Fictitious Biographies: Vladimir Nabokov's English Novels [Reprint 2012 ed.] 9783110800609, 9789027933454

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STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE Volume XXV

Fictitious Biographies: Vladimir Nabokovs English Novels

H. GRABES

1977 MOUTON THE HAGUE - PARIS

© Copyright 1977 Mouton & Co. B.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this issue may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

ISBN 90 279 3345 6

English translation of the German original by the author in collaboration with Pamela Gliniars

Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS

In Place of an Introduction I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

Truth and Fiction in Literary Biography: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

VII

1

Fictitious Biography as Paradigm for the Better World of Art: Bend Sinister

18

Autobiography as Demonstration of "precise fate": Lolita

31

Biography as a Balance between Tragedy and Comedy: Pnin

46

The Combination of Autobiographies as "correlated pattern in the game": Pale Fire

54

Autobiography as the Triumph of Subjectivity: Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

70

Biography as Sinking Back into the Past: Transparent Things

96

VIII. Parodied Autobiography as Satire on the Unity of Life and Work: Look at the Harlequins! Select Bibliography

106 132

IN PLACE OF AN INTRODUCTION

Nabokov is one of the few creative writers who make the literary critic extremely aware of his limitations. It is not so much that his novels already contain parodies of possible interpretations. Neither is the danger of becoming a target for the master's avenging satire all too great (he does not generally do his critics so much honour). But the awareness that the interpretation always lags so very far behind its subject is, on its own, enough to have a lastingly detrimental effect on the critic's self-confidence. A wholesome process as far as it stimulates the critic to consider what can at best be expected from literary criticism when applied to a number of works by one author. What does literary criticism aim at in this respect? It could perhaps attempt to reveal the connection between the author's works and his life, - and it would be difficult to improve on Andrew Field's corresponding treatment of Nabokov. 1 It might also subject the individual works to a detailed analysis in the hope of recognizing the author's universal aims, which recur in all his literary products. As is well-known, Page Stegner first dealt with Nabokov's English novels in this way. The title of his book, Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokovl, at once shows that he intends to reduce the diverse novels he examines to one common denominator. Julia Bader's more recent study, Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels3 also follows this aim: The "idea" of this book is that the various levels of "reality" in Nabokov's novels are best seen in the perspective of the game of artifice ( realistic, sexual, American, academic, etc., being but different modes of presenting illusion). My "modish message" is that in varied forms and strange ways all of Nabokov's novels are about art (a narrow theme if one understands

VIII art to be separate from reality, sex, America, academe).4 In an interpretation of this kind the individual works provide evidence in support of a general thesis existing a priori in the critic's mind before interpretation begins, although it may well be based to a large extent on a close reading and analysis of the separate works. Convincing proof of this is the fact that, despite far-reaching agreement in description of detail, Bader supports a thesis which is completely opposed to Stegner's: . . . Nabokov's subject is not the conflict between art and "reality", but between different conceptions of art. For Nabokov and his characters, aesthetic patterns are not a way of escaping from the empirical world but rather a way of creating a selfcontained and complete world. 5 It might seem that these contrary opinions result from a lack of objectivity, thus confirming the widespread view that literary criticism is by nature something very subjective. But in this case, we should not allow ourselves to be misled by this notion. First of all neither of the theses presented by Stegner or Bader is by any means arbitrary, for they emerge from a careful reading of Nabokov's novels, - and that goes for both! To conclude that the novels themselves must be muddled if two careful readings lead to contradictory results would be a neat solution, but is certainly making things too easy. Nabokov's novels are full of concrete details carrying multiple meanings, meanings that are often difficult to make out and that sometimes turn the books into crossword puzzles, but they are certainly not muddled. Are the critics therefore to blame for the contradictions in interpretation? As a closer view reveals, the apparent 'subjectivity' of literary criticism goes back to the unavoidable inaccuracy that results from the attempt to grasp the concrete by means of necessarily rather abstract terms. In a way Nabokov's novels not only create their own world of 'aesthetic patterns' (Bader), but they also present the conflict between 'art and "reality" ' (Stegner). This ambivalence is a deliberate feature of the novels themselves and becomes evident if the critic's level of abstaction is kept flexible enough to allow a close description of what the novels reveal on different levels of understanding. Then it cannot go unnoticed that these novels, inspite of their chameleon-like quality, have one thing in

IX common: they are all fictitious biographies or fictitious autobiographies. In being fictitious they demonstrate the artificial, contrived nature of art and the omnipotence of the author (thus supporting Bader's thesis). As biographies they also treat the problem of the artistic portrayal of 'real' lives and thus the relationship between art and life (demonstrating Stegner's thesis). But is it not rather trite to assert that Nabokov's novels are all fictitious biographies or autobiographies, because this holds true for most novels by most other authors as well? It certainly would be if Nabokov's novels were only de facto biographies or autobiographies on imaginary heroes, if they did not make a special point of their being biographical as well as fictitious and of thereby dealing specifically both with the process of artificially creating a 'life' in art and with the problem inherent in all biographical writing. As far as the writer's art is concerned, this infatuation with the obstacles encountered by the biographer is perhaps the most striking of the many pervading features in Nabokov's English novels. It is hoped that the following attempts at description will help to show this and will facilitate the sometimes strenuous process of reading. This means that careful and repeated close reading of the novels themselves would make this book to a large extent superfluous, at least for those trained in reading literature. But the following descriptions may prove valuable to the less skilled reader and to those without the time or inclination to reread the novels for a third or fourth time. They are based on a rational analysis of the different texts, and although the problem of biography, the predominant aspect in each novel, has been given special attention - as shown by the chapter headings we have generally tried to avoid entering the realms of speculation. And these prefatory remarks are meant to show that this does not result from any hostility towards theoretical discussion, but is rather due to a conscious limitation imposed by our own aims and by the nature of Nabokov's novels. In the following we go along with Van, the chronicler in Nabokov's Ada, when he says: I try not to 'explain' anything, I merely describe.6

Χ

NOTES 1

Nabokov: His Life in Art (London, 1967). 2 New York, 1966. 3 Berkeley, 1972. 4 Ibid., D. 2. 5 Ibid., p. 3, footnote. 6 Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), p. 519.

I

TRUTH AND FICTION IN LITERARY BIOGRAPHY: THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT

1

As long as there was a widespread tendency in literary criticism and theory to take for granted that artistic creations in general and the literary work of art in particular exist in their own right being largely independent of the reality in which they appear,2 the biography was obviously in a difficult position. On the one hand, as the life of a definite person fixed in time and space, the biography belongs in the region of historiography and is in Dryden's words "the history of particular men's lives"3 and thus inevitably is closely bound to the very empirical reality against which the literary work of art asserts its autonomy. But on the other hand, if it is to become more than a mere catalogue of facts or chain of anecdotes, it is also subject to the author's shaping will and to the principles underlying the work of art, i.e. broadly speaking also belongs to the fictional sphere. And so the 1 i t e r a r y biography naturally raises the question of the relation between the two components so aptly associated in the title of Goethe's autobiography Truth and Fantasy.

1. The very title of Vladimir Nabokov's first English novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight makes clear that the biographer, whom we encounter as first-person narrator, is determined to give priority to the first of those two components, namely to 'truth'. It is first and foremost "The Real l i f e " of the novelist Sebastian Knight, who has died shortly before the biography is begun, that is to be portrayed here, and any aesthetic considerations are of secondary importance. This view is explicitly upheld by the biographer himself when, for instance, he asserts that his only qualification for writing the biography is his special know-

2 ledge about the 'real life' in question, for he is not a professional writer and even felt it necessary to prepare himself for the task by taking part (rather unsuccessfully) in a "be-an-author" course: When at last I did take pen in hand, I had composed myself to face the inevitable, which is but another way of saying I was ready to try to do my best. 4 And because he is bent on depicting the 'real life' of Sebastian Knight, he also feels morally obliged, even at the risk of disappointing his readers' expectations, to point out that his information on this particular life is naturally limited and his possibilities certainly cannot be compared with those at the disposal of the writer of fiction. In a passage on Sebastian's youth for example he writes: For reasons already mentioned I shall not attempt to describe Sebastian's boyhood with anything like the methodical continuity which I would have normally achieved had Sebastian been a character of fiction. Had it been thus I could have hoped to keep the reader instructed and entertained by picturing my hero's smooth development from infancy to youth. But if I should try this with Sebastian the result would be one of those 'biographies romancees' which are by far the worst kind of literature yet invented [p. 17], and after a rather unprofitable conversation with one of Sebastian's former student friends about their time at university he responds to the unexpected inquiry "Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight? " with this deep sigh: Oh, how I sometimes yearn for the easy swing of a well-oiled novel! How comfortable it would have been had the voice belonged to some cheery old don with long downy ear-lobes and that puckering about the eyes which stands for wisdom and humour... A handy character, a welcome passer-by who had also known my hero, but from a different angle. 'And now,' he would say, Ί am going to tell you the real story of Sebastian Knight's college years.' And then and there he would have launched on that story. But alas, nothing of the kind really happened. That Voice

3 in the Mist rang out in the dimmest passage of my mind, [p.44] Whereas however the narrator is primarily concerned with presenting facts in his biography, which is to be as exact a reconstruction of Sebastian Knight's life as humanly possible with little or no regard for literary qualities, Sebastian's former secretary Mr. Goodman obviously wrote his already completed rival biography for very different reasons. What Goodman tells the narrator may well be designed to prevent the writing of a further biography but it also reveals a completely opposing conception orientated towards popular success, as is shown by his choice of the title, The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight: I don't wish to say that a book could not be written about him. It could. But then it ought to be written from a special point of view which would make the subject fascinating... Leave it to some professional fellow, to one who knows the book-market and he will tell you that anybody trying to complete an exhaustive study of Knight's life and work, as you put it, would be.wasting his and the reader's time. [p. 49f.] But nothing, not even this piece of advice, can deter the narrator from achieving his goal and he now concentrates on finding out as much about Sebastian Knight as possible. He is careful not to leave any of the biographer's usual sources untapped. First there are Sebastian's more or less private remarks contained in letters written at various stages in his life and then above all his literary production consisting of a few early poems, the four novels, The Prismatic Bezel, Success, Lost Property and The Doubtful Asphodel, and the anthology of short stories The Funny Mountain Amongst the letters which are treated in more or less detail there is one, containing Sebastian's defence of the satiric strain in his first novel, that is almost printed in full. Summaries of all his fictional works are given in order of their composition and at least some attempt is made at interpreting them. Sebastian's novels, especially Lost Property - according to the narrator "his most autobiographical work" [p. 6] -, are again and again used as direct biographical sources although the validity of this procedure is never questioned. The central importance of the novels in shaping the narrator's image of Sebastian is shown by the arguments he employs to prove that Mr. Goodman's presentation of Sebastian's life is written from a completely unsuitable angle.

4 For Mr. Goodman, young Sebastian Knight 'freshly emerged from the carved chrysalid of Cambridge' is a youth of acute sensibility in a cruel cold world. In this world, 'outside realities intrude so roughly upon one's most intimate dreams' that a young man's soul is forced into a state of siege before it is finally shattered [p. 53], he says about Goodman's attitude and his refutation begins with a reference to Lost Property: It is enough to turn to the first thirty pages or so of Lost Property to see how blandly Mr. Goodman... misunderstands Sebastian's inner attitude in regard to the outer world. Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936 - it was always year 1. [p. 55] This is supported by two passages quoted at greater length from the same novel and ends with the sarcastic remark: It is a pity Mr. Goodman had not the leisure to peruse this passage, though it is doubtful whether he would have grasped its inner meaning, [p. 58] The fictional works even have the last say in deciding which aspects of Sebastian's life deserve special attention. For instance when the narrator refuses to discuss the intimate side of Sebastian's relationship to Gare he crowns the arguments in his support with appropriate quotations from the short story The Back of the Moon and from Lost Property: Naturally, I cannot touch upon the intimate side of their relationship, firstly, because it would be ridiculous to discuss what no one can definitively assert, and secondly because the very sound of the word 'sex' with its hissing vulgarity and the 'ks, ks' cat- call at the end, seems so inane to me that I cannot help doubting whether there is any real idea behind the word. Indeed, I believe that granting 'sex' a special situation when tackling a human problem, or worse still, letting the 'sexual idea', if such a thing exists, pervade and 'explain' all the rest is a grave error of reasoning. 'The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea, from its moon to its serpent; but a pool in the cup of a rock and the diamond-

5 rippled road to Cathay are both water.' {The Back of the Moon) 'Physical love is but another way of saying the same thing and not a special sexophone note, which once heard is echoed in every other region of the soul' (Lost Property, page 82) 'All things belong to the same order of things, for such is the oneness of human perception, the oneness of individuality, the oneness of matter, whatever matter may be. The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition,' (ibid., page 83). [p. 87f.] We are not only acquainted with Sebastian's written testimonies but also with some of the deceased's other belongings which are introduced in the form of a description of his flat. But this second sphere does not provide nearly as much information as the first, and fortunately there exist two other sources that prove to be more fruitful. These are the biographer's own memories of Sebastian and the recollection of other personal acquaintances whom the biographer interviews as witnesses. We should perhaps have mentioned earlier that the biographer is Sebastian's stepbrother which means that he enjoys a privileged position for observing his subject. But as he is six years younger than Sebastian, his own memories of Sebastian's youth are unfortunately not as instructive as they might have been if he had been the elder brother and if the relationship between the two brothers had been more close. Luckily his mother's accounts compensate for this to a great extent, and the fact that the biographer is related to Sebastian also offers other advantages, such as personal contact with Sebastian later on in life as well, a knowledge of the circumstances surrounding his death, a number of letters written to him by Sebastian and last but not least preferential access to the deceased's estate. The biography shows that the narrator went to much trouble in tracing and interviewing people who had known Sebastian personally. His mother, as just mentioned, is able to contribute much to the story of Sebastian's youth although she is not his real mother and did not marry the mutual father of Sebastian and the narrator until Sebastian was five years old. The narrator also learns from her a great deal about Sebastian's mother and father which he considers important enough to be included in the biography as it may explain Sebastian's temperament. An account of Sebastian's student days is given by a Cambridge scholar who was then his best friend, and the narrator has no difficulty in finding witnesses

6 with first-hand knowledge of the years following, which cover the period in which Sebastian wrote his novels and stories. First and foremost there is Helen Pratt, Mr. Goodman's secretary and the former bosom friend of Sebastian's ex-lover Clare Bishop. Of course her accounts are complemented by Sebastian's good friend, the poet P. G. Sheldon, and by Roy Carswell, who painted Sebastian in 1933, but she provides almost all the narrator knows about the adult Sebastian (not counting the year before his death). In fact he has such faith in her accounts that he identifies with them in his presentation, only indicating his source now and again. This is rather surprising in view of the fact that, after his conversation with Sebastian's student friend, the narrator becomes only too well aware that second-hand information may be unreliable: . . . don't be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale, [p. 44] And yet this scepticism is hardly compatible with his almost fanatical determination to track down first Sebastian's ex-lover Qare Bishop and then his last great love, Nina Rechnoy, for interviews about Sebastian. Not until dealing with Nina Rechnoy's statements, which show Sebastian in a very poor light, does it seem to occur to him that the informant's point of view may well colour his testimony, and he explains the negative depiction by pointing to her own character. And finally there is Natasha Rosanov, the sixteen-year-old Sebastian's f i r s t love, whom the narrator meets by chance in Berlin when on his search for Sebastian's l a s t lover, and she tells him about this teenage experience. Strangely enough, on the other hand the narrator does not even dare to ask Clare Bishop about Sebastian when he finally encounters her in the street and she does not (or at least pretends not) to recognise the key to Sebastian's flat which he shows her on the pretext that she might perhaps have lost it. Those who seek the reason for the narrator's unfailing resoluteness in face of the many set-backs on his quest for Sebastian's 'real life' will soon arrive at the one source of knowledge that outweighs all others as far as he is concerned. In his own words:

7 But what actually did I know about Sebastian? I might devote a couple of chapters to the little I remembered of his childhood and youth - but what next? As I planned my book it became evident that I would have to undertake an immense amount of research, bringing up his life bit by bit and soldering the fragments with my inner knowledge of his character. Inner knowledge? Yes, this was a thing I possessed, I felt it in every nerve. And the more I pondered on it, the more I perceived that I had yet another tool in my hand: when I imagined actions of his which I heard of only after his death, I knew for certain that in such or such a case I should have acted just as he had. Once I happened to see two brothers, tennis champions, matched against one another; their strokes were totally different, and one of the two was far, far better than the other; but the general rhythm of their motions as they swept all over the court was exactly the same, so that had it been possible to draft both systems two identical designs would have appeared. [pp.28f.] Thus it is the "inner knowledge of his character" founded on the inner resemblance to his blood-relation Sebastian that inspires and nurtures the biographer's confidence in his ability to portray Sebastian's 'real life'. Both his details on the preparation of the biography and its actual arrangement show how much he allows himself to be guided by this conviction. We are even told that he (something rather abstruse if not viewed in the light of his inner resemblance with Sebastian) is so determined to mentally recapture Sebastian's life as exactly as possible that he even proceeds in strictly chronological order when collecting the material for his book. And so for instance he says before recording his conversation with Mr. Goodman Now what I wanted from Mr. Goodman was not so much an account of Sebastian's last years — that I did not yet need — (for I intended to follow his life stage by stage without overtaking him), but merely to obtain a few suggestions as to what people I ought to see who might know something of Sebastian's post-Cambridge period, [p. 45] As a consequence of this procedure the biography is thus not only a

8 chronological record of Sebastian's life (it begins with his birth and ends with his death) but also a detailed account of the quest which the biographer embarks upon in his effort to re-trace the course of Sebastian's life. This means that two principles of arrangement are united which are generally considered to be completely disparate, if not indeed exclusive of one another: the 'objective', chronological order demanded by the object in question (i.e. the life that is being described) and the 'subjective' order dictated to the describing subject (i.e. the biographer) by the sequence in which he receives information on the life he is describing. That his consciousness of inner resemblance with Sebastian is regarded by the biographer as being an absolute criterion for the adequate portrayal of Sebastian's 'real life' becomes especially obvious where the above principles of arrangement come into conflict. This is the case when, as already mentioned, the biographer comes across Sebastian's first love, during his search for his last love and thus learns of one of Sebastian's teenage experiences at, according to his own chronological procedure, far too late a stage. In view of his strong emphasis on reality and his great pains in trying to achieve objectivity we might have expected that the biographer would have given priority to the objective chronological course of Sebastian's life and have inserted this new piece of information at the appropriate place. But he does just the opposite: A more systematic mind than mine would have placed them in the beginning of this book, but my quest had developed its own magic and logic and though I sometimes cannot help believing that it had grown into a dream, that quest, using the pattern of reality for the weaving of its own fancies, I am forced to recognise that I was being led right, and that in striving to render Sebastian's life I must now follow the same rhythmical interlacements. [p. 113] Hence he does no less than claim that the most adequate portrayal of the object (Sebastian's 'real life') is then guaranteed when it follows the biographer's subjective notions, since the inner resemblance between the person describing and the person being described is the surest guarantee of authenticity. By the end of the quest this inner resemblance has merged into complete identity:

9 I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being — not a constant state - that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden. Thus — I am Sebastian Knight, [p. 172] He sees himself as an actor playing the part of Sebastian in the play of Sebastian's life, but the re-tracing of this life has a lasting effect on him beyond the limits of the quest and the biography: whereas the rest of the cast in this play return to their own lives, he regards his identity with Sebastian as something more permanent: The end, the end. They all go back to their everyday life (and Clare goes back to her grave) — but the hero remains, for, try as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian's mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows, [p. 173]

2.

With this description of the narrator's intentions and the way he tries to realise them however, we have only covered one aspect of the novel. Another aspect which contributes just as much to the total impact is Nabokov's very varied ironical treatment of the narrator's intentions during the course of the biography with the result that the biographer is made to seem like an "unreliable narrator". 5 One reason for this impression is the narrator's handling of the different sources, —which must appear inadequate and dubious to say the least. A striking illustration of this is the fact that the narrator actually burns two bundles of letters from Sebastian's remains, marked "to be destroyed" [p. 32]. And when he justifies this action by referring to the bond of loyalty between himself and his stepbrother, then his blood-relationship with Sebastian, that had seemed to favour the biography's success, is seen to be an obstacle. The tedious search for Sebastian's last lover, taking up so much space in the biography, is first made necessary by the burning of the letters and must thus be viewed as a difficulty artificially created by the

10 narrator. Even the way Sebastian's novels and stories are used for the purposes of the biography is at times so speculative and wilful that the reader must surely take offence. So for instance when the narrator tries to recapture young Sebastian's feelings on having been deserted by his mother, he even admits that the passage quoted from Albinos in Black is not directly connected with this event, but he still considers his procedure to be correct: This is a quotation from Albinos in Black, textually in no way connected with that special disaster but retaining the distant memory of a child's fretfulness on a bleak hotel carpet, with nothing to do and a queer expansion of time, time gone astray, asprawl... [p. 8] Even where he criticises Mr. Goodman's use of quotes, for example when Goodman deduces Sebastian's relation to Russia from a passage in The Doubtful Asphodel, nothing better occurs to him than to cite a passage from Lost Property and to offer his own interpretation of that relationship on the grounds of this alternative quotation [pp. 22f.]. Because the narrator himself often enough makes use of those very biographical methods he so criticises in Goodman's book, his vehement attacks, sometimes degenerating into direct insults, backfire and tend rather to shake the reader's confidence in his own integrity. At his first mention of the rival biography the narrator points out straightaway that Mr. Goodman has overlooked his existence as Sebastian's stepbrother altogether, which must make the reader wonder whether his attacks are not rather the result of offended pride than of his declared obligation to objectivity. His main objection to Goodman's book, the fact that it is not exact and that the author fills in gaps with his own speculations, could just as well apply to the narrator's own biography. His enlargements upon the way Sebastian's father felt after his first wife, Virginia, had left him, upon Virginia's feelings before her death, upon Sebastian's thoughts when he arrived at Cambridge and those during his stay there, not forgetting the remarks on Clare Bishop's attitude to life and on her mental relationship to Sebastian, to mention but a few examples, must all be pure figments of the imagination to judge by the sources offered in evidence. But the narrator not only reveals a large portion of subjectivity in the way he fills out missing facts but also in the way he selects and assesses witnesses' evidence (we only have to think of his biassed inter-

11 pretation of Nina Rechnoy's statements), so that the whole biography seems to be very much at the author's mercy. Admittedly, the narrator always refers to his "inner knowledge" of Sebastian as decisive criterion. Yet although he views this argument as the strongest in favour of his status as biographer, the reader must surely view it as the weakest, for it lies beyond the reach of objective verification. In fact the narrator's long and rambling accounts of his quest so full of detail that for example, on describing his journey to St. Damier he not only dwells at great length on his own thoughts but also on the weather - would rather make it seem that he is extremely self-conceited, merely using the opportunity of writing about his famous stepbrother to keep on telling us about himself. The only thing that could remove this suspicion would be some sort of proof of an inner resemblance between the narrator and Sebastian, for then the narrator's accounts would also be valid for Sebastian - just because of their close relationship. But as it stands, neither the fact that the narrator conceals his identity throughout^ nor the assertion "I have tried to put into this book as little of my own self as possible" can alter the impression that he is a member of that species of literary active hyenas, so strikingly portrayed by Nabokov in the narrator of his later novel Pale Fire.

