Stalking Nabokov
Page 33
Both Machado and Nabokov distort chronological order to introduce their heroines before or after we are ready. Virgilia features teasingly in the first chapter of Brás Cubas’s memoirs, only to be announced later in regular chronological order, and then delayed chapter after chapter. In Nabokov’s Mary, the name of Mary, the great love of the hero’s life, is mentioned on the first page of the novel without the hero realizing it, but Mary herself, despite providing the novel’s title, never appears on its stage. In The Defense, Luzhin’s future wife appears unannounced and unexpected at the end of one chapter, only for the narrative to have to backtrack, in a key move, before resuming the interrupted scene in the next chapter but one. Similarly the opening chapter of Quincas Borba introduces Rubião filled with hope that Sofia feels as keenly for him as he does for her, only for Machado to interrupt (“Come with me, reader. Let’s have a look at him months earlier”) before returning us to the same morning thirteen chapters later.
Machado and Nabokov independently invent or at least deploy one authorial device after another. Both repeatedly issue memory tests to the reader. Brás Cubas, for instance, reports that Virgilia’s father “introduced me to his wife—an estimable lady—and his daughter, who in no way belied my father’s panegyric. I swear to you, in no way. Reread Chapter XXVII” (89). In Ada, Van Veen in 1892 describes a series of photographs of 1884 that require us to recollect in similar detail events from three hundred pages earlier, then in 1967 refers back to that early summer one final time, after five hundred pages, in precise but oblique details that challenge our powers of recollection.
Both writers can dangle clues in front of our noses but seem to dismiss them, as Bento Santiago in the opening chapter of Dom Casmurro tells us, “Don’t consult your dictionaries” for the special meaning of “casmurro” that has supplied his nickname, or Kinbote twice divulges the context in Shake-speare that provides the title for Pale Fire, without his or our realizing it. Like magicians, both writers slip in key information after engaging our attention elsewhere, like the casual reference to slave trading when we are waiting for Brás Cubas as a boy to avenge himself in some spectacular way on Villaças, or Van’s disclosing in a subordinate clause his vile treatment of a would-be blackmailer while we are preoccupied with the agony of his parting from Ada.
And both writers explicitly conceal deeper meanings beneath dazzling surfaces. Machado explains that he writes “one utterance but with two meanings”;5 Nabokov tells the New Yorker that “most of the stories I am contemplating (and some I have written in the past—you have actually published one with such an ‘inside’ . . .) will be composed on these lines, according to this system where a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one” (SL 116–17).
Both writers challenge and reward their readers. Nabokov stressed that he wrote for “the artistic reader” (SO 40), “the creative reader” (NG 140). “The authentic writer of genius,” he maintained, “writes for an ideal audience, for readers or spectators whom he would like to possess the same power of comprehension as his own power of expression.”6 He prefers the reader with “some artistic sense—which I propose to develop in myself and others whenever I have the chance” (LL 3). Machado’s playful tweaking of imagined incompetents in his audience both deters the uncreative reader and instructs creative readers in exactly Nabokov’s spirit.
More conventional novels, even those of major writers, build to dramatic crises and climaxes. Both Machado and Nabokov thought this falsified life. Brás Cubas writes: “in order to titillate the nerves of fantasy I should have suffered great despair, shed a few tears, and not eaten lunch. It would have been like a novel, but it wouldn’t have been biography” (BC 160). Nabokov explicitly stated his opposition to the conventions of drama: “The idea of conflict tends to endow life with a logic it never has” (MUSSR 340). He proposes instead “the creation of a certain unique pattern of life in which the sorrows and passions[7] of a particular man will follow the rules of his own individuality” (MUSSR 341). Both Nabokov and Machado in their best fiction tend to follow not the contours of rising dramatic conflict but the unique pattern of a life: the life rhythms of a Brás Cubas, a Dom Casmurro, a Humbert, or a Van Veen.
