay, we can see images of death, fire, and falling that appear to signal that Hugh will die by jumping to escape a fire that the narrators have already seen in the making. But because of a last-minute change of room, his death does not happen as so insistently foreseen. Hugh does die in the fire, but by suffocation, and he is welcomed, in a dizzying and unexpected final scene, onto the level of being of the spectral narrators, especially the ghost of R., whom he had been visiting when he first met Armande. Again, the novel as strategy depends on the surprise of the ending: not a plunge into death but a heady dance of imagery that leads Hugh to a threshold beyond the story and onto the level of its tellers.

  Since adultery, planned or performed, sets the tone for both Mary and Transparent Things, one might expect it to result in the clash of wills so familiar in story from Agamemnon and Clytemnestra to Anna and Karenin and beyond. But Nabokov writes in “The Tragedy of Tragedy”:

  The idea of conflict tends to endow life with a logic it never has. Tragedies based exclusively in the logic of conflict are as untrue to life as an all-pervading class-struggle is untrue to history. Most of the worst and deepest human tragedies, far from following the marble rules of tragic conflict, are tossed on the stormy element of chance.

  (MUSSR 340)

  For Nabokov, conflict is a convenient but conventional trap for story and one that he springs open again and again. Ganin plans to take Mary from her husband, but neither Alfyorov nor Mary will ever know, after Ganin quietly slips away, having changed his mind, with no one but himself the wiser. Hugh Person kills Armande not as a consequence of her infidelities, for which he has never reproached her, but only in the throes of the dream of someone who has always been as lurching and lumbering in sleep as in waking life.

  In “The Tragedy of Tragedy” Nabokov envisages “the higher form of tragedy”—but it could in fact be the higher form of plot, whether tragic or not or theatrical or not—as

  the creation of a certain unique pattern of life in which the sorrows and passions[10] of a particular man will follow the rules of his own individuality, not the rules of the theatre as we know them…a writer of genius may discover exactly the right harmony of…accidental occurrences, and…this harmony, without suggesting anything like the iron laws of tragic fatality, will express certain definite combinations that occur in life.

  (MUSSR 341)

  In his own work Nabokov does not impose the character’s individual mark with the stark irony of Hardyesque fate but with a delicacy that it can often take the eye of sensitive retrospection to spot, in a pattern that once seen, cannot be unseen, like Ganin in stasis and then suddenly moving again or Hugh awkwardly emerging to cross a new threshold.

  In Mary Nabokov establishes a stiff rhythm to Ganin’s existence as he alternates between present and recollections of the past, but in fact he fails to provide Ganin with much of a past beyond his love for Mary, much of a present beyond his reminiscences of her and plans for escape with her, much of a future except his no longer needing Mary to help him cope with the present and beyond. These are not deliberate decisions, like Tolstoy’s refusal to give his characters background lives, but simply youthful inexperience. As early as the Franz of his next novel, Nabokov will use backfill and infill to build up the patterns of a life that can extend even into the moment of death. In Hugh’s case, the aggressive overtness and humiliating insistence of the patterns, from his unhappy years as a youthful somnambulist to his waking to death by fire, disturb us, as does so much about the novel. The overt patterning of time here stands in stark contrast to the complex, covert, celebratory layering of past on past in Nabokov’s immediately previous novel, Ada.11 The difference reflects the gulf between Van’s character, his love, his triumphant fate, and his role as fond retrospector, with Ada, of the past he shares with her, and Hugh’s character, his love, his sad fate, and the power the narrators of his story have to search his past with a more than human, indeed quite inhuman, freedom.

  THE IMPLIED WORLDS OF NABOKOVIAN NARRATIVE

  Because he rejects determinism, because he refuses to see life in terms of action and counteraction meshing like teeth on interconnecting cogs, Nabokov’s stories minimize the conflict that ticks its way through so much of story. He constructs his stories to reflect the unique, unpredictable rhythm of an individual character’s life.

  He also shapes his stories so
that each poses an overarching problem where the force of characters’ moves and countermoves often seems less significant than their combining into an artfully playful and puzzling authorial design. He famously explains this by analogy with chess-problem composition (SM 288–93), and some chess-problem aficionados indeed feel that in his problems he is too ingenious, that he does not maximize the tension between black and white but instead focuses too much on the tension between problemist and solver, between the solver’s expectations and the problemist’s radical inventiveness. In the same way, resistant readers of his fiction prefer the simpler rhythm of action and reaction—the powerful clash of character and character, which, after all, our ancestors evolved to notice even before they were hominids or humans—to Nabokov’s focus on the subtle tension between author and reader.

  As plot became less central to literary storytelling in the twentieth century, there was a general tendency, at least early in the century, to pay less attention to the clash of characters over time and to focus instead on the inner experience of the mind within the moment. But Nabokov rejects that, too, as a primary focus because he is interested in the mind as much beyond as within the moment or the self. What makes his work unique at the local level is his capacity to be true to the details of a scene but also to shift within or beyond the scene and to take responsive readers with him.

  He does not eschew situations in the here and now, and in fact he can render them, a stalled elevator, a taxi outside a hotel door, with stunning immediacy, not by the sheer accumulation of detail but by catching our imaginations off guard. He knows that attention fades if we habituate to stimuli, so he refreshes and provokes it by shifting it from one point to another within a scene: not by shifting from one character’s mind to another, since life rules that out, but by retaining a focus on one mind yet freely sliding or soaring this way, aside or ahead, to another scene, another time, another plane, as smoothly or abruptly as he chooses, and expecting the reader can do so, too.