3. If the matter were to rest here then the narrator would have failed in his attempt to portray the real life of Sebastian, and Nabokov's novel would then be either a parody on the endeavour to write an objective biography or a satire on the self-conceited biographer. However Nabokov does not let the reader and critic off so lightly. Those who look beneath the surface will very soon discover that the book does indeed demonstrate objectively, at least in one respect, the inner resemblance between the biographer and Sebastian, thus making the narrator appear justified after all and the biography seem a success. We may perhaps best throw light on this aspect by first taking into consideration that the narrator understood his inner resemblance with Sebastian as also covering his own literary work, the composition of the biography. And he continues the relevant passage from the fourth chapter, already quoted above, as follows:

12 I daresay Sebastian and I also had some kind of common rhythm; this might explain the curious 'it-has-happened-before-feeling' which seizes me when following the bends of his life. And if, as often was the case with him, the 'whys' of his behaviour were as many Xs, I often find their meaning disclosed now in a subconscious turn of this or that sentence put down by me. [p. 29] So it is a question of whether the biography contains similar features of structure and style as Sebastian's own works. But this is just what we encounter in abundant measure. As Charles Nicol has devoted an essay7 to this mutual 'reflection' of both single traits and whole structures of plot in the works by Sebastian discussed by the narrator and in the latter's biography, a few indications should here suffice. Success, Sebastian's second novel, is for example characterised as "but a glorious gamble on causalities" [p. 80], a phrase which would aptly describe the effect achieved in the biography when Sebastian's first rendezvous with Nina Rechnoy is depicted or the narrator's first meetings with Helen Pratt, with the amateur detective in the train from Blauberg to Strassburg and with Natasha Rosanov, as well as when Madame Lecerf is identified as Nina Rechnoy. And when the following is said of The Doubtful Asphodel: The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole. . . [p. 146], then one wonders whether it more aptly describes Sebastian's book, for which it was meant, or the biography itself. As it is, there are particularly numerous parallels between The Doubtful Asphodel and the biography: Schwarz turns up again in Paul Rechnoy's cousin "Uncle Black", the "fat Bohemian woman" in Lydia Bohemsky, the detective in Mr. Silbermann and the "lovely tall Primadonna" in Helene von Graun. And to top it all 'asphodel' designates a type of narcissus, so that the title might well refer to the author of the biography, as the 'doubtful Narcissus' we have come to know. This similarity between Sebastian's literary works and the biography, however, does more than merely demonstrate the truth of the biographer's claim to inner resemblance with Sebastian. At the same time it also offers an original answer to the question raised at the outset, of the

13 relationship between fact and fiction in the literary biography. Nabokov shows that it is possible to achieve identity between fact and fiction in a biography about a writer, if the biography is written in the same way its subject would have done so himself. If then the subject (i.e. the author being described) is also formally imitated in the fictitious sphere of the biography, then fictitiousness and factuality are both equally closely related to the subject and portray the 'real life' together.

4.

We might of course rightly object that Nabokov has every good reason for demonstrating this identity within a fictitious biography (and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is one - in case that has not yet become clear). For it would seem that the tense relationship existing between fictitiousness and factuality (between the portion resulting from the literary imagination and that which is strictly related to reality) is much more difficult to reconcile if we are confronted with it seriously and not just as exemplified by the fictitious model of this novel, i.e. within the latitude allowed by mere fiction. But this objection must surely provoke us into taking a look at another relationship, namely the relationship of the novel to its real author Nabokov, and thus the connection of the fictitious biography with reality. And those who observe the mutual reflecting of the novel's different spheres will soon notice that this connection is a very close one. As a comparison with Nabokov's autobiography Speak, Memory clearly shows, all his novels are autobiographical, but this is especially true of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. This is not so much due to the many corresponding details between the lives of the fictitious author Sebastian Knight and of the real author Nabokov (Sebastian is for example born in the same year in the same town, emigrates like Nabokov from revolution-stricken Russia, is also a student at Cambridge, like Nabokov's mother his mother wears her deceased husband's ring tied to her own with a black thread and like Nabokov he is also faced with the problem of writing literature in a foreign tongue) but is rather due to the fact that the narrator's detailed description and criticism of Sebastian Knight's works (including more general literary criticism) is not only applicable to the narrator's biography, i.e. to this one novel of Nabokov's in keeping with the special aim mentioned above, but also applies to all of Nabokov's narrative

14

works and to his views on literature. We must however resist the temptation of going into too much detail and shall make do with a few examples. When discussing his first novel the narrator says of Sebastian: As often was the way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion. J. L. Coleman has called it 'a clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon', and the metaphor seems to me very apt. . . With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud [p. 76] and further on he remarks: I should like to point out that The Prismatic Bezel can be thoroughly enjoyed once it is understood that the heroes of the book are what can be loosely called 'methods of composition'. It is as if a painter said: look, here I'm going to show you not the painting of a landscape, but the painting of different ways of painting a certain landscape, and I trust that their harmonious fusion will disclose the landscape as I intend you to see it [p. 79], Although this is said about one of S e b a s t i a n ' s novels it would be hard to find anything more reminiscent o f N a b o k o v ' s own narrative technique. Hence there can be no doubt that Nabokov uses the discussion of fictitious works by a fictitious author to comment upon his own literary technique. And just how well he anticipated real criticism of his own art of narration may best be shown by a comparison. This, at least partly justifiable, verdict written by Philip Toynbee in his review of Nabokov's novel Ada for the Observer of 5th October 1969: The infinite conundrums seem, in the end, to be nothing but a device by which the writer can look down with scorn on the pitiful reader toiling so clumsily behind h i m . . . But I cannot conceive any kind of crib which would persuade me that the enterprise had been, after all, a valuable one. For the function of a novelist...

15 is not the same as the function of a conjurer, or of a confectioner. Alas, it has much to do with critical appraisal (of one's own work), with social observation; even ugh! • with morals, shows a marked resemblance to the assessment of Sebastian's novels which was made eighteen years earlier by a well-read English businessman, created by Nabokov for this veiy purpose. The narrator tells us: He s a i d . . . the author seemed to him a terrible snob, intellectually, at least. Asked to explain, he added that Knight seemed to him to be constantly playing some game of his own invention, without telling his partners its rules. He said he preferred books that made one think, and Knight's books didn't - they left you puzzled and cross, [p. 152] But a television interview given for the BBC in 1962 discloses that what is here twice worded as a reproach was in fact intended by Nabokov. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit but I like composing riddles and I like finding elegant solutions to those riddles that I have composed myself. 8 And if any more evidence is needed for the relationship between Sebastian Knight and Nabokov there is also the envelope, found by the biographer amongst Sebastian's remains, which contains various photographs of a man and to which is attached this newspaper insertion: 'Author writing fictitious biography requires photos of gentleman, efficient appearance, plain, steady, tee totaller, bachelors preferred. Will pay for photos childhood, youth, manhood to appear in said work.' [p. 34] Now, in the biographer's own words, That was a book Sebastian never wrote, but possibly he was still contemplating doing so in the last year of his life [p. 34];

16 so it only remains for Nabokov to write the fictitious biography planned by Sebastian. As this fictitious biography proves to be so strongly autobiographical in the way indicated, it once again demonstrates the paradox that the relation to reality is primarily achieved in the fictitious sphere. Of course such an, at least apparent, paradox can only be more than an absurd notion or non-committal game if we may presuppose a definite conception of reality. And Nabokov states in the same interview quoted above, in reply to a question concerning his idea of reality: Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And any further stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of levels of perception, of false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. 9 Since he believes that reality itself is unattainable and that it can only be approached to a degree which varies according to the individual's perceptive faculty, the degree of approximation determines the appearance of reality which thus becomes "a very subjective affair". But if this subjective intrusion is an essential part of what appears to the individual to be 'real', then the 'real life' of Sebastian Knight, or of any other person, will present itself in a different light to each biographer and only the a u t o b i o g r a p h y may claim universal validity. Hence the biographer in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight acts quite consistently when he attempts to enhance his resemblance to Sebastian to the point of complete identity, thus turning his biography into an a u t o biography. But also the fact that the real, whether the life of Sebastian Knight or Nabokov's views on aesthetics, may best be depicted in the fictional sphere, takes on deeper significance in view of the fundamentally subjective character of everything that we consider to be 'real'. For if subjective intrusion is an essential part of the 'real', then this intrusion and thus 'reality' - may best be illustrated using a fictitious model, in

17 the aesthetic playground, because it is there possible t o invent situations and c o m b i n e t h e m at will, so that t h e specific character of a certain t y p e of intrusion clearly emerges. This means that art, according t o Nab o k o v , has a relevance t o the comprehension of reality that far exceeds that realm of superficial reality demanded b y T o y n b e e in his call f o r "social observation" and moral purpose. We could perhaps simulate Nabokov's reply t o Toynbee's reproach b y citing Havelock Ellis: The moralizing force of Art lies not in its capacity t o present a timid imitation of our experiences, b u t in its power t o go bey o n d o u r e x p e r i e n c e . . .10

NOTES 1. This chapter on "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" has already appeared in almost unaltered form in: POETICA, 5,3-4 (July-October, 1972), pp. 374-387. 2. We only have to think of the literary criticism generally known as New Criticism, and of a theoretical position as for instance manifest in R. Wellek's and A. Warren's Theory of Literature (New York, 1948). 3. John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols., London, 1962, II, p. 7. 4. P. 30 (here and in the following cited from the Penguin edition, Harmondsworth, 1964). 5. In the sense, introduced by W. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961). 6. Cf. pp. 48f., 105, 112 and 118. 7. "The Mirrors of Sebastian Knight", in L. S. Dembo, ed. Nabokov: The Man and His Work (Madison, Wisconsin, 1967), pp. 85-94. 8. "Vladimir Nabokov on his life and work: A BBC television interview with Peter Duval Smith", The Listener, 68 (November 22, 1962), p. 857. 9. See footnote 8, ibid., p. 856. Affirmations (London, 1898), p. 115.

II.

FICTITIOUS BIOGRAPHY AS PARADIGM FOR THE BETTER WORLD OF ART: BEND

SINISTER

The story in Bend Sinister is not really about life and death in a grotesque police state 1 writes Nabokov in the introduction to the English edition of the novel. He is anxious to make quite clear that the depicted events are only imaginary (though after having read the novel no-one is likely to doubt the fact), pointing out that the characters in his totalitarian state are merely absurd mirages, illusions oppressive to Krug during his brief spell of being, but harmlessly fading away when I dismiss the cast [p.X] and that Krug is ultimately in good hands, for the narrator can even deliver him from death [p. XIV]. This shows that the author identifies himself with the narrator, who appears in person at the end of the novel, for these introductory statements not only anticipate the exact wording of some of the narrator's remarks in the last chapter but partly even excel them in clarity.2 It is thus perfectly legitimate in this case to ask the author what it's all about and why the narrator creates a fictitious world which forces him to fall back on a literary device in order to rescue his hero from its clutches, and why Nabokov here regards himself as a narrator of this kind. And indeed Nabokov provides an answer to this question ( anyway his 'Introduction' is designed to make other interpretations completely superfluous, or at least ridiculous [cf.p.XIII]): The main theme of Bend Sinister, then, is the beating of Krug's loving heart, the torture an intense tenderness is subjected to -

19 and it is for the sake of the pages about David and his father that the book was written and should be read. [p. X] This explicit reading instruction positively demands to be put to the test, and we shall attempt to apply it to the novel as a whole - including the narrator's comments - by examining how far this "main theme" corresponds to the author's declared intentions. Of course Nabokov would reject an attempt of this sort right from the start because he believes that: In the long run, however, it is only the author's private satisfaction that counts [p. XIII] but if we are concerned with the impact of a novel, which is automatically released from the author's charge on publication, then - with all respect for the author - we have no choice but to replace "author's satisfaction" by "reader's.. . satisfaction".

2. If the book has been written and should be read solely because of the relationship between David and his father, then it is interesting to take a closer look at the literary economy, at everything that was invented and must be read for the portrayal of this very relationship. Leaving out the appearance of the narrator for the moment, the question is more narrowly concerned with the nature and extent of the imaginary world presented by the narrator. Into what kind of a world is the reader introduced? The most striking thing is that the depicted country, the language spoken there and the prevailing social conditions all constitute an artificial structure whose elements are, however, familiar to the reader. (It is as if Nabokov has wished to prove the opinion, entertained by many scholars of literature, that the poet creates the new by combining the familiar in an unusual fashion.) Geographically the arena for the events might be placed somewhere between Germany and Russia, - in Nabokov's own words the language is "a mongrel blend of Slavic and Germanic with a strong strain of ancient Kuranian" (it includes numerous Russian and German colloquisms), - and the totalitarian state is highly reminiscent of Russia under Stalin and Germany

20 under the Nazi regime. 'Realistic' elements, such as these, immediately make the reader think that the author is going to use the representation of an artificial world in order to pass judgement on the real world, and so Nabokov, who regards politically involved literature as "topical trash" painstakingly endeavours to counteract this impression: I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of "thaw" in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent, [p. VIII] But in spite of his further statement: The story in Bend Sinister is not really about life and death in a grotesque police state. My characters are not "types", not carriers of this or that "idea" [p. IX], the huge threat to the most elementary needs in life which is conjured up in this novel in the form of the totalitarian system, makes avowals of this sort seem utterly futile, it is just as if the author of a comedy were to stress the serious nature of his play and to ask his audience not to laugh at the funny parts. It is of course another matter whether the impact of the novel is confined to the threat represented by the totalitarian state. In view of the complexity of the whole work we should do well to doubt this right from the start.

3. An essential part of the depicted world is formed by the academic sphere which is first shown from inside in a few of its members like Ember and particularly Adam Krug, the hero of the novel, or in the 'academic' discussions between these two characters. Their almost proverbial lack of interest in political matters - and resulting lack of 'judicious' behaviour - becomes most obvious when their long discussion of different interpretations of Hamlet is dramatically interrupted by Ember's arrest. A closer look beneath the surface reveals that the new dictators have good reason for favouring Professor Hamm's anti-intellectual interpretation, which, founded on the strangest speculations, at-

21 tempts to prove that Fortinbras, the political man of action, is the play's real hero, and that the cultural sphere is also threatened by a 'bringing into line'. So what at first had seemed to be no more than a digression, turns out to have relevance for the rest of the action. This view receives further support if we examine the famous Hamlet monologue, partly quoted by Ember in translation, in the context of Krug's reflections on death and life to come.4 In addition anyone familiar with Shakespearean criticism in particular and literary criticism or the theatre and film world in general, is reminded of 'genuine' parallels when he is acquainted with Hamm's (at times racial) interpretation, the spectacular version of an American director wittily related by Krug and finally Krug's own, deliberately absurd, mythological interpretation. Even the Bacon theory has its place.5 So this sphere is also concerned with more than just the world of fiction, and although Nabokov considers this to be irrelevant, it is impossible to ignore the satirical overtones. The place allotted to the remaining characters and events can only be explained in relation to the main character, Professor Krug. For beside the public sphere of politics and university it is only the private world of Adam Krug, the hero of the novel (and to some extent that of Paduk, his antagonist) that is unfolded to the reader. The larger circle surrounding this smaller world is made up of Krug's friends, the domestic servants and the state functionaries with whom he has dealings. The smaller circle consists of his family, i.e. his son David and his wife Olga, who dies shortly before the story begins. Finally Adam Krug forms the common centre to these concentric circles, as the conventional 'hero' of the novel. If we look at the amount of detail spent on describing the external appearance of the figures or at their importance as far as the plot is concerned, then Paduk is seen to be Krug's rival and opponent; Krug's dominant position, however, becomes clear, if we take into account the point of view from which the depicted world is presented. This point of view varies in Bend Sinister: for the most part the narrator reports from his omniscient vantage-point, but should he transpose the point of view into one of the characters, then with few exceptions he almost always chooses Krug. In this way a greater part of the action is brought to the reader through the eyes or consciousness of Krug, and as in addition the narrator also informs us of Krug's reaction to particular incidents or of his reflections and sentiments, the representation of Krug's

22 inner life takes on central significance. What is the nature of this inner life? First we must bear in mind that Krug, the professor of philosophy, is repeatedly shown as a large pondorous man, full of self-confidence. This self-esteem [p. 79] - necessarily has its roots in the past: his natural superiority over the dictator Paduk, who was his schoolfriend, and his successful career. Krug's enormous self-confidence is directly responsible for his inability to assess the present political situation correctly and indirectly even for David's murder and his own death. Krug may not confuse past and present completely until the end of the novel when he mistakes the prisonyard for the schoolyard, but it is perfectly in keeping with his characterization when the narrator allows him to become mad out of pity, for Krug is extraordinarily preoccupied with his past and his memories appear 'more real' to him than the present situation. He may for instance recall particular sensations: Yes, it reflects a portion of pale blue sky - mild infantile shade of blue - taste of milk in my mouth because I had a mug of that colour thirty-five years ago [p. 1 ], individual incidents like the accident on a journey with Olga, Ember and an American professor [pp. 202f.], or even whole periods of his life, like his time spent at school with Paduk [pp. 57-72]. Krug is so used to living with his memories that he even tries to imagine how his present experiences will appear to him at some future point in time, and he not only invents a supposed acquaintance from his past to get out of the tricky situation on the bridge ("Anyone can create the future but only the wise man can create the past" [p. 91]), but he even makes things up about his deceased wife's youth to bring her experiences in line with his own [pp. 119-121]. Memories - and his reflections show why the narrator chose a philosopher as hero - mean to Krug one of two ways of overcoming alldestroying time (the other being the complete absorption in a sensation whose intensity, as long as it lasts, may stop the flow of time [p. 11]). He considers the process of waking up every morning for example to be impressive evidence of this consciousness guaranteed by memory ("the finding oneself in the saddle of one's personality" [p.73]) and because he is aware of such amazing possibilities he is even at first capable of refusing to accept death:

23 My intelligence does not accept the transformation of physical discontinuity into the permanent continuity of a nonphysical element escaping the obvious law nor can it accept the inanity of accumulating incalculable treasures of thought and sensation, and thought-behind-thought and sensation-behind-sensation, to lose them all at once and forever in a fit of black nausea followed by infinite nothingness [pp. 87f.]. Later he succeeds in analysing the nature of his threat to the continuity of consciousness ("death is either the instantaneous gaining of perfect knowledge..., or absolute nothingness, nichto [pp. 155f.]) afterwards coming to the conclusion that there is just as little cause for worrying about life after death as there would be for worrying about life on earth, before being born. In this context it becomes clear that Krug's strong feelings of antipathy towards the idea propagated by the Ekwilists, that all people should be equal on the trivial level represented by Mr. and Mrs. Etermon, does not result from thinking as a member of the 61ite but from his idea that loss of individuality also makes the belief in individual immortal life impossible: Etermon appears as a living refutation of individual immortality, since his whole habitus was a dead-end with nothing in it capable or worthy of transcending the mortal condition [p. 68]. It is not, however, his inclination towards reflection, something to be expected of a philosopher, that is typical of Krug but rather the fact that his thoughts are dependent on images, similes and metaphors ("And then, thought Krug, on top of everything, I am a slave of images." [p. 155]). Accordingly he imagines the two alternative possibilities for what happens after death, already quoted above in abridged form, in full as: . . . either the instantaneous gaining of perfect knowledge (similar say to the instantaneous disintegration of stone and ivy composing the circular dungeon where formerly the prisoner had to content himself with only two small apertures optically fusing into one: whilst now, with the disappearance of all walls, he can survey the entire circular landscape), or absolute nothingness, nichto [pp. 155f.]

24 and for the analogous concept of infinite time before birth in connection with our speculations on eternity after death he introduces this image: Thus we live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds, [p. 172] Krug's special talent for clothing his views in apt and vivid images - we only have to recall the comparison of translating literary works of art with the building of a piece of machinery able to cast the artificial shadow o f a t r e e [p. 107], or his idea of the cosmos as caleidoscope [p. 153] — also receives recognition amongst his academic colleagues. This is demonstrated by the fact that they still remember Krug's images years later and attempt to imitate them. A striking example is the description of the recent political development by the Professor of Modern History: . . . no doubt we can single out occasions in the past that parallel our own period, when the snowball of an idea had been rolled and rolled by the red hands of schoolboys and got bigger and bigger until it became a snowman in a crumpled top hat set askew and with a broom perfunctorily affixed to his armpit - and then suddenly the bogey eyes blinked, the snow turned to flesh, the broom became a weapon and a full-fledged tyrant beheaded the boys. [p. 40] Not only are the historian's thoughts "pure Krugism", as the economist remarks [p. 4 0 ] , but also the actual image itself 6 , and even the President of the University, Azureus uses it in his speech [p. 44]. This tendency to think in images, however, may also be observed in other characters in the novel. President Azureus for instance betrays a special liking for metaphorical expressions [p. 4 3 ] , the revolutionary theorist, Skotoma, develops his Utopia of the equal distribution of human consciousness amongst all people as guarantee of universal happiness, by comparing individual consciousness to a bottle: It was, however, quite possible, he maintained, to regulate the capacity of the human vessels. If, for instance, a given amount

25 of water were contained in a given number of heterogeneous bottles - wine bottles, flagons and vials of varying shape and size, and all the crystal and gold scent bottles that were reflected in her mirror, the distribution of the liquid would be uneven and unjust, but could be made even and just either by grading the contents or by eliminating the fancy vessels and adopting a standard size [p. 66], and the speech composed by Paduk to be held by Krug, is full of absurd images: Blind matter regains the use of its eyes and knocks off the rosy spectacles which used to adorn the long nose of so-called Thought . . . no matter to whom they belong, two pairs of eyes looking at a boot see the same boot since it is identically reflected in both: and further, that the larynx is the seat of thought so that the working of the mind is a kind of gurgling, [p. 134]. Skotoma's 'bottle'-comparison also has significance for Krug's antagonistic attitude towards the 'Ekwilism' in the new system, in that Krug deliberately opposes this idea by making use of another metaphor for human consciousness: No, the average vessels are not as simple as they appear: it is a conjuror's set and nobody, not even the enchanter himself, really knows what and how much they hold [p. 70], and furthermore this struggle between individualism and egalitarianism also becomes visible in figurative terms: under a regime that aims at turning people into standard bottles, a "Krug" (German for jug!) is a continual source of annoyance. According to Skotoma's instructions either the contents would have to be reduced - and to pour out the 'jug's' (Krug's) contents it is necessary to get hold of the handle (Paduk: "All we want of you is that little part where the handle is" [p. 130]) or the 'jug' (Krug) would have to be abolished completely ("eliminating the fancy vessels" [p. 66]). Confronted with this kind of interplay between proper name and use of imagery, the reader is constantly reminded of the fact that the character and their words are mere creations of the narrator - and ultimately of the author -, who is responsible

26 for the coordination of the whole work.