What makes Nabokov and Machado, who knew nothing of each other, more alike than either of them was to writers they did know? Each of them, I think, had a powerful independence of mind and spirit and a powerful sense that independence matters. Both of them detested the iron-clad determinism in literary naturalism. But even realism, even as perfected by Flaubert and Tolstoy, did not satisfy them. Realism at its best seems to place us right inside the situations of the characters. Like all animals, we have evolved to respond to our immediate surroundings, especially, in the case of our ultrasocial species, to our immediate social environment. Our senses have evolved to pick up cues from this immediate world and our emotions have evolved to assign them instant value.
But unlike other animals, we have uniquely evolved ways to step outside our here and now, to remember the remote past, to imagine possible futures or different perspectives, to generalize or connect, and to direct others to these remote vistas, improbable options, and unprecedented images. Machado and Nabokov always want to keep, as Nabokov once wrote, “all the shutters and lids and doors of the mind . . . open at once” (RLSK 67) and to develop that imaginative openness in their styles and their readers. They can engage us intensely in situations, but they also remind us always of the power of thought to make what Nabokov calls knight moves of the mind.8 Their natural sense of independence explains their self-conscious awareness of not just the scenes before them but the worlds of actuality and possibility around them. It explains their gleeful challenges to literary and intellectual conventions. It explains their readiness to step beyond the immediate or the sudden leaps into distant perspectives that simultaneously testify to our freedom and expose our vulnerability in the infinitude of time and space.
The high value Machado and Nabokov set on independence finds its reflection in their social attitudes. Machado offers a critical analysis of economic dependence in clientelist nineteenth-century Brazil, and, of course, a particularly stinging critique of slavery, still in force in Brazil until 1888. Nabokov, by contrast, living in a more economically liberal world, could celebrate independence—even in the poverty he and his fellow émigrés experienced in Russian Europe—and denounce the authoritarian regimes he escaped from in Russia and Germany. To an early reader of his book on Nikolay Gogol who noted Gogol did not object to serfdom, Nabokov replied, maybe not, but “the interior moral standards of [Dead Souls] bristle against it” (VNAY 56).
Being so independent of mind, Machado and Nabokov tended to swim against the tide: as Nabokov instructed young writers, “Avoid the cliché of your time” (Givan interview). But since in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the prevailing tides of thought flowed in opposite directions, Machado and Nabokov faced in contrary ways.
Machado’s independence made him an instinctive critic of the widespread nineteenth-century confidence in inevitable progress. In his delirium, Brás Cubas sees the cavalcade of folly in human history and beyond and the delusions of the nineteenth century, “in the end as miserable as the ones before” (BC 20). Machado satirizes would-be improvers in stories like “The Alienist” and “Alexandrian Tale” or in his critique of positivism and social Darwinism in Quincas Borba’s humanitism. Throughout his work he stresses the mixed nature of humanity, the egotism and vanity likely to taint even the rare acts of altruism, and the tangle of good sometimes emerging from bad and bad from good. Even the competition between different possible versions of what we see as good can lead to disaster or distress in the fever of indecision that kills Flora in Esau and Jacob (1904) or the young love that triumphs at the cost of the godparents’ happiness in Counselor Ayres’ Memorial (1908).
If Machado was a pessimist in a century of optimism, Nabokov was an optimist in a century of pessimism. The carnage of World W
ar I, the tyrannies of communist Russia and fascist Europe, the Holocaust, the threat of nuclear warfare, and the prospect of technological apocalypse have made gloom the dominant mood of modern intellectual life. Where Machado resisted the optimism of his century, the still darker Beckett resonated perfectly with the pessimism of the next. Nabokov, by contrast, remained an optimist, despite exile and poverty, a father assassinated by Russian monarchists, and family and friends at risk or killed in the Holocaust. Nabokov’s strong disagreement with Spengler’s Decline of the West and similar fare inspired him to write a novel set in the present, Glory, which he first planned to call Romanticheskiy vek (Romantic Age). By having the insanely erratic Quincas Borba endorse Pangloss, Machado marks his own distance from optimism. Nabokov, by contrast, declared himself ready to agree with the eighteenth-century philosophers who thought humans are fundamentally good (PF 225, LL 375).