4. Especially Krug gives the appearance of being a projection of the narrator's imagination, because the creativity he shows in his use of imagery is rather more typical of a poet than of a philosopher, who is generally recognized by his efforts in the realm of pure abstraction. On a few occasions Krug quite evidently even becomes the narrator's mouthpiece when he employs the same images. The most obvious and perhaps most important example, on account of its prominent position at the beginning and end of the novel, is the comparison of puddle and footsteps, first repeatedly used by Krug [pp. 1, 48] then taken up and interpreted by the narrator at the end of the book [p. 217] and finally by Nabokov himself [p. X ] . When the narrator thinks: I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because o f the constant spatulate shape o f a depression in the ground. Possibly, something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space [p. 217], and Krug once speculates during the course of the narrated events: . . . I might start writing the unknown thing I want to write: unknown, except for a vague shoe-shaped outline, the infusorial quiver o f which I feel in my restless bones [p. 140], then this leads to a two-way identity between the narrator and the hero of the novel: Krug is o f course identical with the narrator because it is the narrator's story that gives life to him. And the narrator can shape Krug's life to fit the pattern of the puddle, reminiscent o f a footprint, which he finds important - he can even go further and allow a meditating Krug to recognize this pattern himself (as at the very beginning of the novel) and thus to mirror the main theme. On the other hand the narrator is identical with Krug in that he tells a story with a "shoe-

27

-shaped outline" and in this way creates that very "unknown thing" which Krug himself would like to write. The presence of a character that has written or would like to write the very novel he appears in, is a recurrent element in Nabokov's narrative technique, from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight to the book in question and Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada. This may be regarded as an attempt to free the narrator of all pragmatic ties, allowing the work to write itself so to speak. With the narrator as character in the novel writing the narrative in which he appears, the circle of the work of art is completed: it exists as it were, both through itself and out of itself as pure product of the imagination.

5. The fictional character of the narrative is continually stressed in other ways as well. First there are the various kinds of word-play, the anagrams (from 'Krug'-'Gurk' to 'Telmah'-'Hamlet' and 'mad Adam' [pp. 15, 103]) that also have a political dimension: . . . one should constantly bear in mind that all men consist of the same twenty-five letters variously mixed [p. 60], the puns [p. 103], the complex paranomasias. All these devices draw attention away from the objects being portrayed and direct it instead to the manner of portrayal and thus to the stylistically artificial character of presentation. Moreover the reader is not sure whether to accept Krug's experiences as being 'real' or only as existing in Krug's mind (both incidents on the bridge seem to be concrete experiences at first but afterwards turn out to have been merely imagined or dreamt [p. 170]). Then there are repeated references to the writing of the novel, whether it be by leaving possible alternative wording in brackets - "The movement (pulsation, radiation) of its features (crumpled ripples) was due to her speaking..." [p. 4] by using author's notes ( " . . . followed by infinite nothingness. Unquote" [p. 88]- "Last chance of describing the bedroom" [p. 95]), by pointing to the fact that one version has been replaced by another ("No, it did not go on quite like that.. ." [p. 131]) or even by discussing the medium, i.e. why the story of Krug's youth is presented in the form of a dream [p. 55]. In addition some

28 of the narrator's remarks show that the incidents described in the novel are not subject to the laws of time ("Three consecutive coppers fell and are still falling" [p. 34]) and others refer to his omnipotent role as creator of the destinies he relates: . . . just before his reality, his remembered hideous misfortune could pounce upon him - it was then that I felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid towards him along an inclined beam of pale light - causing instantaneous madness, but at least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical fate [p. 210], . . . just a fraction of an instant before another and better bullet hit him, he shouted again: You, you - and the wall vanished, like a rapidly withdrawn slide, and I stretched myself and got up from among the chaos of written and rewritten pages. . .[p. 216], I knew that the immortality I had conferred on the poor fellow was a slippery sophism, a play upon words, [p. 217]. These varied, repeated and very obvious references to the fact that we are 'only' confronted with an imaginary world of reality show how well Nabokov is aware of the way in which the chosen plot and the threat of a "sinister" political reality are designed to mesmerize the reader and produce an illusion of reality. This continually effective counterbalance to the novel's tendency to create illusion, keeps on reminding the reader that plot and depicted world are not to be read for their own sake but rather as elements in a creation of a more complex structure.

6. Yet the narrator's remarks, on his omnipotent role as creator - (Nabokov talks of "an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me" [p. XIV]) - have a significance beyond their function of destroying the illusion of reality. Krug, whose idea of the continuity of consciousness means everything to him, comes to the conclusion, as a result of his reflections, that the hereafter - and therefore death - is in theory nothing to be afraid of. Upon losing his dearly beloved child though, he must

29 experience at first hand that this theoretical conclusion does not withstand the 'real' experience of death. The narrator saves Krug from actually having to experience his own death by allowing him to go mad just at the right time. Krug dies a happy man because he cannot grasp the 'real' situation. Of course from another point of view his behaviour must be considered 'reasonable', for he is after all only a character in a novel and does not really die, cannot really die, and anyway the narrative breaks off shortly before his death: his death remains "but a question of style" [p. 217]. But Krug's immortality is not redeemed on the level expected; it is "a slippery sophism, a play upon words" [p. 217]. The immortality of the - artificially - created may only be guaranteed in the artistic sphere. This immortality is guaranteed by the narrator or rather the author, that "anthropomorphic deity" already mentioned. In Bend Sinister it is a deity full of pity and compassion. It not only renders its creation, Adam Krug, 'immortal' but also spares him the "senseless agony of his logical fate" [p. 210] and thus any fear of death: In the last chapter of the book this deity experiences a pang of pity for his creature and hastens to take over. Krug, in a sudden moonburst of madness, understands that he is in good hands: nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution. And as Olga's rosy soul, emblemized already in an earlier chapter (Nine), bombinates in the damp dark at the bright window of my room, comfortably Krug returns unto the bosom of his maker, [p. XIV] The religious terminology doubtlessly stands here as metaphor for the act of literary creation, for the author's relationship to his created characters, and once again of course this is only true of art. But within the limits of this imaginary life even Adam, despite his being a created product, must fear for David's life and, had he not lost his senses, also for his own. It is just this anxiety, "the beating of Krug's loving heart, the torture an intense tenderness is subjected to" [p. X] that according to Nabokov, provides the reason for reading the novel. If we agree with this, then we must admit that the theme of Bend Sinister is, despite all outward appearance, not only literary creation, art 7 , but just as much life outside of art: the life of an Adam, who is not sure

30 whether his Creator also possesses the narrator's compassion. This Adam will not at any rate be spared every sort of "senseless agony" in his conflict with external reality; against the backcloth of this world the artistic sphere appears as the 'better world'.

NOTES 1 Bend Sinister (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), p. IX. All further quotations and references to pages are taken from this edition. 2 Ί knew that the immortality I had conferred on the poor fellow was a slippery sophism, a play upon words. But the very last lap of his life had been happy and it had been proven to him that death was but a question of style'. [Bend Sinister, p. 217] 3 "On a Book Entitled Lolita", in: Lolita (London: Corgi Books, 1969), p. 332. 4 Cf. J. Bader's comments in her excellent analysis of the novel. Crystal Land (Berkeley, Calif., 1972), pp. 95-122. 5 Cf. L. L. Lee, "Bend Sinister: Nabokov's Political Dream", in: Nabokov, ed. L. S. Dembo (Madison, 1967), pp. 95-105. 6 'Did he not use', asked the Professor of Divinity, with a mild suggestion of slyness, 'did he not use somewhere that simile of the snowball and the snowman's broom? ' 'Who? , asked the Historian. 'Who used it? That man? ' 'No', said the Professor of Divinity. 'The other. The one whom it was so hard to get. It is curious the way ideas he expressed ten years ago -', Bend Sinister, p. 41. 7 Cf. Bader, p. 96.

III AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS DEMONSTRATION OF "PRECISE FATE"; LOLITA

1. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. . ., 1 with this enthusiastic invocation the narrator, Humbert Humbert, introduces his autobiography, revealing at once that Lolita was - and still is - the shaping force in the story of his life. Thus he looks back on his past from the angle of his total dependence on Lolita. And above all this retrospective view (as forthwith indicated to the reader) is meant to show how he came to be dependent on Lolita. As Humbert Humbert moreover styles himself a murderer right at the beginning and addresses his remarks to the "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury" as "exhibit number one" asking them to "Look at this tangle of thorns" [p. 11], it would at first seem that his autobiography has been composed as a p l e a in court. Apparently he intends to use the insight into his life in order to gain the understanding of the jury for his conduct; thus we may expect that the account of his life will be designed to demonstrate how his past almost inevitably led to the murder for which he is now on trial. In keeping with this aim he devotes only one short chapter to the whole story of his childhood (or "David Copperfield kind of crap" according to Salinger's Holden 2 ) and then turns immediately to his encounter with Annabel, - the Annabel who, as Lolita's "precursor", marks the beginning of a development which ends in an act of murder. The narrator regards his love for Annabel as the start of his fixation on young childlike girls he calls "nymphets" and wonders whether this experience may be viewed as the cause or merely the first manifestation of his passion:

32 I leap again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? [p. 15] Although he carefully considers whether to view his encounter with Annabel as a 'primal experience', which took complete hold of his senses and drastically restricted his powers of perception, or as an innate peculiarity, he is not able to arrive at a final conclusion. But he is certain of one thing; that his later love for Lolita already had its origins in his experience with Annabel: I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel, [p. 16] In the situation of having to explain his 'abnormal' behaviour in court, the narrator apparently endeavours to demonstrate in his autobiography, held as plea, the autonomy of the process governing his life, and to convince his judges that he has not deliberately committed a crime but is rather the abject victim of a "fateful" development beyond his control. The account of his life is meant to reduce the extent of his personal responsibility for what has happened and at the same time to pass on the charge to an unseen force in control of individual actions. Humbert Humbert, who significantly enough begins writing his biography in "the psychopathic ward for observation" [p. 325], appears to be only too well acquainted with the possibility of turning a court case into a feud between rival psychological opinions, a method he, at first anyway, does not despise. Consequently the fictitious autobiography in Lolita promises to become a demonstration of how an individual may be fatefully damned to perversity.

2.

At the end of his story, if not before, however, it becomes evident that this is not the case, when the narrator explains that he has no intention of publishing this story as long as Lolita lives, and would at most use excerpts from it for a trial in camera - but even then only "to save not

33 my head, of course, but my soul" [p. 325]. Instead he now justifies presenting his life as fateful encounter with Lolita by pointing to a motive that has always served the loving poet as final argument for rendering his beloved and his love in artistic form: t o . . . make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita [p. 325] This new motivation of immortalizing Lolita in art is implied much earlier on in the novel though. Whereas the narrator's depiction of his encounter with Annabel and his other experiences before meeting Lolita - and also his stress on the fateful interdependency of all these events all fit well into the chosen framework of the plea, "Exhibit Number Two" [p. 43] marks a new type of narrative art. The story of Humbert Humbert's life now turns into a story bearing the significant title of Lolita. This change is first signalled by the inclusion of much more detail starting directly after his first encounter with Lolita [p. 4 3 ] , and is explained by the existence of a diary, which has ironically disappeared without trace in the meantime [pp. 43f.]. At first it might seem that this new more detailed description is still solely in the interests of the defendant's plea, being merely better suited to arouse the compassion and understanding of the "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury". But following Charlotte Haze's declaration of love and Humbert Humbert's reaction, we are told something else, something the narrator considers to be of the utmost importance: And now take down the following important remark: the artist in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman. It is with a great effort of will that in this memoir I have managed to tune my style to the tone of the journal that I kept when Mrs. Haze was to me but an obstacle. That journal of mine is no more; but I have considered it my artistic duty to preserve its intonations no matter how false and brutal they may seem to me now. [p. 76], At first it comes as a surprise when the narrator confesses to having given art priority in writing, being driven by "artistic duty" to recon-

34

struct certain phases of his life as precisely as possible, for here he departs from the chosen framework of autobiography as plea. Further, because he thus feels obliged to render the malicious and objectionable side of his story, which might be expected to have a highly unfavourable effect on the jury and could well contradict the usual intentions of a plea. The reason why "artistic duty" required Humbert Humbert "to tune my style to the tone of the journal" is however first revealed a few chapters later, 3 when we are told how this diary came into Charlotte Haze's possession and became the indirect cause of her death, because in her excitement at reading it she ran blindly across the road and was run over. The reader has to be as well informed about the content and nature of the diary as possible, to ensure that Charlotte's unusually violent reaction appears authentic. Thus the diary is not reconstructed so exactly for its own sake, but to guarantee the plausibility of the rest of the narrative. That is evidently what is meant by "artistic duty". In Humbert Humbert then, we encounter a conscious narrator who is very much aware of the effect his method of presentation has on the reader. His ironical, at times even satirical, description of the 'American way of life' (especially directed at pseudo-psychological education and the "highway civilization") together with the often deliberately comic depiction of his experiences and feelings, is able to counteract any danger of becoming embarassing or sentimental. The numerous literary allusions which nearly always point out parallels to his own situation - we only have to think of the many references to Poe's poem Annabel Lee and his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm - also serve a definite purpose; they help to remove some of the uniqueness, and thereby some of the 'abnormality', attached to his relationship with Lolita. And finally the shaping of the autobiography as a combination of crime story and detective novel is exactly calculated by the narrator. As in a detective novel, Humbert Humbert keeps the reader in suspense by betraying who the murderer is on the one hand, but concealing the identity of the victim on the other, and by allowing the reader to relive the search for Quilty; at the same time, as in a crime story, he unfolds the events leading up to the murder before our eyes, thus gaining the reader's sympathy for the murderer - and so for himself. The re-shaping of his autobiography from a plea into a work of art perpetuating Lolita and the autobiographer's love for her, is also made to appear credible because the narrator is able to demonstrate that his infatuation for the "nymphet" Lolita, as object of his lust, has finally

35 grown into love for the person Lolita, and now in retrospect he declares himself to be guilty. After a long search, having found Lolita again, now married and pregnant and not at all like a "nymphet", he realises he is in love with her despite everything and will always love her: What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand peche radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I cancelled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still grey-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine. . .[p. 292] As he now rates his previous behaviour towards Lolita as "sterile and selfish vice" and she also confirms that he has destroyed her life, he confesses his guilt, recognising that the only possible atonement for his crime lies in immortalizing Lolita in the artistic form of his story: Unless it can be proven to me -. ..- that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. [p. 298]

3. When these thoughts run through Humbert Humbert's head, he is already on his way to murder Quilty. The actual assessment of this murder, for which he is to appear before court, is not as easy as it may seem, for Humbert Humbert has no feelings of guilt at all on this score, although on the other hand he recognizes his guilt concerning Lolita's fate: Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges, [p. 325]

36 Since however, the murder was only the last stage of the antagonism between him and Quilty, a closer look at the events previous to it may prove helpful. As Humbert Humbert learns later on, on their second journey through the States he and Lolita had constantly been pursued by Quilty up to the time when Lolita, who had informed Quilty of their route beforehand, escapes from the hospital with Quilty. On his search for Lolita's kidnapper, Humbert Humbert soon realises that Quilty apparently wishes to torture him, for he has left clues of his presence everywhere, - clues which, however, do not suffice to prove his identity with absolute certainty: His main trait was his passion for tantalization. Goodness, what a tease the poor fellow was! [p. 263] When Lolita relates how Quilty, whom she loved, had only wanted to use her as a model in pornographic films, the narrator remarks, "Sade's Justine was twelve at the start" [p. 291], and shortly before being murdered Quilty confesses: " I have made private movies out of Justine and other eighteenthcentury sex capades." [p. 314] This all seems to point to the fact that Quilty, who moreover lives in "Pavor Manor" in "Grimm Road" ('grim road'?), is a sadist - who, it is true, has much in common with the narrator. He not only looks like him, as the picture in Lolita's room shows [p. 73], but Humbert Humbert even occasionally mistakes him for "Gustave Trappe", his father's Swiss cousin [ cf. pp. 230f., 240f., 250f., 259], and the nurse Mary who knew of Lolita's escape and knows Quilty [p. 262], actually calls him his brother [p. 260]. The decisive common denominator between the narrator and Quilty now consists in their both misusing Lolita as an object of their perverse desires. Thus it is only logical that Humbert Humbert wishes to kill his Doppelgänger, after having overcome this stage of "selfish vice" himself and having realized that he is in love with Lolita as a person. For Humbert Humbert, Quilty's murder, which brings both of them closer to one another than ever before ("I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us" [p. 315]), represents the outward manifestation of the inward rejection of his earlier life, the extirpation of his "grand peche radieux", although of course

37 he pursues Quilty at first because his rival had, in Lolita, abducted the object of his own selfish desires. Thus not only the presentation of his relationship with Lolita but also his pursuit of Quilty receives new motivation during the course of the story. The act of murder itself, still retaining all its cruelty despite the burlesque description, reveals in Humbert Humbert a sadistic strain, thus making him become even more like his Doppelgänger, with the result that he does not feel the expected relief: He was quiet at last. Far from feeling any relief, a burden even weightier than the one I had hoped to get rid of was with me, upon me, over me. [p. 320] Not even afterwards does the narrator see an alternative to his actions however: and towards the end of his autobiography he confirms that Quilty had to die in order to make this story possible, as Lolita's 'immortalization': One had to choose between him and Η. H., and one wanted Η. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations, [p. 325]

4. A murder as an indispensable requirement for writing an autobiography that at the same time is felt by its author to be the only possible means of atoning for the fact that his own "selfish vice" has ruined his lover's life - this approximately sums up the combination of confession, plea, crime story and romantic novel from the narrator's angle. How should the reader assess this combination?Can he for instance take the narrator's judgment to be that of the real author's? Although some remarks made by Nabokov on Lolita do exist, it would seem more expedient to begin by exploring all the possible interpretations offered by the novel itself. This means considering the preface added to Humbert Humbert's autobiography. "John Ray, Jr., Ph. D.", the alleged author of the preface and editor of the autobiography, introduces himself as a psychiatric expert on "certain morbid states and perversions". Above all he sees his function in proving to the reader

38 that this is not an imaginary but a 'genuine' autobiography written by the narrator under the pseudonym of "Humbert Humbert", and as evidence he provides exact particulars on the origin of the manuscript, references to newspaper articles and such like. Having thus demonstrated the authenticity of the story, the editor does not have any difficulty in countering objections to its allegedly pornographic content by citing experts on perversion whose statistics prove the described sexual behaviour to be 'real', even if abnormal: at least 12 per cent of American adult males-... -enjoy yearly, in one way or another - the special experience "Η. H." describes with such despair, [p. 6] Further he explicitly stresses that this is a "case history", and moreover one that will become a "classic in psychiatric circles". But this double apology is still not enough. As final argument, having already pointed to the 'moral apotheosis' at the end of the story, John Ray indicates that the moral significance outweighs the psychological and literary value: for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac these are not only vivid characters in a unique story; they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. "Lolita" should make all of us - parents, social workers, educators - apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world, [p. 7] Such a crude attempt to pass the fictitious story off as a case history with moral purpose must straightaway be doomed to failure, because Nabokov's name, as author of the book, stands on the cover. Why does the author use such complicated fabrications and false evidence to suggest the authenticity, scientific value and moral purpose of the story, if the reader can so easily see through his design? This can surely only mean that the exact opposite is intended, i.e. the author here employs the device of ironic inversion to rob the following narrative of every trace of authenticity, making quite clear that this is a fictitious autobiography, a novel. The arguments offered by the psychiatrist, who is an expert on perverse behaviour, then do no more than parody the

39 modern tendency to disguise depictions of abnormal habits (including the cheapest pornography) as 'case histories', as documentary reports or scientific instruction not stopping short of feigning a didactic or moral purpose. 4 At the same time (and the reader familiar with Nabokov is in the know) it is a parody on psycho-analytical literature, in this case complemented by reports from the field of behaviouristic research, as developed by Kinsey.

5. At this point, having assessed the fictitious preface as parody, we must doubtless come to the question of the author's intentions or - should the idea of 'intentional fallacy' prove disturbing - to the question of the novel's total impact, beyond the intentions professed by the fictitious narrator or editor. What is the purpose of describing an educated European's obsession for half-grown girls, and especially for the American teenager Lolita, if the reasons given in the preface are dismissed as a parody? In spite of John Ray's reassurance that not one obscene word is to be found in the whole book and that the relevant 'scenes' are strictly necessary for the moral lesson at the end, and in spite of Nabokov's warning that those who start reading the book as a pornographic work will be disappointed, 5 it cannot be denied that Lolita became a best-seller not least because of that "deliberate lewdness. . . not inconsistent with flashes of comedy, or vigorous satire, or even the verve of a fine poet in a wanton mood", 6 which Nabokov thinks may be found in European literature as far back as the 18th century. In this context it may prove rewarding to take a look at a particularly genial interpretation of the novel put forward by Lionel Trilling.7 According to this explanation, in an age when the freedom to choose husband or wife is regarded as a matter of course, and sex generally recognized as an integral part of a "healthy marriage", Nabokov had to resort to describing a sexual perversity in order to write a love story (as a conjuring up of 'passion love') because the lovers' tragic downfall is indispensable to 'passion love'. In our present society however, since there is nothing like Andreas Capellanus' code of courtly love, since the marriage partner is no longer chosen by the family as in the case of Romeo and Juliet, and since there is no bourgeois conception of marriage which could yield adultery as subject-matter for a romantic tragedy

40 or drama about jealousy, A man in the grip of an obsessional lust and a girl of twelve form the ideal couple for a story about love in our time. 8 Unfortunately there are a few important premises lacking for this conclusion which sounds so attractively paradox. Humbert Humbert and Lolita do not come into any sort of conflict with the American society despite their objectionable affair, for the simple reason that society learns nothing at all of the affair until Humbert Humbert writes his "Confessions of a White Widowed Male", as the subtitle to Lolita is supposedly called. Thus a tragic lovers' downfall cannot develop out of the conflict between their love and the norms of society. True, the narrator constantly runs up against these norms, because they force him to conceal his passion for 'nymphets'. But they can never really stand in the way of love between Lolita and him, for the very reason that such a reciprocal love never exists. In following the autobiographer's story it soon becomes apparent that his perverse passion, directed towards an object and not a person, finally changes to real love; Lolita on the other hand expresses only too clearly that she has never loved him and never will. The relationship between Humbert and Lolita certainly does not make the novel, with the exception of the last few chapters, into a love story. It is rather the rendering of the actions, thoughts and feelings of a man, whose opportunities of finding sexual satisfaction are drastically limited - either due to certain youthful experiences or to some inherent disposition. The fact that his one and only desire is a relationship to half-grown girl-children, a relationship not tolerated by society, that, moreover, from amongst these only an uncommon type of girl called 'nymphet' corresponds to his ideas and that he cannot expect just these girls to be willing to begin a sexual affair with him - all this virtually seems to exclude any chance of his fulfilling these desires. Therefore it is not surprising when he at first attempts to escape this frustrating confinement by trying out a 'normal' marriage and, when, after it has proved a mistake, he at least seeks mental satisfaction in watching possible objects of his lust, as neither psycho-analysis nor the 'distraction' of an Alaskan expedition (Nabokov is never at a loss for an ironic side-effect) could bring about a 'cure'. Thus Humbert carried on compulsively dividing his fellow-beings into

41 'nymphets' and other mortals, and it is only on this basis that we may appreciate just what a piece of good luck his encounter with Lolita must have been and with what hate he confronted everybody and everything, Charlotte Haze, Quilty and society norms, that contended with him for the 'possession' of Lolita. He appropriately attempts to keep Lolita as a sexual object for himself, by making her presents of money and fulfilling her teenage dreams. He does not stop short of tearing her away from her childlike surroundings in order to escape society's inquiring curiousity, and does not even soften when she openly demonstrates her loathing and inward misery ("and her sobs in the night - every night, every night - the moment I feigned sleep" [P- 185]). Should anyone still doubt the fact that the novel tells the - never really sentimental or tragic - story of a man whose suffering results from a radically reduced sexual desire which drastically limits his chances of finding sexual satisfaction, then he should turn to Nabokov's epilogue which contains a reference to the novel's genesis. Here Nabokov writes: The first little throb of Lolita went through me late in 1939 or early in 1940, in Paris, at a time when I was laid up with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia. As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.9 This immediately recalls the first verse of Rilke's poem Der Panther bearing the subtitle, "Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris": Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe so müd geworden, dass ihn nichts mehr hält. Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.l° In both cases the caged animal's world is reduced to the iron bars of his cage; it is these bars that determine its consciousness. Nabokov's remark suggests a comparison between Humbert Humbert, the autobiographer, and the ape who drew the iron bars of its cage. In this context the sexual

42 fixation on 'nymphets' is seen to be a metaphor for the radical reduction of the world that takes place when one single obsession (in 18th century terminology: a "master passion" 11 ) dominates a person's mind. In one way though, Nabokov's novel is less pessimistic than the story that suggested it: at the end of the novel Humbert Humbert succeeds in finding another more selfless relationship to Lolita, that is, in escaping from his cage to some extent. He is successful because he had managed to find a different approach to other people, no longer characterized by selfishness, namely in his encounter with Rita whose actions were determined by "compassion" and "comprehension". Quilty's murder, as already mentioned, appears in this context as the destruction of the personification of the "selfish vice" whose mastery the narrator had just overcome himself.

6. But let us leave this complex of problems which, considered in isolation, project a decidedly too dismal picture of the novel's impact, and now try and find the reason for that well-balanced total effect so rich in subtle humour, as it is experienced by the reader. We have already pointed out the irony often verging on satire and the tendency to parody, which may all be regarded as a defensive measure from the narrator's point of view. This problem of reduced consciousness however, may help explain the novel's many farcical and comic aspects, because — as we are aware at least since Sterne's Uncle Toby - a mental fixation on particular fields of association may well produce humourous effects despite feelings of pity. In a way then, nymphets are to Humbert Humbert what fortresses are to Uncle Toby, and in Lolita the reader's enjoyment is further enhanced by the self-irony contained in the autobiographer's depiction of his earlier thoughts and feelings from his present superior point of view. The narrator's special taste for parody (we only have to recall the parody on Eliot shortly before Quilty's murder [pp. 315f.]) has something in common with the ironical revelation of his 'one track mind', for this too makes us aware of another given compulsion - this time not an associative but a stylistic one. At another level even the satirical treatment of American life, ranging from the doubtful principles of education to the stereotype attitude of consumers or from the love of sight-seeing accompanied by blindness to nature and to the clich£ charac-

43

ter of popular film plots, belongs in this context, because Nabokov has created a European autobiographer who is able to point to the compulsive nature of most human actions, thereby allowing the humourous side to gain the upper hand, although from his defensive angle, the narrator really only wishes to show that he - if himself not 'normal' - ultimately lives in a mad world anyway.

7.

But one aspect of the novel, with which we are already familiar from the narrator's point of view, has yet to be considered: the many literary allusions and the frequent cryptic references to Quilty which almost turn the story into a crossword puzzle or jigsaw. If (to continue Nabokov's own simile) Humbert Humbert only draws the iron bars of his cage, then in doing so he manages to create artistic patterns that are far too sophisticated to be grasped at once by the reader. True, the narrator intended to create a work of art immortalizing Lolita. But what function could the enigmatic character of the novel have beyond the narrator's aim? At any rate Nabokov seems to suggest a particular approach to the text. Anyone wishing to spot the hidden clues referring to Quilty must either keep turning back or must read the novel at least twice - something generally not expected of a crime thriller or detective story. And if the reader wishes to recognize just a small part of these clues (and red herrings) he must understand at least some of the literary allusions. For instance when the narrator calls Lolita's pianoteacher "Miss Emperor" and we hear that she has missed her piano lessons, in order to meet Quilty (as we learn later on). The reader who recalls that Flaubert's Emma Bovary meets Leon in Rouen instead of attending her piano lessons given by Mile. Lempereur will have guessed what has happened at o n c e . 1 2 And those who follow the many allusions to Prosper Merimee's Carmen and have recognized the parallels between Carmen and Lolita, between Jose Iizzarabengoa and Humbert Humbert and between the bull-fighter Lucas and Quilty, 1 3 will expect Humbert Humbert, now standing trial for murder, to have killed Lolita as Jose did Iiis Carmen, especially after Jose's last request is quoted ("Carmencita, lui demandais-je..."). At all events the narrator thinks that the reader will expect this outcome when he afterwards remarks:

44 Then I pulled out my automatic -1 mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it. [p. 295] This enigmatic structure directly provokes the reader to search beneath the surface for the hidden pattern governing the whole. Thus Nabokov confronts the reader with the artistic puzzle of the novel, just as he confronts the narrator and Lolita with the riddle of their own lives. Charlotte Haze's death had already made Humbert Humbert aware of the amazing mechanism of combination determining fate, which he terms "precise fate, that synchronizing phantom" [p. 109]. Finally when Humbert Humbert points to the coincidence it had been, that only the Wace Journal, and not the Briceland Gazette he had perused, contained Quilty's picture, Lolita thinks: this world was just one gag after another, if somebody wrote up her life nobody would ever believe it. [p. 287] Fate arranges life as a director the gags in his film, - and as the author the plot in his novel. Because Nabokov has created in Humbert Humbert a narrator, who allows the reader to see things as he supposedly experienced them, not revealing more than he could have known at the appropriate stage in his life, the novel becomes when being read an imitatio vitae. But does not the novel (despite the pleasure it affords) also raise the 'more serious' question of whether, vice versa, life, if based on mere coincidence does not have the nature of a work of art, and like a work of art follow a 'pattern', even if we do not know the author or are certain he exists. This is a problem, already familiar to the reader of Bend Sinister, which does not, however, become the obvious central theme until Pale Fire.

NOTES 1. Lolita (London: Corgi Books, 1969), p. 11. All further quotations and references to the text are taken from this edition. 2. The Catcher in the Rye (New York: Signet Books, 1958), p. 5. 3. Pt. I, chap. 22 and 23. 4. Cf. Nabokov, "On a Book entitled Lolita" (written in reply to reactions to the Olympia Press edition 1956, and added to later editions of the novel): "I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow" [p. 332].

45 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. "The Last Lovei: Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita' " Encounter, XI (1958), 6, pp. 9-19. 8. Ibid., p. 17. 9. "On a Book entitled Lolita" [p. 328]. 10.Sämtliche Werke, ed. F.. Zim, vol. 1 (Frankfurt, 1955), p. 505. 11. Cf. A. Pope, "Essay on Man", Epistle II, 1. 129-168. The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, One-Volume-edition (London, 1963), pp. 520ff. 12. Cf. Carl R. Proffer, Keys to Lolita (Bloomington, Indiana, 1968), pp. 24-26. 13. Ibid., pp. 45-52.

IV.

BIOGRAPHY AS A BALANCE BETWEEN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY: PNIN

1. Whoever follows the events in Timofey Pnin's life throughout the book cannot help wavering between a sense of amusement and a sense of affliction, between hearty laughter at Pnin's pecularities, especially his language, and a deep feeling of sympathy with a person whose experiences involuntarily seem to confirm his own view "The history of man is the history of pain". 1 At the same time these changing sensations gradually give way to a sense of real involvement, an interest in the destiny of the novel's hero, who, according to society, certainly cannot be ranked amongst the ' g r e a t s ' o r 'important personalities' of this world. This steadily increasing sympathy, accompanied by the strongly fluctuating reactions towards Pnin's idiosyncrasies and mannerisms, is created not only by the numerous details of characterization but by other stylistic devices as well; and yet it is almost impossible to imagine Pnin without that large portion of respect this eccentric demands of us despite the triviality of his life. But it is difficult to describe how this effect is achieved, and it shall be our next task to examine just how the author succeeds in creating a clown whom the reader is prepared to take seriously. As this novel is written in the form of a biography, it is not surprising that the character of Pnin and the reader's reactions to this character should become the first centre of interest. The first six chapters show Pnin in key situations and characterize his most important relationships to other people. In the seventh and last chapter the dramatized narrator then describes his own relationship to Pnin, the subject of his biography. And only the alert reader will have noticed that as much as four years and four months have elapsed between the introductory scene and the end of the novel (i.e. between Pnin's journey to Cremona and Cockerell's account of the same journey), for the way the different situations and events are depicted gives the impression

47 that Pnin is shown from different angles but not at different stages of development. Admittedly the flashbacks, which reveal something of Pnin's youth in Russia and his time in Paris including the crossing to America, do help to convey a certain sense of passing time, but the story of Pnin's life is certainly not presented in a continuous fashion and the episodic character of the narrative clearly predominates. Whether this however justifies the view that the whole work is no more than a loose collection of sketches (some were previously published as short stories) which hardly constitute a novel, remains to be seen. Anyway this issue cannot be decided on the grounds of the novel's genesis alone. The decisive criterion is rather whether the episodes, which formally centre on Pnin and the dramatized narrator, are not also functionally related to some recurrent or higher theme. And in this context the close connection between the narrated events and the narrator is of special importance. It should not be forgotten that the whole of the last chapter is devoted to the relationship of the narrator, who appears as character in the novel (though remaining anonymous), to Pnin. At times when he is actually depicting the single episodes the narrator draws attention to himself by adding his own brief comments. As the reader learns where and when the narrator became acquainted with Pnin and where he has obtained his information, it soon becomes clear just why this biography has an episodic character; it is (at least for the present) the sum of everything an outside observer, one of the hero's occasional acquaintances, has managed to find out on the basis of personal impressions and accounts collected from ex-colleagues of Pnin, like Clements and Cockerell, or from Pnin's former wife and her second husband Dr. Wind and possibly from their son Victor. As long as the narrator strictly adheres to this role his knowledge must inevitably remain fragmentary and its rendering cannot therefore be anything other than episodic. Thus we have, at least technically, solved the problem of unity in relation to total form. As however the narrator styles himself a "litterateur" [p. 45] it is safe to assume that the portrayal of Pnin's life will be coloured by his literary ambitions. This is particularly obvious at the end of the novel which skilfully refers back to the beginning, thus implying the formal completion of a story that cannot (as biography of a still living person) be completed. We may further believe this narrator, who occasionally refers to problems of presentation himself ("It all happened in a flash but there is no way of rendering it in less than so many consecutive

48 words" [p. 21] - "the narrator's art of integrating telephone conversations still lags far behind that of rendering dialogues conducted from room to room" [p. 31 ]), perfectly capable of using the bright - even if a trifle tipsy - Joan Clements to point indirectly to his most important principle of composition, when she says at Pnin's party: But don't you think - haw - that what he is trying to do - haw practically in all his novels - haw - is - haw - to express the fantastic recurrence of certain situations?" [p. 159] This could well be a reference to the strikingly similar situations where Pnin encounters a squirrel, at different stages of his life. All of these scenes, with one exception (vouched for by the narrator who claims to have seen a stuffed squirrel in Pnin's study), have most probably been invented, since the type of presentation, from Pnin's delirious childhood fantasies to the vision during his heart-attack and the incident on his way to the library, betrays that they could virtually only have been known to Pnin himself, and there is no mention of his having told anyone about them. This 'pattern', which forms the basis of Julia Bader's interpretation of the whole novel, 3 provides the narrator with a means of relating distant periods in Pnin's life - and thus different episodes more closely to one another. The "fantastic recurrence of certain situations" remarked upon by Joan Clements, legitimizes, as it were, the episodic relation of a biography, for life then presents itself not as a linear development but as an intermittent recurrence of the same situation (with erratic intervals). The squirrel scenes alone make it evident that the dramatized narrator here goes beyond the limits of his role as Pnin's acquaintance and at least sometimes becomes an 'omniscient' narrator. However this is not only true of single scenes but also applies to all those parts where Pnin's inner life is described and where Pnin functions as "central intelligence", to use James' term, i.e. where incidents are depicted from Pnin's point of view. Yet even this stepping over the limit might be regarded as a legitimate way of solving the problem that naturally arises in a biography if the subject's inner world is presented - and as a rule the reader is quite willing to accept such liberties. But it is a different matter when the narrator deliberately goes too far and blatantly directs the reader's attention to the fact that he has left the convention of the dramatized narrator to take on the part of the omniscient - because self-

49 creating - narrator. And that is just what we discover at the outset of the novel, when first the illusion is built up that Pnin is being described through the eyes of a fellow passenger and we are then informed: Thus he might have appeared to a fellow passenger; but except for a soldier asleep at one end and two women absorbed in a baby at the other, Pnin had the coach to himself, [p. 8] Another passage is just as conspicuous, when the narrator demonstrates that his knowledge is superior to Pnin's: By now he had weeded out all trace of its former occupant; or so he thought, for he did not notice, and probably never would, a funny face scrawled on the wall just behind the headboard of the bed.. [p. 65], and, that the life in question only exists 'on paper' and is fully dependent on the narrator/creator, is clearly shown by the closing sentence of the fifth chapter: One could not make out from the road whether it was the Poroshin girl and her beau, or Nina Bolotov and young Poroshin, or merely an emblematic couple placed with easy art on the last page of Pnin's fading day. [p. 136] Obviously such a blatant shifting in point of view between the restricted angle of vision imposed upon a dramatized narrator and the unlimited powers at the disposal of the omniscient narrator, is not only deliberate must also be recognized by the reader if it is to fulfill its proper function. A survey of some further aspects of the novel is however first necessary in order to understand the nature of this function.

2.

At the outset we had already pointed out that the situations and incidents portrayed all relate to the character of Pnin who gives the novel its title. Thus the character of Pnin provides both the point of reference for the fictitious world described in this novel and also sets its

50 limits: everything depicted is necessary for the characterization of Pnin, whether it be Russia, France or America, Petersburg, Paris, Waindellville or The Pines with the appropriate people and events. But this does not mean that the portrayed world has no significance in its own right - on the contrary: each of Pnin's several settings appears as a coherent structure subject to its own laws over which the hero seems to have little or no control, at least as far as his material life is concerned. His experiences as emigrant and his role at Waindell College should suffice to illustrate this point. In detail then, the author creates characters like the Clements' couple, Hägen and Cockerell, like Liza, Dr. Wind or Victor, who variously show how the hero is viewed by his environment, in order to demonstrate the difference in each case between their and Pnin's point of view. On the one hand this first makes clear to the reader that Pnin possesses a faulty sense of reality and that his almost unshakable selfconfidence is utterly naive, making him appear as an eccentric outsider in the eyes of the world (we only have to compare his own assessment of his ability to speak English with the standard he has really achieved). On the other hand it is also possible to portray differing reactions to a characteristic like his foreign English: reactions range from Cockerell's sick habit of parodying and Liza's ruthless exploitation, to the patient understanding shown by the Clements' couple and the uncomplicated acceptance on the part of his emigrant friend. The narrator's attitude resembles that of Joan and Laurence Clements: he makes no secret of the fact that he is well aware of Pnin's failings, but he does not allow it to effect his high regard for Pnin's personality - especially as there is also his bad conscience (not so much because of Liza, where he is Pnin's 'predecessor' but rather because of his appointment at Waindell College, where he is his successor). In this context the creation of a dramatized narrator with restricted vision offers yet another possibility of presenting differences in point of view, this time by enabling the reader to compare Pnin's view of other characters with the narrator's. A good illustration is provided by the contrast between Pnin's memories, in the second chapter, of his time spent in Paris with Liza and the narrator's description of the same period, in the fifth chapter. This example also shows that this additional possibility of presenting contrasting points of view can only function because the dramatized narrator repeatedly goes beyond the limits imposed by his role, becoming an omniscient narrator who records Pnin's inner feelings,

51 thoughts and memories. Since the narrator employs two different voices, the reader is able to experience from his vantage-point both Pnin 'from outside' (from the viewpoint of his surrounding world) as well as the surrounding world from Pnin's point of view (i.e. Pnin 'from inside') and may thus form his own judgment.

3. True, this judgment is deliberately channelled - and it is here that the novel has its thematic standpoint, for which the narrative devices, discussed above, are merely a prerequisite. But this channelling refers us back to the author who implies a particular judgment of Pnin and his world, on the one hand by the way he shapes his hero and his setting and also by choosing a narrator with two voices. Pnin's failings are his poor knowledge of human nature, his completely inadequate sense of reality, and in many respects (e.g. concerning his proficiency in foreign languages and his ability to adapt to new situations) his unrealistic selfassessment. These failings make themselves especially felt in Pnin's case because he is suddenly confronted with a completely changed situation both in the larger political sphere (October Revolution and the loss of his beloved Russia) as well as in his private sphere (deceived by his beloved Liza), which demands of him special efforts in adapting. And yet even Pnin's complete inability to adapt to new demands does not lead to a catastrophe, for he is equipped with a corresponding will to persevere accompanied by invincible self-confidence and an inexhaustible belief in his right to a 'private' sphere, his individuality. This enables Pnin to avoid any feelings of self-pity and to endure great hardship without losing heart. As a final alternative to adapting to a situation which would threaten his principles, there always remains the possibility of fleeing - from both Russia and Waindellville. It is just this heroic commitment in asserting the self without compromise against a hostile environment and against all the odds, that secures the reader's respect for 'unimportant' Pnin. Even though his non-conformity is often so eccentric that the reader has to laugh, it cannot effect this basic respect and serves rather to make Pnin still more likeable.

52 4. Our sympathy with Pnin has of course something to do with the natural tendency to support the 'underdog', the clumsy person subject to humiliation and ridicule. It has been rightly pointed out that in this respect he resembles Akaky Akakievich in Gogol's The Overcoat* especially as Gogol is most probably the "great author" at whose hundredth birthday celebration Pnin and the narrator meet in New York [pp. 185 ff.] Gogol also employs a double narrator who at one point professes not to know what Akaky is thinking ("Perhaps he was not even thinking that at all: but is it possible to look into a person's mind and find out what he is thinking? " 5 ) and on another occasion is quite able to render his thoughts ("For comparison he then fetched his old dressing-gown that was already falling to pieces. He looked at it and even began to laugh himself: so great was the difference!" 6 ). Just as Akaky puts all his energy into copying documents so Pnin puts all his into Russian literature, and in each case their concentration on one thing for its own sake earns them a reputation as eccentrics. Pnin's overcoat - to carry the comparison even further - is his house, his own steady home in his inconstant life. Akaky possesses his overcoat for only one day, Pnin owns his house only in his thoughts before it is taken from him. In both cases the world to which Akaky and Pnin have fallen victim is on trial. Gogol sacrifices plausibility at the end to reveal a vision of better times to come: Akaky, as wandering ghost, fetches the overcoat of the man who had refused him justice, and even changes his way of thinking. Nabokov leaves the ending more open: by resorting to the limited narrator's point of view he lets Pnin escape from the dramatized narrator. The omniscient narrator is once more involved though, when Pnin's future appears, at least stylistically, golden: Then the little sedan boldly swung past the front truck and, free at last, spurted up the shining road, which one could make out narrowing to a thread of gold in the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of distance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen, [p. 191]

53 That Pnin has become "Head of the Russian Department" is something we are first told in Pale Fire, the novel whose plot again returns to Pnin and Victor's fantasies on falling asleep.

NOTES 1 Pnin (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 168. All further page numbers in the text refer to this edition. 2 Thus G. P. Elliott, "Fiction Chronicle", Hudson Review, X (1957), p. 289 and W. Havighurst, Saturday Review (March 9, 1957), p. 15. 3 "Pnin: Pattern Broken by Life", in: Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels (Berkeley, 1972), pp. 82-94. 4 A. Field, Nabokov: His Life in Art (London, 1967), p. 136. 5 N.V. Gogol, "Shinel· " ("The Overcoat"), Sochineniya (Works), Moscow, 1956, p. 279. Translated by the author. 6 Ibid. 7 Not, as Field thinks, his language. Op. cit., p. 136.

V.

THE COMBINATION OF AUTOBIOGRAPHIES AS "CORRELATED PATTERN IN THE GAME": PALE FIRE

1. Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind Of correlated pattern in the game, Plexed artistry, and something of the same Pleasure in it as they who played it found. 1 What the poet John Shade here calls "correlated pattern in the game", and a few lines earlier also terms "topsy-turvical coincidence" [1.809] and a "web of sense" [1.810], namely the organization of details to a higher structure as the result of mere chance or perhaps of meaningful planning, not only represents the most important insight amongst the autobiographical reflections in the poem "Pale Fire" but may also be regarded as the principle of composition governing the whole novel that bears the same title. Should we succeed in bringing to light the way the very varied themes and forms of presentation conform to this principle of composition, and thus in setting up an 'anatomy' of the extremely complex novel, then we might attempt to outline the intention behind this work of art (even against the author's will, for: "it is the commentator who has the last word." [p. 29]).

2.

The clever and abundant use of parody, the many different kinds of allusion and the deliberately enigmatic structure all contribute to the enormous complexity of Pale Fire, and have led to its being treated as a special challenge by critics. As a result, a number of shrewd analyses

55 and interpretations have already been published which not only deal with the separate parts of the novel but also with their organization to a whole. 2 Even the problem of the "correlated pattern in the game", central to this study, has already been dealt with, 3 and the fact that Page Stegner, who investigated this specific problem, could not decide on the novel's intention must make us wary. 4 If then, in the following, the correlation of the different parts and aspects to the "pattern" receives more detailed treatment, it is in the hope of deducing the implied intention from the nature and extent of this correlation, - and some of that frustration is bound to remain which is very soon encountered by any reader in search of the 'meaning' of Pale Fire. It may be possible to uncover more of that intention by actually incorporating the reader's frustration on his search for the meaning into the analysis itself.