Yet many have understood Nabokov differently: “How terrible, to see life as [Nabokov] does” (VNRY 343); why does he live “among such depressing people” (Lolita 318)? His novels swarm with prominent suicides (five of seventeen novels) and violent deaths, including prominent murders and on- or offstage executions (eleven of seventeen novels). In Lolita even murder pales beside child abuse. How can I, and how can Nabokov, read Nabokov as an optimist?
Here the chase hots up as we focus on not the similarities but the differences between Machado and Nabokov. Machado stresses, never more clearly than in “The Devil’s Church,” that human lives are inevitably mixed. Even positive forces can conflict, as in his most serene mature novel, Counselor Ayres’ Memorial. In his emphasis that even the clash of positive factors can compound human sorrow Machado anticipates the twentieth-century philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who emphasizes that even ideals we may agree on, like love, freedom, justice, and tolerance, may conflict rather than converge.
Nabokov, by contrast, focuses squarely on suffering and evil but nevertheless sees grounds for optimism beyond. In the essay “The Art of Literature,” composed during World War II, Nabokov wrote that if we reject false common sense,
the irrational belief in the goodness of man … becomes something much more than the wobbly basis of idealistic philosophies. It becomes a solid and iridescent truth. . . . goodness becomes a central and tangible part of one’s world, which world at first sight seems hard to identify with the modern one of newspaper editors and other bright pessimists, who will tell you that it is, mildly speaking, illogical to applaud the supremacy of good at a time when the police state, or communism, is trying to turn the globe into five million square miles of terror, stupidity, and barbed wire.
(LL 373)
Nabokov’s surface irony can sting but can also hide deeper positive ironies. The Nabokov character closest to his maker, John Shade, writes at the end of his poem “Pale Fire,” where he probes the question of death and an afterlife, and recounts the story of his daughter’s suicide:
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line.
I’m reasonably sure that we survive
And that my darling somewhere is alive,
As I am reasonably sure that I
980 Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July
The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine.
Shade can read his world positively despite the raw pain of his daughter’s loss, but despite his confidence, he will be killed by a madman that very afternoon: he will not wake at six the next morning or ever again. Nabokov’s emphatic irony seems to deny that “the verse of galaxies divine” can scan right, or that Shade has any reason to suppose that his daughter, despite her suicide, is somewhere, somehow, in some sense alive. Yet Nabokov allows the curious reader to see a “second (main) story . . . woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one,” where both Shade’s daughter and Shade himself survive beyond death and contribute their creative energy to what from this side of death may look like a cruelly mocking world (see NPFMAD).
Again and again Nabokov sets up positives, counters them with ironic negatives, then allows still deeper positives to incorporate but reverse the negative. Although he had no time for organized religion and thought the very idea of God revealed the limitations of human thought, he suspected some creative consciousness behind the world. He also supposed that the world’s inexhaustible details offer human minds the chance to discover more and more and in that process of discovery to share much of the magic of creation. And while he felt strongly the limitations of human consciousness, the absurdity of our not being able to escape the prisons of the present and the self, he also felt that love, kindness, curiosity, imagination, and art offer intimations of a freer and ampler world beyond the confines of mortal consciousness.
Nabokov’s optimistic metaphysics supported not only an optimistic epistemology but also an optimistic ethics, a confidence that by dint of effort individuals and humanity could become more sensitive to their world, kinder, freer, more creative.9 For him, the forces of good do converge, even if at a point beyond human sight. He ends his introduction to The Eye, whose hero tries to commit suicide: “The forces of imagination which, in the long run, are the forces of good remain steadfastly on Smurov’s side, and the very bitterness of tortured love proves to be as intoxicating and bracing as would be its most ecstatic requital” (Eye 10).