3. It is at the very outset of the novel, however, that the reader of Pale Fire is confronted with an unusual situation, and not first when in search of the meaning. Those who, in view of the general successivity of written presentation and in deference to the author's chosen sequence, usually start reading a novel at the beginning and gradually approach the end (granted the inquisitive glance at the solution of crime thrillers) are likely to be just as perplexed as those who are used to consulting notes in annotated editions, when in his foreword the 'editor' advises them to read the second larger part of the novel before the first, that is the annotations before the poem: Other notes, arranged in a running commentary, will certainly satisfy the most voracious reader. Although those notes, in conformity with custom, come after the poem, the reader is advised to consult them first and then study the poem with their help, rereading them of course as he goes through its text, and perhaps, after having done with the poem, consulting them a third time so as to complete the picture, [p. 28] Depending on his reaction to these instructions, the reader will now approach the novel in one of several ways: he will either follow this piece of advice in "willing suspension of disbelief' and turn to the com-

56 mentary, or he will interpret this directive as a parody on the complacency of editors and keep to his usual mode of reading (i.e. referring to the commentary whilst reading the poem), or else he will read first the poem and then the commentary one after the other - especially if he should notice while proceeding according to the second method, that the commentary evidently has little to do with the poem and consists for the most part of the commentator's digressions. But the remarkable thing about Pale Fire is that, even after having tried out all these procedures, it is impossible to determine which alternative is the best, let alone which is intended by the author, although the impact on the reader varies considerably according to the sequence of reading matter. Let us take a close look at the varying effects produced by reading this "do-it-yourself detective story" 5 in the three different ways mentioned above. The reader who follows Kinbote's advice by turning at once to the commentary, will be pleasantly surprised to discover that the notes make very good reading. They are not only for the most part very extensive and hardly seem to presuppose knowledge of the poem itself, but above all they also offer a continuous story in the life history of Charles of Zembla, an exiled king, the gradual approach of Gradus, the secret agent who is on his trail, and finally the accidental murdering of the poet John Shade. Even if the commentator asserts that he does not intend the notes to become "the monstrous semblance of a novel" [p. 86], they have nevertheless turned into 'a novel about Zembla' (presumably the same thing, for he says himself that Zembla means "Semblerland" [p. 265]). Strangely enough, the biography of Charles and the approach of the agent Gradus in the commentary progress parallel to the development of the poem, yet at the same time having their own strictly chronological order. Kinbote explains this by pointing out that the story in the commentary in fact represents the true theme of Shade's only seemingly autobiographical poem. Consequently the reader who starts with the notes, is all the more amazed when he afterwards discovers, that the poem offers no evidence for this interpretation at all. But an explanation is provided at the beginning of the commentary, which is now to be consulted simultaneously: . . .we may conclude that the final text of Pale Fire has been deliberately and drastically drained of every trace of the material I contributed; but we also find that despite the control exercised

57 upon my poet by a domestic censor and God knows whom else, he has given the royal fugitive a refuge in the vaults of the variants he has preserved... [p. 81] As Kinbote often met Shade before and during the poem's genesis and also suggested the writing of a poem on Zembla, he is sure that the apparently contradictory 'surface structure' will not disturb the careful reader who will still perceive the story of Charles of Zembla as "dim distant music" [p. 297]. Kinbote feels that it is his task to bring these distant tones closer to the reader: My commentary to this poem, now in the hands of my readers, represents an attempt to sort out those echoes and wavelets of fire, and pale phosphorescent hints, and all the many subliminal debts to me. [p. 297] Admittedly the reader could disregard this attempt as megalomania on the part of the editor, especially as he has already been informed by the commentary that Charles of Zembla is none other than the editor himself. If, following the next part of Kinbote's instructions, he should then reread the commentary for the third time, he will have to admit that even such a seemingly wild assertion as that Shade's murderer is an escaped madman called Jack Grey who wanted to avenge himself on Kinbote's landlord, Judge Goldsworth, is well integrated into the story by being 'exposed' as camouflage for the real mission of Gradus, the secret agent. And further he will also have to admit that, even if the story of Charles' life is in fact the invention of Professor Botkin of Waindell College, the eccentric emigrant (which is hinted at in foreword and commentary), the poem on its own without the commentary would still have been lacking in colour: in Kinbote's words it would have been void of my magic, of that special rich streak of magical madness which I am sure would run through it and make it transcend its time. [pp. 296 f.] Of course it is quite possible that the reader who keeps to his usual reading habits, beginning with the poem (while consulting the notes), may arrive at the same conclusion, but there is certainly a shift in em-

58 phasis. Most probably though, the reader will very soon tire of interrupting the poem by turning to the commentary, because his expectations are continually disappointed and the commentary does not appear to have very much to do with the poem anyway. So in this case he will presumably change over to the third reading method, i.e. read the poem on its own and then the commentary. Should he find samples from the commentary more interesting than the poem though, it is likely that he will then continue reading the notes on their own and thus arrive at the first approach. But in both cases it is significant that the expectation aroused by the commentary is not fulfilled. Instead the reader is confronted by an editor who, in his unreliability, stupidity, pedantry, priggishness, prudery (as far as heterosexual relations are concerned!) and above all in his unbounded arrogance, seems to embody all of an editor's worst possible faults. Thus Kinbote appears as parody on the typical editor, and the reader may well gain the impression that Nabokov's novel is primarily something like a modern counterpart to Swift's A Tale of a Tub.6 Admittedly someone who starts with the commentary is almost certain to notice this burlesque element as well, but it does not reach such predominant proportions, because the biography of Charles of Zembla, as a story in its own right, acts as a counterbalance. But what about the reader who switches from the second approach to the third, first reading the poem all through on its own and then the commentary? He is almost likely to feel that the poem is more than An autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather old-fashioned narrative in a neo-Popian prosodic style [p. 296], that instead with its marked tendency towards self-parody, it represents an extremely elaborate work of art, typical of the later phases of some literary epoch. Further he will notice that it has more than just the metre in common with Pope's An Essay on Man, and with Goldsmith and Wordsworth at least as much as is anagrammatically suggested by the fact that it was composed between Judge Goldsworth's house and Wordsmith University. Thus in this case the commentary, with its accounts of life in Zembla and King Charles' escape, of the approach of Gradus, of both John Shade's and the editor's private life as well as of the intrigues at an American college, has much more difficulty in assert-

59 ing itself against the poem, as Kinbote encouraged by suggesting the first reading method. Instead the correspondences and ironic distortions resulting from the comparison of the poem with the commentary become more obvious. Even the appraisal of the fictitious author changes. Whereas the first approach is designed to make Kinbote's talent quite 'overshadow' Shade's (giving "Pale Fire" the appearance of a weak version of the story of Charles the Beloved), the second reading method portrays Kinbote above all as a "lunatic" and the caricature of a megalomaniac editor, and finally the third strategy makes the author of the poem, Shade, appear to be the superior character. Of course it is not a matter of completely different effects but rather of shifts in emphasis. These, however, cannot go unnoticed in a 'novel' whose parts may be read in any chosen order determining the emphasis. We all know that a work of art first reaches completion in the reader's mind and that the impact on the reader of what follows is strongly dependent on the preceding reading matter. But what the different ways of reading this novel (including both the effect of the single parts and the total impact) actually have to do with the intention of Pale Fire may only be suggested at this point. At any rate the different possible approaches mean that the total effect is left remarkably open, for the reader himself is involved in shaping the effect to an unusually large extent. Moreover a closer look reveals that the varying effects are related to one another like reflecting mirrors, so that they do in fact form a "correlated pattern" of an objective nature, although the novel demonstrates how the total effect is dependent on the way the individual approaches the text and is therefore essentially subjective.

4. We have already pointed out that the assessment of the fictitious authors, Shade and Kinbote, changes according to the selected reading strategy, but this is just one of the many difficulties facing anyone who attempts to understand the relationship of these 'authors' to one another - or even to Nabokov, the real author. First impressions would suggest that Shade is the author of the poem and Kinbote the author of Foreword, Commentary and Index, but the novel also contains a number of hints that point in other directions; some imply that Kinbote has also composed the poem, whereas others suggest Shade as the

60 'author' of the whole novel, - in each case the one fictitious author having 'invented' the other. At first sight the arrangement of the novel, with the separation of poem and critical apparatus (foreword, continuous commentary, index), seems to speak in favour of separate authorship. As, however, all of the novel's parts have their origin in one author, Nabokov, and the whole work proves to be a fictitious parody on the critical edition of a poem, this evidence is of relatively little value. We should do better to investigate how far references to authorship within the novel itself cast doubt on the superficial separation of poem and critical apparatus. Not only does the arrangement of the novel give the impression that two 'authors' were involved in its composition; when Kinbote for instance describes his alleged friendship with Shade as follows: This friendship was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed, especially when we were not alone, by that gruffness which stems from what can be termed the dignity of the heart [p. 25], and other passages in his commentary suggest that Shade's behaviour provides no reason for believing in such a warm and hearty friendship, then the irony may only be appreciated if two separate persons are presupposed, both having a very different idea of their relationship to one another. Or when Kinbote relates that Shade defends a supposed 'lunatic' with these words: "One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention" [p. 238] and it becomes clear that Kinbote himself is meant, then we have to assume two authors and accept the reported words as a 'genuine' quotation before the irony can take effect. This irony is contained in the way Kinbote here unwittingly informs the reader that the evidence he has so painstakingly collected to prove his identity as the exiled King Charles of Zembla, should be regarded as no more than an illusion. These relatively subtle references to the existence of two authors ultimately prove to be more convincing than the most obvious argument, i.e. the fact that Shade is murdered and Kinbote survives. But

61 why should we not suppose that Kinbote has invented the whole character of Shade together with the poem and the murder, especially if we may believe him capable of inventing the fictitious biographies of Charles the Beloved and Gradus? This is one of the two possibilities of viewing Shade and Kinbote as one and the same person, - and there are plenty of reasons for doing so. Above; all the fact that the composition of the poem runs parallel to the approach of the secret agent, Gradus, supports the notion that, even within the world of novel, poem and commentary only have one author, - but this is merely the most striking piece of evidence. Kinbote tries to explain away the stylistic similarities as his natural adaptation to Shade's style ("unconsciously aping the prose style of his own critical essays" [p. 81]), but that is only one possible explanation for that "symptomatic family resemblance in the coloration of both poem and story" [p. 81]. It cannot go unnoticed that even Kinbote's and Shade's likes and dislikes are very similar, including their mutual scorn of psycho-analysis, abhorrence of jazz and even the imitation of Shade's "word golf' in Kinbote's Index. 7 But it is difficult for the reader to decide on the true identity: does Shade represent a product of Kinbote's imagination or Kinbote a product of Shade's? Another argument in favour of Kinbote as author of the whole work is the fact that he survives Shade and, like every real author, can allow the character of his novel to die, whereas the opposite is more difficult to prove in this case. Before we doubt whether the 'naive' editor Kinbote could have invented Shade's poem, however, we should consider several other things. As author of the fictitious stories of Charles and Gradus, he is quite obviously able to invent characters and their fate. That his use of this ability is not only naive is shown by the fictitious scene "The Haunted Barn" in his note to line 347, especially if read in close connection with the poem. Admittedly Kinbote says to himself that he is a "miserable rhymester" [p. 209], but when he goes on to explain: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft o f t h a t web [p. 289], then he is describing exactly what Shade is aiming at and achieves in his

62 autobiographical poem [cf. 1.971-978]. Of course Kinbote's 'stupidity' as annotator would be no more than a fafade if he is also the author of the poem (he is for example not aware that "Pale Fire" comes from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, as his Uncle Conmal's Zemblan translation of the play does not happen to include this metaphor). But on the other hand would not Shade also have to pose as a simple-minded editor if he is supposed to have written the whole story? And yet this second premise is favoured by critics, primarily because of Shade's greater seriousness: they are more willing to accept that the poet Shade, who is familiar with Pope, could have invented a crazy commentary to his own poem together with the fictitious 'lunatic' Kinbote and Kinbote's creations, Charles and Gradus, than to believe Kinbote capable of composing a poem which contains such serious parts. Admittedly the following lines are to be found in Shade's poem: Man's life as commentary to abstruse Unfinished poem. Note for further use [1.939 f.] but would Shade have left these lines standing in a book that must surely be regarded as the realization of the idea they express? On the other hand Shade's authorship of the complete work would best explain the greatest coincidence in the whole book, namely that, according to the commentary, Shade happens to be murdered when his autobiographical poem with its symmetrical structure has reached the last line. Certain sly digs, - for instance that Kinbote includes a variant to Shade's poem in which the line occurs "The sot a hero, lunatic a king" [p. 203] from Pope's An Essay on Man, or that he illustrates the way Gradus is concealed in words with the example: "A prig rad (ob. past tense of read) us" [p. 221], also suggest that Shade is responsible for the parody on the commentator. But how do the fictitious authors relate to their creator, Nabokov? Andrew Field is of the opinion that, in the epigraph taken from Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, Nabokov, speaking from without the fictitious world of the novel, has provided the key to interpretation. 9 But he seems to have overlooked the fact that Kinbote states in his notes to line 172 that his pocketbook contains, "among various extracts that had happened to please me" - a footnote from "Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson" [p. 154]. But as the parody of an interpretation, Pale Fire does anything but give the reader an interpretation of itself. As our dis-

63 cussion of the different possible reading strategies has also shown, here again the fact that the relationship of the fictitious authors to one another cannot be ascertained with any amount of certainty and that there is room for differing interpretations, means that Pale Fire aims at a greater degree of uncertainty and flexibility than usual in other novels. Thus the reader is allowed an extraordinarily large amount of freedom for his conjectures and guesswork.

5. This enigmatic or playful structure reoccurs more intensely in other aspects of the novel. Above all there is the broad range of allusions to literature and to foreign languages, which have been described and assessed by critics with much brilliance and apparent joy at disco very. 1° This example, taken from Kinbote's account of an ideal suicide, for instance: Your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off farewell, shootka (little chute) [p. 221] is a good illustration of how allusions to foreign words are employed; as 'shootka' means 'joke' or 'trick' in Russian, 11 these lines evidently contain a hidden judgment on the biography of Charles of Zembla, who arrives in America by parachute (most probably not only for safety's sake but also because 'parachuting' has become a popular sport in Zembla [p. 75]). Even the fictitious editor Kinbote himself offers directions for decoding multilingual puns in his notes to lines 501 ff. ("L'if, lifeless t r e e . . . " , "The grand potato" and "big i f ' ) at the same time bringing us to the level of literary allusions with his reference to Rabelais [p. 222]. How games are played at this level may be illustrated by the notes to line 270: because Shade calls his wife "My dark Vanessa" Kinbote is reminded of a couplet from Swift's Cademus and Vanessa in which the name of the butterfly is used for Esther Vanhomrigh. But when he goes on to write "I notice a whiff of Swift in some of my notes" [p. 172], this is both at once a hint in another direction as well as an understatement in view of his obvious talent for matching the commentator in Swift's A Tale of a Tub.12 The way in which Swift's use of the scientific name 'Vanessa atalanta' ("When, lo!

64 Vanessa in her bloom / Advanced like Atalanta's star") furthermore is woven into a network of allusions to ancient mythology within Pale Fire, has been impressively demonstrated by Mary McCarthy. 1 3 The enigmatic, playful structure is also manifested in the copious word-play - from palindromes of an ironic nature like "T. S. Eliot toilest" [p. 193] to puns like "Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4/On Chapman's Homer" [1.97 f.] or "word golf' and the use of 'talking' names (so for instance, Hazel Shade's life ends in 'Lake Omega' on whose shores 'Exe' and 'Wye' are situated; the wife of the homosexual Charles of Zembla is called "Disa, Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone", a lady-inwaiting "Fleur, Countess de Fyler" etc.). The language created by Nabokov in Pale Fire for the inhabitants of the fictitious Zembla, plays an important part in this context, and on closer scrutiny it turns out to consist mainly of West and North Germanic elements (English, German, Swedish) with Slavic (Russian) and Romanic (French) strains. 14 Of course this language also adds a touch of authenticity to accounts of Zembla (for instance when these words are inserted into the description of Charles' escape: "Yeg ved ik [I know not]', answered the guard"), but its main attraction lies in the fact that the reader familiar with foreign languages is generally more or less able to decipher the meaning of multilingual constructions like 'belwif, 'limbarkamer', 'mowntrop' or 'hotinguens'.'S At the same time Zembla also acts as a means of connecting different levels of plot with one another. When for example it is said of Charles that, during his escape, he is suffering from "alfear (uncontrollable fear caused by the elves)", this is also true of Kinbote or Botkin, who is suffering from a persecution complex and could well be said to have "all fear". That 'grados' means 'tree' in Zemblan is even significant, as the killer Gradus is to murder a John Shade, who says of himself as a child: I walked at my own risk: whipped by the bough Tripped by the stump.. . [1.128 f.] There are many more examples of this sort which offer a challenge to the reader's powers of combination, without ever giving him absolute certainty as to whether and to what extent his results are actually 'intended', or what relative significance they have for the whole work. In this way the reader is constantly kept on the look out-for that "web of sense" that John Shade thinks he may read into a misprint as being the

65 pattern of his life [1.806-810].

6. The many different types of parody in Pale Fire offer the reader a source of pleasure, very similar to that found in the various allusions. We have already discussed the critical apparatus, abounding in every editorial vice imaginable, which is quite obviously a parody on similar scholarly efforts. In fact we can hardly talk of an enigmatic structure in this case, but the reader who is familiar with annotated editions, will have great pleasure in recognising amongst the notes, characteristics of the more 'serious' counterparts with the usual faults. We have also already mentioned how the commentary recalls Swift's A Tale of a Tub, by almost smothering the poem with its notes. 16 Not only the critical apparatus but also the poem itself shows marked signs of parody however. Shade lives between Judge Goldsworth and Wordsmith College, and in his poem Goldsmith's diction and Wordsworth's autobiographical poetry are easily recognised, though made trivial enough to ensure the effect of parody. But most obviously (not particularly surprising in view of Shade's research work on Pope) we are reminded of An Essay on Man, which not only provides several quotations but also shares with the poem the central problem of the meaning of human life. As a post-Romantic writer, however. Shade does not seek to solve this problem by entering into a general philosophical discussion, but rather by reflecting upon his own individual life and his subjective way of experiencing things. But for all that, his systematic endeavours at the "Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter" betray just as much affinity to similar efforts in the Age of Enlightenment, as they also do to Pope's ironical spirit. Admittedly it is not Shade's systematic philosophising that leads him to an insight into the essence and purpose of human life, instead this is revealed to him through his 'accidental' discovery of the similarity between the structure of life and the structure of art. And yet Pope's dictum: "A mighty maze! but not without apian" 1 7 , is reiterated in Shade's words: . . .not text, but texture; not the dream But topsy-turvical coincidence, Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense. [1.808-810]

66 Shade even shares with Pope the ironic treatment of attempts to secure a more exact picture of life after death, and both are very much concerned with the way analogies are formed for this purpose, the way unfulfilled desires on earth are projected into the realm of the unknown. This idea, that concepts of the hereafter are like reflecting mirror images, already appears in a more serious context at the beginning of the poem, in the image of the "false azure in the windowpane" and the double reflection of the lighted room outside - an image set into a discussion of life after death [1. 1-12]. It is typical of Pale Fire that this subject receives both serious and ironical treatment, once again making it difficult for the reader to make up his mind, as we also observed in discussing the sequence of reading matter and the question of authorship. This also holds true of the death theme in a more narrow sense, which appears in the poem on the occasion of Aunt Maud's decease, Hazel Shade's suicide as well as in connection with Shade's own recurrent lapsing into a deep state of unconsciousness, and which reappears in the commentary in Kinbote's fear of death, in Gradus' will to murder and finally in the murdering of Shade. In each case the theme is presented so that it still retains its seriousness, though distorted by parody. An illustrative example is the simultaneity between Gradus', the murderer's, approach and the composition of the poem, as asserted by Kinbote. At first sight this must appear to be something in the imagination of a crazy commentator and a parody on the omniscient narrator; but it takes on deeper meaning in the light of these lines, contained in Shade's autobiographical poem that presents his life story in chronological order: What mostly interests the preterist; For we die every day; oblivion thrives Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives. [1.518-520] Gradus' gradual approach, which Kinbote is convinced he can literally recognise in the phrase "gradual decay", is thus presented as the constant experiencing of death in life, death in the form of oblivion, i.e. in the individual's loss of the rich variety of his experiences, and also as the inevitable drawing nearer to the end of life. The murdering of Shade is another example. It can be conceived as a parody on the ending of a spy thriller (after the large-scale efforts by the Shadows, Gra-

67 dus, in killing Shade, finally gets the wrong man), or as the burlesque demonstration of the unity of life and art (Shade dies at the point where his symmetrically constructed autobiographical poem is complete all but for the last line). Further we might say that Kinbote 'kills' Shade by smothering his poem with his overpowering commentary. But none of this detracts from the seriousness death holds for Shade, as well as for the reader, for whom Shade's death raises the question as to whether human life and endeavours are merely subject to coincidence or conform to a meaningful basic pattern. In this way the burlesque structure governing long stretches of the novel, leaves the choice between taking the presented subject matter seriously or maintaining critical distance to it, completely open. Again then the reader is offered an enormous amount of freedom, as he may choose his standpoint from a relatively wide range. Not even the effect of the comic elements in Pale Fire, which belong to the level of parody, may be taken for granted. Whereas Philip Hengist in Punch is of the opinion that "It is also enormously funny, on the level of literary allusion and on the level of'simple' event"! 8 ; Alfred Chester writes in Commentary: "Despite all this brilliance, Pale Fire is a total wreck, and for only one reason: it isn't funny, and it's supposed to b e " 1 9 , and Laurence Lerner in The Listener seems to be extremely irritated: "Mr Nabokov is a comic writer of high talent, perhaps of genius, but he can go and play his cryptographic games on someone else, not on me."20

7. A reaction like this, coming from a reader who would like to know just where he stands, is easily understandable in the case of a book like Pale Fire. What are we to think of a fictitious world in which the past is as freely treated as the idea of life after death, and in which "ici", the Here and Now also means "Institute for the Criminal Insane" [p. 295] ? The "cryptographic games" 2 1 have not satisfied a number of critics, 22 even a Nabokov admirer like Page Stegner joins in the complaint about "playing the game simply for its own sake". 2 3 And it is difficult to counterbalance this reproach as long as Nabokov stresses the purely playful nature of his works:

68 Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty, I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit but I like composing riddles and I like finding elegant solutions to those riddles I have composed myself." 2 4 But those who think they may infer from this statement a standpoint of art for art's sake must completely ignore another reply of Nabokov's in the same interview, when he answers the imputation "It seems to me that you seem to take an almost perverse delight in literary deception" with, amongst others, these words: . . . I think I'm in good company because all art is really deception and so is nature; all is deception in that good cheat, from the insect that mimics a leaf to the popular enticements of procreation. 2 5 If nature is conceived in this way, then it is perfectly consistent when Nabokov includes these lines in Shade's poem: . . . I feel I understand Existence, or at least a minute part Of my existence, only through my art In terms of combinational delight [1.971-974] If reality itself is enigmatic, full of coincidences, illusions and uncertainties, then art may help us gain insight into things just because of its playful cryptographic character. The function of art as mimesis of life (and vice versa) depends on one letter when Shade imagines the Gods of Fate as "playing a game of worlds" [1.819] (or "game of words"?). Aesthetic pleasure then consists not in escaping from reality into the sphere of aesthetics, 26 but in imitating the process of creation itself, as mimesis in the Aristotelean sense: Yes, it sufficed that I in life could find Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind Of correlated pattern in the game, Plexed artistry, and something of the same Pleasure in it as they who played it found. [1.811-815]

69 NOTES 1 Pale Fire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), p. 63, 1. 811-15. All following quotations and references to lines and pages are taken from this edition. 2 Especially' Mary McCarthy, "Pale Fire", Encounter, 19 (1962), pp. 71-84; Page Stegner, Escape into Aesthetics (New York, 1966); chap. 8: Andrew Field, "Pale Fire: The labyrinth of a great novel", Tri Quarterly, 8 (1967), pp. 13-36 and Nabokov: His Life in Art (London, 1967), chap. 10: Nina Berberova, "The mechanics of Pale Fire", Tri (Quarterly, 17 (1970), pp. 147-159; Julia Bader, Crystal Land (Berkeley, 1972), chap. III. For further interpretations of the novel see bibliography. 3 Stegner, op. cit. 4 Op. cit., pp. 130 ff, 5 As Pale Fire is called in the blurb of the English edition (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962). 6 And with very good reason. Cf. A. Levine, "The Design of A Tale of a Tub (With a Digression on a Mad Modem Critic)", ELH 33 (1966), pp. 198-227. 7 "lass-male in four" (Pale Fire, p. 262): see "Index" under "Lass", "Mass" and "Male". 8 Cf. Field, Nabokov, pp. 299f„ and J. Bader, Crystal Land, p. 31. 9 Field, "Pale Fire", p. 19 and Nabokov, pp. 299f. In the already mentioned studies by Mary McCarthy, Andrew Field and Arnold Levine, but also by Uwe Friesel, in: Vladimir Nabokov, Fahles FeuerMarginalien (Reinbek, 1968), Elizabeth Janeway, "Nabokov the Magician", The Atlantic Monthly 22 (1967), pp. 66-71, William W. Rowe, Nabokov's Deceptive World (New York, 1971) and Julia Bader, Crystal Land, chap. III. 11 Field, "Pale Fire", p. 21. 12 Cf. Levine, "The Design of a Tale of a Tub. ..". 13 M. McCarthy, "Pale Fire", p. 82. 14 Cf. John R. Krueger, "Nabokov's Zemblan: A Constructed Language of Fiction", Linguistics, 31 (1967), pp. 44-49. 15 French 'bei' + Engl, 'wife'; Engl, 'lumber' +Germ. andScand. 'Kammer'; Engl, 'own' + Russian 'tropa' (Pfad); Engl, 'hot' + Latin 'inguen'. 1 6 Cf. Levine, "The Design of a Tale of a Tub . . . " 17 An Essay on Man, I, 1.6 18 No. 243 (Dec. 12, 1962), p. 876. 19 34 (1962), p. 451. 20 68 (Nov. 29, 1962), p. 931. 21 L. Lerner, cf, footnote 48. 22 Cf. Philip Toynbee, "Nabokov's Conundrum", The Observer (Nov. 11, 1962), p. 24; William Peden, "Inverted Commentary on Four Cantos", Saturday Review, 45 (May 26, 1962), p. 30; Roderick Nordell, "Nabokov: Parody, Pedantry, and Waste", Christian Science Monitor (May 31,1962), p. 7. 23 Escape into Aesthetics, p. 131. 24 "Vladimir Nabokov on his life and work: A BBC television interview with Peter Duval Smith", The Listener, 68 (Nov. 22,1962), p. 857. 25 Ibid., p. 856. 26 Cf. Page Stegner, Escape into Aesthetics, passim.

VI. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS THE TRIUMPH OF SUBJECTIVITY: ADA OR ARDOR:

A FAMILY

CHRONICLE

The subtitle of the novel at once suggests that Ada is a family chronicle and this impression is reinforced both by the novel's unusual length and by the inaugural "Family Tree". And to a certain extent this expectation is even fulfilled in the opening chapters. But at the same time these first chapters also call the function of the genealogical tree into question, in that they make clear that this is not a generation novel of the sort exemplified by Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga. The "family chronicle" here under discussion namely, begins about the time of the chronicler's (Van's) birth with an account of the relations between Aqua, Marina, Dan and Demon, and what follows is primarily concerned with the love affair between Van and Ada. Thus we might better describe Ada as a love-story in the romantic tradition or at most as a burlesque alternative to the family novel in the shape of a 'marriage story' (something already suggested by the distorted introductory quotation from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina). Whereas over half of the whole book (and two thirds of the long first part) is devoted to the incestuous love of Van and Ada for one another, the other members of the family introduced in the "Family Tree" receive much less attention. After the exposition has been completed in the first three chapters which also include the report on Aqua's fate, only Lucette, who is the stepsister of Van and Ada, is treated in any detail. The fate of the others, Marina's, Demon's and Dan's life and death, is merely touched upon from time to time, and then only when relevant to the life of Van and Ada. (Admittedly this is also true of Lucette, but the more detailed depiction, especially in the third part of the novel, renders her destiny more interesting in its own right - the same applies to Aqua's destiny because it is related at the outset of the novel). Thus a closer look shows that just enough of the structure of the voluminous family chronicle, which focuses on the individual members of the family in turn, has been retain-

71

ed to suggest (aided by the subtitle) this literary form as backcloth. In this context the subtitle of Ada "A Family Chronicle" takes on special significance because it is identical with the title of the first part of Sergej Timofejeevic Aksakov's memoirs (Semejnaja Chronika) in which he portrays, on a large scale, an aristocratic Russian family and the life of a Russian landed proprietor at the end of the 18th century. This might have been pure coincidence if Van had not explicitly named one Aksakov as his "chaste angelic Russian tutor" 1 and S. T. Aksakov did not also happen to be the author of the famous work Childhood Years of Bagrov's Grandson (Detskie gody Bagrova vnuka), for shortly after there follow these words: "He was. . . in the gloomy firwood with Aksakov, his tutor, and Bagrov's grandson". 2 The alienating first names "Andrey Andreevich" may indeed produce a pun in the abbreviated form "AAA" that all Americans must recognise immediately, but they cannot blur the important allusion to the Russian writer. It is altogether characteristic of Ada that the subtitle is taken from Aksakov's Semejnaja Chronika and that there are many analogies between life on Ardis and the life of a Russian landowner's family and yet that the type of novel thus implied is not imitated in its entirety after all. We arrive at a similar conclusion if we use the predominant role played by the love affair between Van and Ada as the starting point for an attempt to interpret the novel as a love-story or marriage story. Not only the passionate and absolute nature of their mutual devotion with its fateful inevitability is reminiscent of the love-story but also the existence of an apparently insurmountable barrier in the way of a lasting realization of their passionate love. Furthermore the repeated references to Chateaubriand's Rene, which cannot go unnoticed amongst the copious literary allusions, point to its proximity to the romantic exaltation of happy-unhappy love between brother and sister. But Van neither enjoys the pain of frustrated love like Rene or Goethe's Werther, nor does the love story end with the lover's death or the disappointed hero's suicide. Instead the love affair between Van and Ada leads to the lovers' lasting union in the form of marriage. And yet even this convention of happy ending is only partly realized, for the novel does not close with the hero's wedding but with his death after more than forty-five years of married life (which, however, receive little enough attention). But even this marriage, so long strived after and only attained in the second (ironically the wrong - or after all right?) half of life, does not lead to what might be called a real marriage story - in spite of the Tol-

72 stoy quotation already mentioned and Ada's affairs with Rack the musician and Percy de Prey which have the character of extra-marital escapades producing in Van the usual outbreaks of jealousy. Neither does the extraordinarily extensive description of sexual relations - especially those between Van and Ada, but also between Van and Cordula, Ada and Lucette etc. - fit into a framework of this kind. The spectrum ranges from the Arcadian scenery in Ardis and the more or less subtle metaphorical depiction of various forms of sexual activity to passages which (like the vision of the Villa Venus aristocratic brothels in the style of a multinational concern) consciously take up stock ideas from traditional or more recent pornography. If in addition we take into account the constant allusions and ambiguities, then the sexual theme must be said to dominate almost the whole novel, and it is rather strange that previous critics have only touched upon this aspect, whereas in the case of Lolita there were heated discussions on pornographic content although the reader really had to search for the pertinent "passages". But one certainly does not need a one-track mind to recognise this situational and stylistic tendency in Ada: "Can one see anything, oh, can one see?" the dark-haired child kept repeating, and a hundred barns blazed in her amber-black eyes, as she beamed and peered in blissful curiosity. He relieved her of her candlestick, placing it near his own longer one on the window ledge. "You are naked, you are dreadfully indecent," she observed without looking and without any emphasis or reproof, whereupon he cloaked himself tighter, Ramses the Scotsman, as she knelt beside him. [pp. 116f]. . . . another, a part-time model (you have seen her fondling a virile lipstick in Fellata ads), aptly nicknamed Swallowtail by the patrons of a Norfolk Broads floramor,... [p. 393] Admittedly the context is sometimes necessary to be quite sure of the double meaning: Dovol'no skuchno (rather a pity) that Ada's visit to lovely Lake Leman need be spoiled by sessions with lawyers and bankers. I'm sure you can satisfy most of those needs by having her come a few times chez vous and not to Luzon or Geneva [p. 518]

73 but it then leaves no room for doubt. Nabokov has rightly pointed out that Lolita should not be read by those expecting something along the lines of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Les Amours de Milord Grosvitl, but in the case of Ada the question arises as to why he has deliberately encouraged similar expectations by combining elements from the works of Cleland, Frank Harris and Joyce (to mention but afew directions). We shall come back to this problem when we discuss the novel's thematic structure. But for the moment, keeping to the level of the depicted world, it is enough to state that (throughout the book) the whole sexual sphere revolves around Van the chronicler. 'My Life & Love' might have been the title given by Van to Ada in a slightly modified version of the Harris title; and without doubt Van is the 'hero' of Ada just as Humbert Humbert is the hero of Lolita. In each case the autobiographical narrator fixes the point in which the many aspects of his life come together in the title of the novel. As Van's autobiography, the novel also depicts the narrator's characteristics and fields of interest. To begin with, Van is so rich that he can afford everything he desires. Then the fact that (even into old age) he exceeds the sexual potency of normal mortals being conveniently sterile at the same time, fits in with the predominance of the sexual sphere. He is able to compete with every similar hero in strength, dexterity and ability to hold drink. His professional interest in investigating psychic phenomena, above all his concern with conceptions of the "other world" Terra and the "Texture of Time", is so strongly supported by his outstanding intellectual gifts that he soon works his way up to the top of the academic ladder. At the same time he considers himself "not quite a savant, but completely an artist", and in retrospect he rates his books not primarily as philosophical studies but rather as "excercises in literary style". This selfassessment deserves more attention in connection with the stylistic pecularities in Ada. It is quite in line with character, for even as youths both Van and Ada outdo their contemporaries as far as their knowledge of literature is concerned "to . . . an absurd extend" [p. 218]. Thus at the level of mere incidents the novel may also be viewed as the presentation of a genial 'life of an artist' that in compliance with convention has to be libertine. This is just one of the reasons why Ada, even though the novel is named after her, does not possess such extraordinary qualitites by far and is by no means as distinctly portrayed as Van. True, the reader is

74 given an exact description of her outward appearance at different stages in the course of her life and even her inclinations and feelings are sometimes treated in greater detail. And yet she still has in common with Lucette, Demon and Dan the fact that she is only viewed outwardly through the eyes of Van the narrator. As a result the reader not only gains less insight into her moods and thoughts but he also receives less incentive for observing the action from her point of view. In this respect her marginal notes on the manuscript of Van's chronicle, which the fictitious editor had included in the final version, prove to be most informative. This will become apparent when we examine more closely the novel's narrative form.

2.

The setting into which Nabokov has placed his 'superstar' Van is just as fantastic as the hero himself. The story takes place on the planet Antiterra whose name alone suggests a contrast to the earth. This contrast is incorporated into the novel, in that, according to a number of 'madmen' on Antiterra, there actually exists a planet Terra which on the one hand represents a concretisation of ideas about life after death (equivalent to our 'Heaven') and on the other is also identical with our world as regards recent political history. But Antiterra, being fifty years ahead of Terra in its historical development, appears to enjoy political stability and peace as a result of its division into the hemispheres of the "Anglo-American coalition" and "Tartary behind her Golden Veil". However, when a film portraying political reality on Terra is shown, thousands profess to believing in the "secret Govemment-conceil'd identity of Terra and Antiterra": Terra convalesced after enduring the rack and the stake, the bullies and beasts that Germany inevitably generates when fulfilling her dreams of glory. Russian peasants and poets had not been transported to Estotiland, and the Barren Grounds, ages ago - they were dying, at this very moment, in the slave camps of Tartary. Even the governor of France was not Charlie Chose, the suave nephew of Lord Goal, but a bad-tempered French general, [p. 582]

75

In detail, the setting in which Van and Ada meet appears as a synthesis of modern America and prerevolutionary Russia, of modern technology with its Utopian advancements (electricity becomes outmoded and is abolished) and feudal society (the heroes belonging to the aristocracy of course). As far as material living conditions are concerned this 'world' seems like Paradise, at least to the members of Van's social class But as for inner experience there must be strong reservations: Ardis may appear like the Garden of Eden to Van and Ada under the influence of their young love, but it is not only 'crazy' Aqua who thinks . . . that only a very cruel or very stupid person, or innocent infants, could be happy on Demonia, our splendid planet [p.301] but even Van as the deceived lover believes . . . that for him to survive on this terrible Antiterra, in the multicolored and evil world into which he was born, he had to destroy, or at least to maim for life, two men. [p. 301] Above all the reality of death threatens Van's life just as it does ours, and according to Ada there only exists a Divine Providence in art on Antiterra. 4 Faced with this conglomeration of elements from our own sphere of experience, authentic history and the imaginary world of conventional literature - in particular the traditions of the novel, fairytale and science fiction - the question of its function becomes of primary importance. And this is a problem that will play no small part in our still pending discussion of central thematic points and more especially in connection with the intentions of the autobiographical narrator.

3. Van's position of priority amongst the characters in the novel is mainly due to the fact that he acts both as narrator and author of the "Family Chronicle". Our consideration of the way the characters are presented already showed that Ada might more aptly be described as Van's autobiography than as a family chronicle. At any rate this chronicle is written by the main performer in the incidents that are portrayed, and this obviously leads to a marked bias resulting from the chosen perspec-

76 tive as well as to several complications in narrative technique, - especially towards the end of the novel. At the beginning however, the novel's autobiographical character does not really become apparent because Van relates his experiences in the third person. It is only from the occasional remarks referring to the actual situation of narrating that the reader may deduce that Van is the narrator and that Ada sometimes helps him in reconstructing the past. For instance in the eighth chapter of the first part: And that kind of simile, with those special trimmings, remind me today of the entomological entries in Ada's diary - which we must have somewhere, mustn't we, darling, in that drawer there, no? you don't think so?Yes! Hurrah! Samples. . .[p. 55], or a little later on in the twelfth chapter when Van first of all asks Ada to carry on relating in his place, then encourages her to proceed further before she finally requests him to take over the role of narrator again: Take over, dear, for a little while. Pill, pillow, billow, billions. Go on from here, Ada, please! (She). Billions of boys. . . the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I'm all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact. . . The males of the firefly (now it's really your turn, Van). The males of the firefly, a small luminous beetle. ... [pp. 70f], Yet it is not only in passages like these, where the reader is given information on the novel's genesis, that it becomes clear who is doing the narrating. At times Van forgets to throw off his own recollections in the third person and appears directly as narrating self: The procuress in Wicklow, on that satanic night of black sleet, at the most tragic, and almost, fatal point of my life (Van, thank goodness, is ninety now - in Ada's hand) dwelt with peculiar force on the "long eyes" of her pathetic and adorable grandchild. How I used to seek, with what tenacious anguish, traces and tok-

77 ens of my unforgettable love in all the brothels of the world! [p. 104] As cannot be otherwise in an autobiography, during the course of narrating the depicted situation of the biography's subject gradually approaches the biographer's actual situation until both situations become identical. It is finally impossible for the autobiographer to complete his biography by describing his own death as well. This problem is raised in a similar fashion in Pale Fire with respect to John Shade's autobiographical poem bearing the same title. There the problem is solved by allowing the poem to remain a fragment and yet suggesting its completion both structurally and metrically, and in the case under question the solution also consists of a stylistic trick. Ada cannot really be considered complete either, for Van keeps on altering the manuscript as long as he lives but he finds a solution by placing this very state of affairs at the end of his chronicle and by making the final completion clear in that he himself manages to compose the blurb for his book: One can even surmise that if our time-racked, flat-lying couple ever intended to die they would die, as it were, into the finished book, into Eden or Hades, into the prose of the book or the poetry of its blurb [p. 587]. Then follows - after a short intermediatory remark referring to the first part of the novel - the "blurb" itself and thus the end of Ada. In keeping with the autobiography carried on until death Nabokov has even provided for an editor. He appears as a character (Ronald Oranger) in Van's memoirs who at first only reveals his presence in additions like "[thus in the Ms. Ed.]" but steadily loses his reserve. At times he wishes to draw the reader's attention to mistakes made by the narrator: . . . a ten-page letter, which shall not be discussed in this memoir (See, however, a little farther. Ed.) 5 and on occasions he even talks about himself: Van Veen (as also, in his small way, the editor of Ada) liked to change his abode at the end of a section or chapter or even paragraph. . .[p. 365].

78

But as editor he is both negligent and clumsy. He forgets to eradicate his own and Van's notes on text layout or Van's obvious directions to his secretary on spelling: The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n, o, x. [p. 494] Ronald Oranger is thus one more example of that species of self-conceited, pedantic and stupid editor introduced by Nabokov in Lolita and veritably celebrated in Pale Fire. The complex nature of the narrative technique becomes even more evident if we take a closer look at the part played by Ada and at Van's artistic reflections. We have already seen in connection with Van's selfportrayal as narrator that Ada sometimes acts as narrator as well, thus exceeding her role of aid to memory which Van assigns to her throughout. But this is only very rarely the case [cf. p. 120]. She makes up for this however by frequently adding her comments to Van's descriptions, either on content, style, or both. It is typical for instance when she reacts to Van's calling her "not an easily frightened or overfastidious little girl" with these words: (In Ada's hand: I vehemently object to that "not overfastidious." It is unfair in fact, and fuzzy in fancy. Van's marginal notes: Sorry, puss; that must stay.) [pp. 97f]. However this quotation alone shows that the subjectivity of Van's autobiography is given priority over the sometimes suggested 'objectivity' of . the Family Chronicle. This is demonstrated not only by the fact that Ada's contributions are always marked as such but above all by the fact that - as here - the version recalled to mind by Van determines the issue [cf. p. 120]. As for Van's remarks on his type of presentation they are quite in line with character, for he is an experienced author who admits to having artistic ambitions: . . . it suddenly occurred to our old polemicist that all his published w o r k s - . . . - were not epistemic tasks set to himself by a savant, but buoyant and bellicose exercises in literary style, [p. 578]

79 It is indeed 'bellicose' when a difficult and complicated sentence is followed by this remark: The modest narrator has to remind the rereader of all this, . . . [p. 19] and he endeavours - which will be mentioned again later - to imitate as many conventional forms of narration as possible distorting them ironically and thus exposing them to ridicule. But we should do well to take the phrase "exercises in literary style" more seriously in reference to the role of narrator. The reason for this is the fact that beside the autobiographer Van there also appears another, 'omniscient' narrator who transposes the whole relationship between the reality Van actually experiences and the reality he depicts from memory into the region of fiction. When Van makes mistakes, when for instance he at first seems to quote from his diary of 1884 [pp. 29f.] and then a few chapters later writes that he has destroyed this diary long ago [p. 109], we may be able to accept this, for he only talks of his "ninety-seven percent true, and three percent likely, Ada or Ardor, a Family Chronicle" [p. 567]. But it is a different matter when the narrator portrays events (like Ada's getting dressed on the day of her twelfth birthday [p. 77] or Lucette's actions and thoughts shortly before her death [pp. 491 ff.].) which by reason of his chosen role he cannot possibly know about. Finally it is even worse when at the close of the novel he quite obviously talks of Van and Ada as mere characters in a novel: Actually the question of mortal precedence has now hardly any importance. I mean, the hero and heroine should get so close to each other by the time the horror begins, so organically close, that they overlap, intergrade, interache, and even if Vaniada's end is described in the epilogue we, writers and readers, should be unable to make out (myopic, myopic) who exactly survives, Dava or Vada, Anda or Vanda. [p. 584] The discrepancy between the omniscient narrator in control of his characters and their destiny and the dramatized narrator Van (created by him) becomes quite evident in the tenth chapter of the second part where Ada and Van are discovered by Demon. At this crucial point in Van's life we are told:

80 . . . the fool who should have simply walked on into the next room and come back one moment later (locking the door behind him - locking out years and years of lost life), instead of which he remained standing near his father's chair, [p. 435] We are given the impression that Van might have averted the catastrophe if he had shown more presence of mind. But at the beginning of the chapter it was expressedly pointed out that all such speculations are absurd for the author (and narrator) had determined his characters' fate long before: They took a great many precautions - all absolutely useless, for nothing can change the end (written and filed away) of the present chapter, [p. 432] A survey of the complex narrative structure in Ada would then produce the following result: an omniscient, omnipotent narrator who hardly ever appears in person invents an ever-present dramatized narrator, the old Van Veen, who - aided by his sister and wife Ada - relates the story of his life. In this life-story Van figures as the author of a number of books and it is thus quite understandable that in writing his memoirs he pays a great deal of attention to style. Moreover in order to hold out the fiction of the autobiography to the end the narrator also invents an editor. This at least is one way of looking at it. There is, however, another just as likely. As the examination of stylistic details still remains to show, the novel is virtually brimming over with imitations and parodies of traditional forms of presentation from the earlier stages of the development of the novel. If we take this into account then it is quite possible that the autobiographer Van is playing with the conventions of the autobiography and family chronicle, and invents for this very reason both the editor (because he is required to complete the autobiography) and the omniscient, omnipotent narrator (because he belongs to the convention of the Family Chronicle). It is difficuly to decide on the 'real' version. In favour of the second version speaks the fact that Van may well be using subtle use of an apparently 'stupid' editor as a stylistic device, in making subtle use of an apparently 'stupid' editor as a ly have to think of the antipathetic effect created by the editor's supposed lapse at the end of the 35th chapter of the first part:

81 My magic carpet no longer skims over crown canopies and gaping nestlings, and her rarest orchids. Insert [p. 221] In addition to this the structure of Ada is in a way - as is yet to be shown - a demonstration of the sense of time as Van attempts to describe it in The Texture of Time. Thus Ada may rightly be considered to be his own composition. But really - having once exposed the possible relations of dependence - the hierarchy of the different narrators is ultimately just as irrelevant as the question of who dies first, "Dava or Vada, Anda or Vanda" [p. 584].

4. The voluminous "family chronicle" Ada or Ardor is presented in five parts of very varying size. The first part takes up more than half of the whole novel, the second part a further quarter, the first three parts together about nine tenths and the last two parts together make up the remaining ten percent. A division of this kind may hardly be called balanced and we should do well to consider the reasons for this unequal distribution. This means that we must attempt to find the principle underlying this division, - and it is not very difficult to find if we take a closer look at the conclusions to the separate parts. The first part closes with Van's departure from Manhattan for Lute after he has tried to forget, with the help of Cordula and his work on a book, his parting in anger from Ada. At the end of the second part there is a parody on Van's attempted suicide and a reference to his later cruel revenge on Kim, after Van in a parting letter has just agreed to the separation demanded by Demon. The third part ends with a preview of Andrey Vinelander's illness and Ada's journey to Switzerland in 1922, after we have been told how she leaves Van in 1905 in Mont Roux to accompany her sick husband Andrey. Finally the fourth part finishes with a discussion between Van and Ada on the time following their reunion after long years of separation. Thus, although not obviously demonstrated by stereotype final scenes, Van's leaving Ada for a period of time marks the end of a part on three occasions and one part closes with their final reunion. This would only seem to be consistent in view of the fact that the narrator has given his autobiography the title Ada thus presenting his life from the viewpoint of his relationship to Ada.