Like all great artists, Nabokov constructed his imagined worlds to match his sense of the real world around him. He tried to make his fiction inexhaustible and to allow the curious and creative reader the chance of discovery after discovery, even to discover positive ironies that could encompass and repolarize earlier negatives and strike deeper into the heart of things.
Machado’s and Nabokov’s differences in outlook help highlight new differences in detail. In his delirium, Brás Cubas hears Nature tell him: “You’re alive: that’s the only torment I want” (BC 17). Nabokov, by contrast, has one of his narrators describe death as “the wrench of relinquishing forever all one’s memories—that’s a commonplace, but what courage man must have had to go through that commonplace again and again and not give up the rigmarole of accumulating again and again the riches of consciousness that will be snatched away!” (Ada 585). Nabokov acknowledges the pain and the loss in death, but he also stresses the magnitude of what consciousness amasses in the course of a life—and that very magnitude seems to him to intimate more.
Machado sees time as loss, as mishap: wasted by Brás Cubas; blighted, even after high good fortune, in Rubião’s fall; a seeming paradise that turns into its own hell for Bento Santiago. We squander even life’s best gifts or have them snatched from us by time and death. For Nabokov time also involves loss, but he sees our inability to reenter the rich reality every moment of our past once had as only more proof of the limitedness of human consciousness. Nevertheless, for Nabokov we can access the past, albeit indirectly, through the controlled power and precision of memory.
Emphasizing humanity as flawed, Machado appeals to his readers, too, as flawed creatures who may fail to remember or infer or to expect more than what convention prompts. Nabokov, by contrast, invites his good readers to become fellow artists who can help reconstitute the complex worlds of his fictions. Machado and Nabokov both famously compare the relationship of authors, characters, and readers to chess, but their differences are revealing. In Esau and Jacob, Machado writes, “There is an advantage in having the characters of my story collaborate in it, aiding the author in accordance with a law of solidarity, a kind of exchange of services between the chess-player and his men.”10 Where Machado sees solidarity between the author and the characters he moves about on the board, Nabokov by contrast focuses on chess problems rather than chess games and locates the real drama not “between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the [reader])” (SM 290).11 Machado inter
rupts his narratives in a jarring, wary engagement with his flawed characters, his flawed readers, and his flawed world. Nabokov sees his novels, like his chess problems, as enclosed worlds, like lives bracketed off by death, upon which we can look as if from outside life or beyond death, enjoying not only our empathetic engagement with the characters in their worlds but especially our creative engagement with the creator of these miniature worlds.
Machado frequently sounds notes of failure or undercuts outbursts of eloquence: “No, that’s not a good comparison” (BC 24); “One of the ancients has said he loathed a guest with a good memory. Life is filled with such guests, and I perhaps am one of them, though proof of having a weak memory may be the very fact that the name of that ancient does not occur to me at the moment, but he was one of the ancients and that’s enough” (DC 119); “bewitched at the feet of my Crippled Venus. Bewitched is just a way of enhancing style” (BC 85). Nabokov, by contrast, tends to stretch language to its utmost, to maximize the mind’s motility in space, time or thought. The rare hints of failure will usually be recouped by proof of success. In his autobiography, he cannot recall the name of the dog of the girl he loved on the beach of Biarritz in the summer of 1907, when he was eight, but then, near the end of the chapter, “triumphantly, along those remote beaches, over the glossy evening sands of the past, where each footprint slowly fills up with sunset water, here it comes, here it comes, echoing and vibrating: Floss, Floss, Floss!” (SM 151–52). Even the ineptitudes of Nabokov’s leading characters, like Pnin’s comically flawed English or Kinbote’s appalling verse, tend to be matched by aptitudes, Pnin’s precise and erudite Russian and Kinbote’s flamboyant prose.