82 Therefore larger changes in this relationship also divide off in his memory the phases of his life from one another, and these phases correspond to the separate parts of the novel. It is also striking that these parts not only vary in size but steadily decrease in length as well. As we are dealing with a life-story which apart from a few glimpses at future and past events - is told in chronological order, the later parts correspond to increasingly later phases in Van's life. At the same time the relationship between the actual duration of narration and the time narrated becomes increasingly unfavourable. In the first part the summer months of 1884 and 1888 on Ardis are each depicted in more detail than the whole four years from 1888 to 1892 in the second part. In the third part almost a whole decade is skipped and the narrative turns to situations from the years 1901 and 1905 ending with a preview of 1922. Two days in summer 1922 are then described in the fourth part, and the fifith part begins as late as 1967 with Van's ninety-fourth birthday dealing with the 45 years in between in the form of brief backward glances which take up no more than a few pages. This increasing economy of description is in complete agreement with the theoretical opinions, scattered throughout the novel, on the development of memory in the course of life and on the sense of time. As far as Van is concerned the only real time is "individual, perceptual time" [p. 536], and, consequently, a uniform sense of time is a mere fiction. Van believes in "real time's being connected with the interval between events, not with their passage", and thus the more these "intervals" increase the faster time flows. But memory is also "a complex system of those subtle bridges which the senses traverse - laughing, embraced, throwing flowers in the air - between membrane and brain" [p. 221], and so it is just those experiences of both sensual and mental intenseness, like summer spent On Ardis with Ada, that are treated most extensively in Van's "memoirs". In his memory, life does not appear to Van as a process, as time that has slipped away, but as a series of separate scenes and pictures: Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photostudio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue, [p. 103] If we consider the novel in terms of this metaphor as the expression of Van's "remembrance" then the pictures from later stages in life become

83 less numerous (and thus the parts of the novel shorter), without there being a change in the principle of presentation. As memory has the character of a picture-gallery and is presented accordingly in Van's "memoirs" 7 it is impossible to talk of a "chronicle" - in spite of the subtitle. Just as the narrator of an autobiography with his restricted perspective and the omniscient narrator of a family chronicle are really exclusive of each other, so the same applies to the subjective principle of presentation as a series of 'pictures' recalled from own experience • with irrelevant intervals of varying length - and the 'objective' principle of presentation required by a chronicle. All four are united in Ada, though with an obvious preference for the autobiographical narrator and the "photostudio de luxe" which crops up as early as the seventh chapter of the second part in the form of Kim's photograph album and gives Van the first impetus for writing his book: I'm sorry you showed it to me. That ape has vulgarized our own mind-pictures. I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle, [p. 406] The novel's overall structure is thus entirely in keeping with Van's conception of memory and of time as "private time". This is of particular importance in view of the fact that the fourth part of the novel is almost exclusively devoted to a philosophical attempt at explaining the meaning of time, because the intrinsic integration of this part within the novel as a whole then becomes apparent.

5. Anyone wishing to describe the novel's structure in more detail even examining stylistic features is likely to despair when confronted with the wide variety of devices presented by the author. This variety is manifested in a wealth of thematic and stylistic cross-references within the novel, in a similar profusion of puns and allusions (in particular referring to works of Russian, French and English literature and Italian and Dutch art), as well as in an abundance of parodies on style and imitations of plots taken from traditional novels. In a brief description of the novel like this, there is only room for a few of the more obvious

84 examples. Those in search of more should refer to the "Notes to Ada" written by "Vivian Darkbloom" alias Vladimir Nabokov [cf. Fn. 2 ] . It would be impossible to deal with these effects including a key to the allusions along the lines of Proffer's Keys to 'Lolita' in anything like the necessary detail without producing a work that would certainly compete with the novel itself in size. An attempt to uncover a few underlying principles is also doomed to failure by the fact that the combination of diverse details is really only subject to the individual nature of Van's life and memory. No accursed generalizer, with a half-penny mind and dry-fig heart, would be able to explain (and this is my sweetest revenge for all the detractions my lifework has met with) the individual vagaries evolved in those and similar matters [p. 237] Van muses upon reaching the conclusion that even he does not know why he should adore Demon his father and be indifferent to Marina his mother. But in spite of Van's triumphant remarks we shall still attempt to direct attention towards some obvious characteristics of structure and style. One such feature consists in the fact that at intermittent intervals throughout the novel, associations are created by means of repetitions and references to previous parts, which partly have the character of leitmotifs and partly betray a game that the author is playing with his reader's attentiveness. So for instance on his journey to Ardis Van had imagined a saddled horse standing ready for him at the station [p. 34]. Instead he only discovers a "Hackney coach" which a few sentences later becomes an "old clockwork taxi". Shortly after we learn in passing that: None of the family was at home when Van arrived. A servant in waiting took his horse, [p. 35] When Van leaves Ardis again a few months later, Bouteillan drives him to the station by car. On the way he stops for a few minutes to meet Ada once more in secret. Just why he now happens to be wearing riding boots with spurs soon becomes evident, for on his returning to the right path there is no more talk of a car. Instead we are informed:

85 Morio, his favorite black horse, stood waiting for him, held by young Moore. He thanked the groom with a handful of stellas and galloped off, his gloves wet with tears, [p. 159] Another example is Lucette's unsuccessful attempt to form a word from REMNILK or LINKREM when playing Scrabble. Van wishes to be of help and says: . . . you can always make a little cream, KREM or KREME-. . . [p. 227] but he does not name the actual word. Two chapters further on Demon compares himself to his son and muses: . . . that gene missed you, but I've seen it in my hairdresser's looking-glass when refusing to have him put Cremlin on my bald s p o t ; . . . [p. 240] It is even more interesting when cross-references of this kind become more extensive or even grow into a complex network of interrelations. Examples of this are for instance the cigarette-motif, the "Cinderella's slipper"-motif and the "La riviere de diamants" - motif. The (Turkish) cigarettes make their first appearance on Van's first night of love with Ada, ("The Burning Barn") [pp. 120 f.], then Van suspects that Ada has a strong smoker as secret lover when she smells of tobacco after returning from Kaluga [p. 234], and when, after the large family meal, Ada lights a Turkish cigarette on the occasion of Demon's visit, Van says: "I think I'll take an Alibi -1 mean an Albany - myself." "Please note, everybody," said Ada, "how voulu that slip was! I like a smoke when I go mushrooming, but when I'm back, this horrid tease insists I smell of some romantic Turk or Albanian met in the woods." "Well," said Demon, "Van's quite right to look after your morals." [p. 260] At this point the irony contained in Demon's remark can only achieve its full effect if the reader recalls to mind the earlier relevant passages.

86 Then of course, it hardly comes as a surprise that "a Karavanchik of Cigarettes" is at hand when Van is in bed together with Ada and Lucette [p. 419]. The network of associations relating to the "Diamond Necklace" begins when the governess of Ada and Lucette, Mile Lariviere, does justice to her name by reading aloud in the summer of 1884 a story bearing the title La Riviere de Diamants that she had written for the Quebec Quarterly. The suspicion that it is in actual fact Maupassant's famous tale La Parure is confirmed when Mile Lariviere declares two pages further on that she intends to publish the story under a pseudonym and two pages later she is called "Mile Laparure". When Van returns to Ardis in 1888 he learns that she has become a "sensational Canadian bestselling author" with her story "The Necklace" using the pseudonym "Guillaume de Monparnasse". Now the closer connection between this literary allusion (and game with the repetition of plots in literature) and the plot of Ada lies in the fact that Van brings a diamond necklace with him on this second visit ("A diamond necklace coiled loose in his pocket" [p. 187]) which he first tears apart on seeing how Percy de Prey twice kisses Ada's hand, only to gather it together again after he has been reconciled with Ada ("Anyway, I made the best study of the dustiest floor ever accomplished by a romantic character" [p. 193]). This last passage is very significant because, via a quotation from Chekhov, the diamonds become a symbol of their happy reunion: . . . at the worst we shall live quietly, you as my house keeper, I as your epileptic, and then, as in your Chekhov, 'we shall see the whole sky swarm with diamonds' [p. 193]. Just why the diamond necklace is of such importance (even Demon intends giving Ada "une riviere de diamants" for her sixteenth birthday [p.257]) is not revealed until the eigth chapter of the second part, when Van finds Lucette in bed with "Ada, already wearing, for ritual and fatidic reasons, his river of diamonds" [p. 417]. There the tribadic situation is described metaphorically as follows: Ada's red-lacquered talons, which lead a man's reasonably recalcitrant, pardonably yielding wrist out of the dim east to the bright russet west, and the sparkle of her diamond necklace,

87 which, for the nonce, is not much more valuable than the aquamarines on the other west side of Novelty Novel lane [p. 419] where the "aquamarines" refer to the "aquamarine tear on her (i.e. Lucette's ) flaming cheekbone" which had been mentioned directly beforehand. A pun gives us a clue to the sense: "aquamarine" refers to Aqua, Van's alleged mother, and Marina, the real mother of Van, Ada and Lucette. These "aquamarines" are equivalent to la riviere de diamants, here concealed under the name "diamond necklace", but which shortly before had appeared in translation with the relevant second meaning as "river of diamonds". Marina's children discover in the "river" (riviere) the adequate expression for their mutual incestuous affection. At the same time the diamonds register in their figurative meaning of 'jewels' (diamants) the value of this relationship and by corresponding to Lucette's tears also point to the sorrowful implications. These are evidently those "ritual and fatidic reasons" that cause Ada to wear the necklace on the above-mentioned occasion. The third of the recurring themes in question is even more comprehensive. When Blanche the maid rushes through the house shouting that the barn is on fire (and thus unwittingly heralding Van's first night of love with Ada) she loses a slipper on the stairs: Yes, she rushed down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase, like Ashette in the English version, [p. 114] From this point onwards, open or covert allusions to Cinderella and her glass or fur slipper ("pantouffle de verre", verre = vair = miniver) keep on cropping up in connection with sexual connotations. Ada finds a shoe and, in the library where she meets Van, puts it into the wastepaper basket, [p. 116]. Later on she lets the maid know where she can find her shoe again [p. 175]. At the Veen's big family meal a dog dashes in directly behind Marina with "an old miniver-furred slipper in his merry mouth: The slipper belonged to Blanche..." [p. 248]. Just before Van discovers a note in which Blanche draws his attention to Ada's infidelity, Ada had left "one common orchid, a Lady's slipper" lying on the garden table [p. 287]. During a metaphorical discussion on the Lesbian relations between Ada and Lucette, Lucette wears a "chic patent leather Glass shoe" [p. 374]. When Van sees Ada in front of him

88 after a long period of separation he falls at her feet "at her bare insteps in glossy black Glass slippers" [p. 391], sometime.laterhe hears Ada calling "for her Glass bed slippers (which, as in Cordulenka's princessdom too, he found hard to distinguish from dance footwear)" [p. 415], and shortly before her death Lucette sees in a vision "a pair of new vairfurred bedroom slippers" [p. 494]. We might interpret this motif as meaning that Blanche first acts as Cinderella, then followed by Ada who finds her prince in Van, and finally Lucette who commits suicide because this prince does not grant her wishes. But more important is the way in which this and the preceding examples show how the conventional device of leitmotif is both made use of in this novel and yet parodied at the same time. The last two examples also contained literary allusions. As already indicated, Ada is full of such allusions and the reader must - even if Nabokov's "Notes to Ada" are consulted - be fairly well versed in English, French and Russian literature from Early Romanticism onwards, in order to grasp at least the most important part of the literary crossword puzzle. In addition he should be just as well acquainted with Don Quichote and Nabokov's own works (in particular Bend Sinister, Lolita and Pale Fire) as with the Argentinian writer Borges whose style has been compared to Nabokov's. Most of the allusions though, are only of local significance within the novel's vast landscape and provide the connoisseur with the same sort of amusement also offered by the many (often multilingual) puns. Some however have a greater influence on the total effect which is demonstrated by the very fact that complex networks of interrelations are created as illustrated by the La riviere de diamants-motif and the Cinderella-motif. Alfred Appel has already dealt convincingly 9 with the more important references to Tolstoy 10 (especially Anna Karenina11), to Chateaubriand (Rene 1 2 and Le Montagnard emigre13, and to Byron. 14 In particular the incest-motif in Chateaubriand's Early Romantic version plays a decisive part. If we also consider the many allusions to Chekhov 15 ("you belonged to the Decadent School of writing, in company of naughty old Leo and consumptive Anton" writes Demon to Van [p. 498]) and Shakespeare 16 , especially Hamlet^, then it soon becomes clear just to what extent literary conventions are imitated and parodied in Ada. It is characteristic of style in Ada that very different types of narration; which are typical of certain stages in the novel's development or of certain types of novel, are employed to a large extent as stock devices,

89 thus turning this novel into an archive of the art of narration, anyway from Chateaubriand to Proust, Joyce - and Nabokov. In an assembly of this sort the very varied forms and conventions of presentation are removed from their original context which they in turn represent in the new context. This kind of 'quotation technique', occasionally even comprising poems, primarily produces a burlesque effect, - the playful aspect of the parody evidently having the upper hand, although the inevitably disrespectful aspect does not go unnoticed: "Old storytelling devices", said Van, "may be parodied only by very great and inhuman artists, but only close relatives can be forgiven for paraphrasing illustrious poems." [p. 246] Here as well as in other passages the reader's attention is expressedly directed to the technique outlined above. This for instance is taken from the description of Van's arrival on Ardis: At the next turning, the romantic mansion appeared on the gentle eminence of old novels, [p. 35] and some time later we are told: Then Van and Ada met in the passage, and would have kissed at some earlier stage of the Novel's Evolution in the History of Literature, [p. 96] The chapter on the library at Ardis Hall and Ada's reading-matter closes with the significant sentence: That library had provided a raised stage for the unforgettable scene of the Burning Barn; it had thrown open its glazed doors; it had promised a long idyll of bibliolatry; it might have become a chapter in one of the old novels on its own shelves; a touch of parody gave its theme the comic relief of life. [p. 137] It is not only literary texts whose conventions are deliberately copied and warped to produce a burlesque effect, for other types sometimes undergo the same treatment. Van's systematic discussion of the nature of dreams, presented in the form of a lecture, offers an illustrative ex-

90 ample of this. Due to the fact that he also records the student's reactions to this lecture, the reader becomes aware of the tension existing between the possible effects latent in the wording of the lecture and its actual impact, and here again both the situation and the form of communication are subjected to irony. Occasionally the type of presentation is also compared to that of the film, for instance when Van visits Ardis for the second time: As he approached from a side lawn, he saw a scene out of some new life being rehearsed for an unknown picture, without him, not for him. A big party seemed to be breaking up. [p. 187] However this comparison is not only meant to show up the stereotype nature of the scene. It is just as much an expression of the onlooker's inner distance from the events that are compared to a film scene. Similarly the much more frequent references to different 'schools' of art serve as a metaphor for the shifting nature of Van's 'sense of reality' or for the associations awakened in him: Whose brush was it now?a titillant Titian? A drunken Palma Vecchio?No, she was anything but a Venetian blonde. Dosso Dossi, perhaps? Faun Exhausted by Nymph? Swooning Satyr? A moment later the Dutch took over: Girl stepping into a pool under the little cascade to wash her tresses,... [p. 141 ]. This feature of style is in keeping with the narrator's own statement, already discussed above, that memory presents itself to him as a picturegallery. As above it is nearly always sexual descriptions that are 'alienated' by the imagery of painting. A large part of the puns and word-play is also connected with sex, which is not really surprising in view of the space devoted to the sexual sphere in this novel. Puns alluding to the incestuous affair between Van and Ada seem to enjoy special popularity. "I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously - c'est le mot - art and science meet in an insect. . . " [p. 436]

91 Demon remarks on describing a picture by Hieronymus Bosch, and the reader is aware of the truth concealed in this formulation because previously, when playing with anagrams, Ada has formed from the word "insect" first "Scient", then "Dr. Entsic" and finally from "Nicest! " arrives at "Incest". It is the abundance of similar games, the constant combining of creations a la Lewis Caroll ("to scratch scrumptiously" [p. 107]) or Joyce ("the sunglasses of much-sung glasses" [p. 203] or "Walter C. Keyway, Esq." [p. 224] i.e. "Walter seek a way, ask"?) and of multilingual puns such as "Gamlet, a half-Russian village" [p. 35] ("Gamlet" is the Russian transcription of "Hamlet", and again "hamlet" means "village" in English of course), that have aroused the critics' disapproval. For example the review of Ada in the Times Literary Supplement is titled "Nabokov's Waterloo" on account of these stylistic pecularities. 19 Whilst still on the subject of style we should also mention that this multilingualism is by no means confined to quotations from or parodies on literature or to puns. For instance Cordula writes a letter in French not only because she happens to be living in Paris at the time but also because she may presuppose that people like the Veens speak French as a matter of course - in accordance with the customs of 19th century Russian aristocrats and the conventions of those Russian novels, in which they were portrayed. Within the family circle however, the Veens show a preference for Russian expressions to which the narrator most kindly almost always adds an English translation. 2 0 The literal rendering of foreign pieces of conversation creates an air of authenticity and is meant to convey those elements of mood which Van circumscribes as follows: . . (the talk - as so often happened at emotional moments in the Veen-Zemski branch of that strange family, the noblest in Estotiland, the grandest on Antiterra - was speckled with Russian, an effect not too consistently reproduced in this chapter - the readers are restless tonight), [p. 380] The last part of the quotation demonstrates just how much Van considers the impact on his readers whilst he is in the act of narrating and that he makes a point of letting the reader know this. This tendency to reflect upon the kind of narrating during the process of narration, thus suggesting to the reader a detached and conscious attitude towards the

92 events described, is to be found throughout the whole novel. Thus for instance, following a detailed account of Van's acrobatic dance on his hands, we are told: It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick's difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time.. . . Van on the stage was performing organically what his figures of speech were to perform later in life - acrobatic wonders that had never been expected from them and which frightened children, [pp. 184f]. When Van walks on his hands it means that his stylistic intentions have been converted into physical action, and the inversion of the metaphors on the stylistic level is supposed to demonstrate the victory of the recollecting narrator over time as an irreversible process running in one direction only.

6.

The above example shows just how the theme of time pervades the whole novel, even effecting single stylistic features and the choice of details of action. Van is fascinated by the problem of time from the age of fourteen right up to the end of his life [pp. 73f.]. In his book The Texture of Time he endeavours to explain in detail what he reduces to a brief statement for Lucette: Our measurements of time are meaningless; the most accurate clock is a joke. [p. 487] Instead he would rather celebrate sense of time as "individual time" [p. 536]: I wish to caress T i m e . . . . I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum, [p. 537] Time as individual time becomes identical with sense of time, and hence

93 with memory as well. Consequently the past has the same structure as memory, which Van had already compared to a "photostudio de luxe" [p. 103]: The Past, then, is a constant accumulation of images. It can be easily contemplated and listened to, tested and tasted at random, so that it ceases to mean the orderly alternation of linked events that it does in the large theoretical sense, [p. 545] In another context we have already stressed the way in which the concept of the recalled past as picture-gallery influences the structure of Ada. The present as the narrating present has also been discussed in our treatment of the complex röle of the narrator. Thus there only remains the future to be dealt with in this connection. Whereas Van regards the consciousness of being alive as identical with memory (i.e. with the past) he denies, just as the narrator in Transparent Things does, the existence of the future as a category of time (as "individual time"): "To be" means to know one "has been". "Not to be" implies the only "new" kind of (sham) time: the future. I dismiss it. Life, love, libraries have no future, [p. 559] Loss of memory is the same as death [pp.584f.] and, as in Bend Sinister and Pale Fire, the idea of a life after death is declared to be a necessary concept arising from the fact that man evidently cannot bear the thought of absolute nothingness after life although he is quite willing to accept the analogous nothingness before birth [p. 314]. Knowing this, why does Van write his memoirs at all?We are informed that he was directly inspired by the thought that it would provide him with "a big playground for a match between Inspiration and Design" where he could indulge in those "buoyant and bellicose exercises in literary style" that have already dominated his previous books [p. 578]. But this is not the only motivation. On thinking back, still apparently with grief, to his behaviour shortly before Lucette's suicide, he writes: In a series of sixty-year-old actions which now I can grind into extinction only by working on a succession of words until the rhythm is right, I, Van, retired to my bathroom.. .[p. 490]

94 This purpose makes Van more like his mother Marina than he supposes, when he renders as her thought: "Someday, she mused, one's past must be put in order" [p. 253]. But of course the autobiography can only serve this purpose if it is solely concerned with portraying the past as subjective memory in the sense of "individual time". Only as long as subjectivity enjoys absolute predominance, only when 'reality' merges completely with memory and this memory in turn appears as "match between Inspiration and Design" [p. 578] in the autobiographical narrator's heightened subjectivity, only then can a life after death, at least in literature, be guaranteed by preserving the memories from loss, and the words: they would die, as it were, into the finished book, into Eden or Hades, into the prose of the book or the poetry of its blurb. [p. 587] then considered from the aspect of the time-theme imply a perpetuation in fiction as the autobiography's ultimate aim. This may only be achieved if there are no bounds to the autobiographer's subjectivity.

NOTES 1 Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York, 1969), p. 149 All quotations and references to the text are taken from this edition. 2 P. 150; cf. also the "Notes to Ada" in the appendix of the Penguin edition of the novel (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 468. 3 "On a Book Entitled Lolita", Lolita (London: Corgi Books, 1969), p. 334. 4 " . . . the alberghian atmosphere of those new trysts added a novelistic touch (Aleksey and Anna may have asterisked here! ) which Ada welcomed as a frame, as a form, something supporting and guarding life, otherwise unprovidenced on Desdemonia, where artists are the only gods." [p. 521 ] 5 Ada, p. 366. 6 Cf. the end of chapter 35 (Part One). 7 As he calls his book Ada himself! [p. 578]. 8 Proffer, Keys to Lolita, pp. 3 - 5 3 . 9 "Ada described", Tri Quarterly, 17 (1970), pp. 160-186. 10 Cf. e.g. Ada, pp. 61, 171, 240, 323, 430, 490, 498. 11 Cf. ibid., pp. 3, 25, 26, 28, 197, 299f., 374. 12 Cf. ibid., pp. 133, 199, 201, 205, 217, 249, 273, 288, 374, 424. 13 Cf. ibid., pp. 81,106, 138,139, 140, 192, 198, 215, 233, 280, 342, 428, 522. 14 Cf. ibid., pp. 255, 488, 498. 15 Cf. Ada, pp. 115, 193, 333, 426, 427, 429, 430, 498, 589. 16 Cf. ibid., pp. 371, 426, 464, 521.

95 17 Ibid., pp. 35, 202, 342, 343, 367, 386, 497. Another passage that might be mentioned here is the depiction of the tribadic situation, Van-Ada-Lucette, in chapter 8 of the second part. [pp. 418-420]. 19 7X5 (Oct. 2, 1969) p. 1121. 20 If not, then it is supplied by Nabokov in the "Notes to Ada".

VII

BIOGRAPHY AS SINKING BACK INTO THE PAST: TRANSPARENT

THINGS

It is rather strange that a novel should begin with the narrator choosing the main character, and the reader wonders why something that generally remains outside the book cover has actually been incorporated into the book itself. Especially as this is directly followed by a discussion in which we are told that the past is only a source of such fascination because there is no concrete and individual future to balance its demands and that, as a result, novices often tend quite unawares to become involved with the history of the single objects they observe ("Transparent things, through which the past shines" [p. 1 ] 1 ) . This may be a most welcome explanation of the title but the real meaning of the opening call "Hullo, person! " does not become any clearer until the second chapter when Hugh Person's life-story commences and we realise that the narrator has summoned the main character of his story. The story of Hugh's life appears to begin in accordance with this principle of "transparent things", i.e. it starts with 'present' time and then goes farther back into Hugh Person's past. At first the narrator keeps to Person's own recollections but then gradually provides us quite freely with more and more of his own information on past events (cf. Ch. 17: "We shall now discuss love"). The way back into the past is very much facilitated by the hero's four visits to Switzerland which act as fixed marking points. Using these points for orientation, we may divide all the past events in Person's life into those which have taken place during, before or after one of these four visits, and as these trips cover a period of eighteen years (from his twenty-second year until his death at the age of forty), this principle of division proves most useful. In addition the unity of location makes his preoccupation with the past much more feasible, for memories arise quite naturally in the hero's mind when after years of absence he returns to a region or particular place where his father died or where he first met his wife. And the auth-

97 or has even attempted to strengthen this impression by introducing Person as a hero who travels to the scene of past events with the expressed purpose of recalling the picture of his wife Armande against the authentic Swiss background, just as he had imagined it again and again in his dreams after her death. Therefore it is not in the least surprising that Person is constantly engrossed with his past (thus giving the reader opportunity of becoming acquainted with it as well). In the course of narration however we notice that although the link with the past is so closely bound up with the hero's psyche and the return to the past follows the pattern of the "transparent things", events are nearly always presented in chronological order and not in the sequence in which they are recalled. The narrator thus leaves Person's fourth visit to Switzerland almost immediately to return to his first trip (Ch. 4) which is characterized by his father's death and is described in greater detail. There then follows, as we know, an account of Person's actions between his first and second Swiss visits (Ch. 8), a large-scale depiction of this second visit (Ch. 9-15) which not only leads to the arranged meeting with the novelist Baron R. but also to his surprise encounter with Armande, his falling in love with her and their engagement. This is succeeded by several short accounts of events that have taken place between the second and third Swiss visits (Ch. 17) and then the third visit itself (Ch. 18), followed by a more detailed description of events between the third and fourth Swiss visits (Ch. 1621) until in the twenty-second chapter we again encounter Person where we had left him in the third chapter - during his fourth trip to Switzerland. From then on until the end of the story and its hero, the events and their description carry on parallel to each other (Ch. 22-26); Admittedly this method of presentation is not rigidly adhered to - in chapter 7 for instance there is a flash-back to events before the first Swiss visit, in chapter 16 to those before the second trip, in chapter 25 to those before the fourth and in the last chapter to events during and shortly after the second visit. But these exceptions only go to prove the above mentioned rule of chronological narration in the sequence of events. This rule however does not agree with the principle of sinking into the past of objects, as explained in connection with the "transparent things" at the end of the first chapter using the metaphor of "descending upright among staring fish", and again illustrated in the third chapter by the story of the pencil in the drawer of a desk in Person's hotel room. In the case of Hugh Person's biography then, the

98 usual chronological method of presentation seems to have been given priority over a gradual sinking back away from present time into the past history of the present. This means that the narrator's opening call "Here's the person I want. Hullo, person! " (Ch. 1) still remains rather puzzling, even if the reader assumes that Person is a character whom the narrator intends to use in order to demonstrate the way the past shimmers through the "transparent things". Perhaps it is easier to comprehend the narrator's choice of Hugh Person if we consider the qualities and the destiny he is provided with by the narrator. According to his capabilities and social position Hugh belongs to the inconspicuous species of the "middle hero". He is neither a rogue nor a personality of rank so that one wonders why anyone bothered to write his biography at all. But then we are reminded that he is at least an ex-somnambulist who killed his wife in his sleep whilst dreaming that he had to rescue a prostitute from falling out of the window of a burning hotel: an 'interesting case' after all. It is rather odd though, that so little is made of this incident in the narrative. In fact Hugh's deed is virtually only mentioned in passing and the narrator devotes much more attention for instance to another of Hugh's peculiarities, - to his weird tennis shot, named after its inventor "Person Stroke", for which there is no antidote, as the ball does not bounce up again and, at the same time visualizing this stroke serves Hugh as a reliable remedy against insomnia (cf. Ch. 16). Hugh's professional success is mediocre, he is one of those brilliant young people who lack any special gift or ambition and get accustomed to applying only a small part of their wits to humdrum or charlatan tasks [p. 22 ] , and the story confirms the narrator's assessment of Hugh as "a sentimental simpleton, and somehow not a very good Person" [p. 48; cf. in particular Ch. 17]. In the preceding quote the capital 'P' is eye-catching, we are to expect "not a very good Person" and this disappointed expectation may be interpreted as meaning that Hugh Person (called "you Person" by Armande) represents the average man. This initial capital letter turns the person of "Hullo, person! " into Person the main character who is

99 none other than "Person, this person" [p. 102]. Hie exemplary nature of the 'hero' becomes even more evident if we take the etymology of 'person' into account. The narrator does mention that "Person" is "corrupted 'Peterson' " [p. 3] but the following phrase "and pronounced 'Parson' by some " clearly points to the common heritage of 'person' and 'parson', i.e. in Old French 'persone' and in Latin 'persona', referring back to the old meaning of the actor's mask that represents the character he portrays. His name alone tells us that Hugh Person is no more and no less than a character in a story. But the narrator certainly does not leave the reader in the dark about this, - from the novel's very first line onwards up to the closing words "Easy, you know, does it, son" [p. 104]. It is not only the fact that he clearly appears again and again as 'omniscient narrator' thus indirectly making plain that he of course is ultimately responsible for creating the character. (An informative example is provided by the last part of the eleventh chapter when the narrator, having given an account of Hugh's encounter with Julia, comments: In Person's mind the affair left hardly anything more than the stain of light lipstick on tissue paper - and a romantic sense of having embraced a great writer's sweetheart. Time, however, sets to work on those ephemeral affairs, and a new flavor is added to the recollection [p. 36]. The narrator makes clear that he is well aware of the difference between the incident itself and Hugh's recollection of it! ). Even more impressive are the direct references to his role as 'creator' of the characters in his story and their destinies. Thus we find the following words in the twelfth chapter: A copy, no doubt the same, of the Figures et cetera paperback, with a folded letter (which we thought wiser our Person should not recognize) acting as m a r k e r , . . . [p. 38], i.e. the narrator must ensure that Hugh may continue believing that Armande might not have received his letter, so as not to effect his love for her and endanger the prearranged course of events. Finally, a whole chapter [24] is devoted to the relationship between the narrator and his character, so that the reader really cannot fail to notice this aspect.

100 Furthermore certain of the narrator's remarks are designed to remind the reader that the biographical story is embedded in a wider framework and to make him aware of the problems attached to presentation these are generally found at the beginning or end of a chapter: "more in a moment" [end of Ch. 1] "Let us now illustrate our difficulties" [end of Ch. 2], "Now we have to bring into focus the main street of Witt" [beginning of Ch. 13], "We shall now discuss love" [beginning of Ch. 17]. A change of tense separates the narrator's remarks from the rest of the story: the narrative appears in the traditional past tense, whereas the comments are in the present tense. The beginning of the 13th chapter is a good example of this: Now we have to bring into focus the main street of Witt as it was on Thursday, the day after her telephone call. It teems with transparent people and processes, into which and through which we might sink with an angel's or author's delight, but we have to single out for this report only one Person. Not an extensive hiker, he limited his loafing to a tedious survey of the village. . . . [p. 44]. The preceding quotation also brings us via the "transparent people and processes" back to the overall theme of "transparent things". But it is worth dwelling on the problems of presentation a little longer. In this novel they receive more detailed treatment, in that Hugh Person is conceived as a character who comes into professional contact with authors, especially with the novelist Baron R. who lives in Switzerland. Baron R. not only entertains a high opinion of Person ("Person was one of the nicest persons I knew" [p. 83]), but also shares with him his insomnia, his fears in the night and Julia. His.main function lies in defending the standpoint of the creative writer against the demands and interests of the publisher: "he wants A Boy for Pleasure but would settle for The Slender Slut, and all I can offer him is not Tralala but the first and dullest tome of my Tralatitions." [p. 31]. He is absolutely not prepared to alter his characters in any way, even if this should lead to legal consequences because of their close resemblance to living individuals (his divorced wife and stepdaughter Julia). His reasons are both artistic and personal, on the one hand he believes

101 that every character occupies an exactly determined "niche" so that every alteration would be immediately recognizable, and on the other his own life is too painfully bound up with his memories [p. 74]. Of especial interest concerning the novel with the title "transparent things" are his comments on the two kinds of title: those which are added by the author or publisher to the completed book, and the other sort: the title that shone through the book like a watermark, the title that was born with the book, the title to which the author had grown so accustomed during the years of accumulating the written pages that it had become part of each and of all [p. 70]. It is almost impossible to imagine a more fitting description of the relationship between title and work in the case of Transparent Things and the comparison "shone through the book like a watermark" applies especially to this title. The feeling that the narrator wants to state his own views through R. is particularly strong where the dying author discloses his sensations and ideas shortly before death [end of Ch. 21]. Thus we are given an alternative to the reflections on death offered in connection with Hugh Person's death at the end of the novel or in Hugh's "Album of Asylums and Jails" [p. 93] or as they are presented as early as the first chapter: if it is valid that, . . . the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought [p. 1 ] then R's Total rejection of all religions ever dreamt up by man and total composure in the face of total death [p. 84] is the only attitude that may be considered adequate. The stylistic similarities between R's works and both Transparent Things and other novels by Nabokov are also very striking. R. writes what Armande calls "surrealistic novels of the poetic sort" in contrast to the "hard realistic stuff reflecting our age" [p. 26]. Our Person, our reader, was not sure he entirely approved of R's luxuriant and bastard style; yet, at its best ("the gray rainbow of

102

a fog-dogged moon"), it was diabolically evocative [p. 75] we are told on the occasion of Hugh's reading the Tralatitions, and in spite of the obvious satirical strain the reader can hardly fail to notice that this passage just as aptly describes Nabokov as the other comments on R's earlier compositions: "Mister R . " . . . wrote English considerably better than he spoke it. On contact with paper it acquired a shapeliness, a richness, an ostensible dash, that caused some of the less demanding reviewers in his adopted country to call him a master stylist [p. 24]. Compared with this, other similarities such as the fact that R. works with "cards, jumbo clips, elastic bands", like some other of Nabokov's creations (John Shade in Pale Fire and the narrator in Look at the Harlequins! ) and like the author himself, are merely superficial. R's, Hugh's and the narrator's common love of word-play is a more reliable source; R. declares: I have been accused of trifling with minors, but my minor characters are untouchable, if you permit a pun [p. 69], young Hugh writes: . . . The sun was setting a heavenly example to the lake [p. 22], and finally hotos oses is an "unintentional pun" [p. 14] made by the narrator (and recognized by Hugh) - and all these examples like the rest are Nabokov's own. Furthermore R. asserts that the title of his novel Tralatitions is "a perfectly respectable synonym of the word 'metaphor' " [p. 69] and the narrator (and with him Nabokov) shows a definite liking for complicated metaphors. We only have to recall to mind the already mentioned "no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring

103 fish" used to describe someone sinking into the past history of "transparent things", or the mixed metaphor illustrating Person Senior's clumsiness (". . . he fumbled for things in the bathwater of space, groping for the transparent soap of evasive matter" [p. 10]), and the implied equation of Julia's love-life with a painting: In the midst of all this, our Person, in his discreet little way (though actually he was half an inch taller than big R.), had happened to nibble, too, at the corner of the crowded canvas [p. 33]. Many more stylistic features deserve closer attention, the satirical elements in the story (a workman had mislaid a pencil, "having gone away for a tool he never found" [p. 6 ] ) or the irony ( " . . . about one month before death separated them, the Persons flew over to Europe for a few days" [p. 68]), sometimes verging on sarcasm: " 'Dust to dust' " (the dead are good mixers, that's quite certain, at least)" [p. 93]. In fact the prevailing irony qualifies the whole novel for inverted commas and not just the words that the narrator considers necessary like "future", "likely", "actually", "reality" and "dream" [pp. 92 f.]. Yet not forgetting this scepticism towards a 'deeper' validity as it is manifested stylistically, it is still worth investigating the referential system named by the title. It is not only that the repeated use of the adjective "transparent" in appropriate contexts, ensures that the narrated events constantly refer back to the overall theme: there is the story of the pencil as "transparent thing" [p. 8], the above quoted "transparent soap of evasive matter" [p. 10] and "transparent processes and people" [p. 44] or again the "transparent ring or banded colors around a dead person or a planet" [p. 93], the "transparent shadow" accompanying Hugh all his life as better self [p. 98] and Hugh's last vision before he dies: Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow [p. 104] Just how strongly the title pervades the whole book "like a water-mark" does not become completely clear until we realize why Hugh Person is really the person the narrator wants [cf. p. 1 ], At this point the passage containing a discussion of the author's attitude to his characters proves helpful (and is worth quoting at greater length):

104 Another thing we are not supposed to do is explain the inexplicable. Men have learned to live with a black burden, a huge aching hump: the supposition that "reality" may be only a "dream". How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of your being aware of reality's dreamlike nature were also a dream, a built-in hallucination! One should bear in mind, however, that there is no mirage without a vanishing point, just as there is no lake without a closed circle of reliable land. [p. 93] But we encounter in Hugh Person a person who from childhood onwards was unable to distinguish reliably between 'dream' and 'reality'. At any rate his very vivid dreamlike visions cause Hugh to carry out 'real' actions in his sleep - although of course with a meaning that has undergone subjective alteration: he manages to avoid all the obstructions in his path whilst sleep-walking and on another occasion he embraces the bedside table under the impression that he must stop it from dancing around [Ch. 7]. During the process of becoming adult this inclination seems to disappear until in a dream he kills his wife Armande [Ch. 20]. However we are already informed beforehand that he is tortured by "nightmare themes" [Ch. 16] and, as we know, he only undertakes his last journey to Switzerland on account of a vision that constantly recurs in his dreams (Armande against a Swiss background - [cf. Ch. 25]). Hugh kills Armande because he dreams that he must save Giulia (or Juliet or Julia) from jumping out of the window of a burning hotel. He thinks that it is really happening and 'really' grabs Armande so tightly around the neck that he strangles her. And yet it is very possible that his vivid dream of the hotel on fire only arose because Armande had been disturbed by a fire shown on television during their honeymoon in Stresa and had insisted that they both rehearse their escape from the hotel as if it were on fire [Ch. 17]. Even the scene of the burning house in R's novel Figures in a Golden Window had made such an impression on Armande that she remembers the title as The Burning Window [Ch. 9]. When finally on his last visit to Switzerland Hugh tries to re-book the room he had occupied together with Armande in the hotel in Stresa he learns that: "The Stresa hotel was undergoing repair after a fire" [p. 98]. As a result he stays in his hotel in Witt and is given the room in which he had passionately awaited and received Armande in former times. And this is what he is dreaming of when the

105 hotel is already ablaze. When he awakes from the dream it is too late for escape. Armande's conscious vision of a fire had become 'reality' in Stresa, Hugh's dream about a fire 'really' caused him to kill Armande and, while he is dreaming of Armande, Hugh's hotel 'really' bums down and he dies. This explains why a narrator who thinks that dream and reality belong in quotation marks and that the 'future' of a character cannot even be averted by the author - let alone be anticipated by the character itself [cf. Ch. 24] finds in Hugh Person the person he was looking for. As illustrated by the amazed reaction of a Swiss man to Hugh's account of his deed and his time in prison and the lunatic asylum "taking him for a drunk or madman" [p. 9 8 ] , neither is the future uncertain and "but a figure of speech" until it actually arrives becoming the present, nor can a person's past necessarily be inferred from outward appearance (just as little as it is possible to tell a pencil's past - [cf. Chap. 3]). Hence people and things are only 'transparent' regarding their past history for their author or for supernatural creatures: . . . transparent people and processes, into which and through which we might sink with an angel's or author's delight [p. 44]. Then Transparent Things would be a book about the relationship of the 'omniscient author' to his created beings — whether he be the author of a novel or the author of the universe. We can be sure about the former of these two possibilities. The literary expression of this "transparency" of his creatures, for the author of fiction, is the ficititous biography.

NOTES 1 All quotations and page numbers refer to the English edition: Transparent Things (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973).

VIII.

PARODIED AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS SATIRE ON THE UNITY OF LIFE AND WORK: LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS! In Look at the HarlequinsI1 we are once again presented with a fictitious writer's autobiography. The Russian exile and author of several Russian and English novels, Vadim N., completes his literary production (for the time being?) with the story of his own life. The opening chapter at once makes it clear that he, as the "non-ordinary memoirist" he considers himself to be, departs from the usual pattern of the autobiography at least in that he begins his chronological description shortly before his first marriage at the age of 23, only including incidental details on his earlier life at sporadic intervals. This is because he is not aiming to give a complete account of his life but rather, as a skilled writer, selects and arranges his (necessarily incomplete) memories according to thematic focal points, resulting in an "account of his illnesses, marriages, and literary life" [p. 2 7 ] : In this memoir my wives and my books are interlaced monogrammatically like some sort of watermark or ex libris design; and in writing this oblique autobiography - oblique, because dealing mainly not with pedestrian history but with the mirages of romantic and literary matters — I consistently try to dwell as lightly as inhumanly possible on the evolution of my mentaf illness, [p. 85] Just how closely these topics are interwoven and determine the autobiography is demonstrated at the beginning of the book when he meets his first wife during a visit to a friend on the Cöte d'Azure made for the purpose of curing "a nervous complaint that skirted insanity" [p. 5] and at the end when he dies in the final incompleted sentence of the book whilst recovering from the worst attack of his illness and talking to his last lover — and of course he starts writing his first novel shortly

107 after his first marriage, and his last partner encourages him to finish his last book [p. 199]. His illness which manifests itself in his early youth as "insidious and relentless connection with other states of being" [p. 7] takes on more concrete shape in later life: he is not able — and he feels morally bound to explain this in detail to each of his future wives before proposing, using a different example every time — to imagine executing a complete change of direction without the mere effort releasing in him a state of utter mental confusion with agonizing headaches and even worse. Towards the end of his life this mental fixation also affects his physical condition, he is suddenly incapable of reversing direction on his usual walk and becomes both mentally and physically helpless. Yet this complaint is more than just an external concomitant of his life. For instance his reflections on death after the last bad attack lead him to a better understanding of the true nature and extent of his illness. He conceives his different torments as the "latent variety" of that "madness" which has been lying in wait for him since early childhood and which must ultimately destroy him [pp. 240 f.]. Finally the connection between his illness and his death becomes even more evident; he dies directly after his last partner has endeavoured to show him that his illness has its origin in a quite simple confusion of space and time: He has confused direction and duration. He speaks of space but he means t i m e . . . . Nobody can imagine in physical terms the act of reversing the order of time. Time is not reversible, [p. 252] Although he thinks that this explanation is no more than "an exquisite quibble" [p. 253], a euphemism supposed to let man forget he must die, even he, at the age of seventy-five, must experience that it is really impossible to reverse time, that his new plans to marry a woman fortythree years younger than himself can no longer be realized and that his life comes to an end at that point where his morbid fixation loses hold. The second theme of Vadim's autobiography, the story of his loves and marriages, is at once the comprehensive story of romantic hopes, erotic experiences and unexpected disappointments. The depiction of his first romantic love affair with Iris, the sister of Ivor Black, his friend from Cambridge, receives a prominent place in the autobiographer's recollections. This affair provides the novel with more sensual details than does any other later phase in the narrator's life, from the exact depic-

108 tion of their getting to know each other together with the appropriate scenery up to the beauty spot on Iris' shoulder and the way she rubbed suntan cream into his sunburnt back on the beach at Carnavaux. The barely eight years spent with Iris take up more than a quarter of the book that treats fifty-two years of his life in some detail and relates the story of a further twenty-two years more or less sporadically. Yet though these detailed memories paint a romantic picture of his love for Iris — the first disappointments soon set in. He is not as happy as he had hoped ("I should have been happier. I had planned to be happier") [p. 52], he becomes jealous (first of Iris' past lovers, then of supposed present ones), and just as a new feeling of tenderness enters into their mutual relations Iris is killed (by one of her discarded lovers?). Vadim, who then develops a crisis, seeks temporary comfort in his work, in prostitutes and in Dolly von Borg, the eleven-year-old granddaughter of his emigrant friend Stepanov, before falling in love with Annette Blagov, one of his stenotypists, and entering upon a second marriage with her. Contrary to Vadim's expectations however, Annette continues to remain prudish after her marriage, and although they manage to produce a child together their marriage is a mistake. Annette comes under the bad influence of a girl friend and leaves Vadim after learning that he has enjoyed extramarital relations with his old acquaintance Dolly von Borg. The reader can tell from the narrator's depiction that his relationship with Annette differs to that with Iris, which was more superficial and much more sexual; this is made manifest both in style (cf. the depiction of the "first tryst" [p. 113]) and also in the fact that from the twelve years spent with Annette he tells us a lot about his books and relatively little about their relationship. But the end of his second marriage by no means puts a stop to the autobiographer's amorous experiences. A tornado mercifully releases him from Annette and gives him the opportunity of having his now twelve-year-old daughter in his care again. It may be shocking but certainly not surprising that Vadim, who had not only shown interest in the eleven-year-old Dolly von Borg but who had also already been attracted by a ten-year-old 'nymphet' on the beach at Carnavaux and had repeatedly dreamt of a love affair between two children, is fascinated by Bel's unique beauty. Especially as she reminds him of his cousin Ada Bredow [p. 169], the model for the female figure in his dreams — but according to him his relationship to her remains "essentially innocent" [p. 173]. To ensure that it stays that way he embarks

109 on a third marriage with Louise Adamson whom he had already got to know and love as the wife of a colleague who has since passed away. Yet the narrator can only think back to his trying time with Bel and Louise with "curses and sobs" [p. 190], and even after Bel has been sent off to a boarding school the marriage does not improve. Louise soon goes off on increasingly longer journeys and Vadim finds comfort in the company of the pretty maid Rose Brown until he finds in Bel's ex-classmate his final partner. Apart from the fact that she is 43 years younger than he is, during her school years showed a marked resemblance to Bel, speaks Russian and shows great interest in his literary production, we are not told much about her, not even her name, for the narrator does not wish to include their relationship in his biography as it belongs to the most intimate sphere of his life: Reality would be only adulterated if I now started to narrate what you know, what I know, what nobody else knows, what shall never, never be ferreted out by a matter-of-fact, father-ofmuck, mucking biograffitist [p. 226] A large part of the autobiography is devoted to the third thematic point of emphasis, the narrator's literary life. Eight of the altogether 43 chapters are entirely taken up with this subject and many others contain longer passages on this aspect of his life. Vadim tells us about his role as author, especially within the group of exiled Russian writers in the Thirties in Paris, but above all he informs us of the circumstances accompanying his literary creations. With the exception of Esmeralda and Her Pandarus, the dates of publication and the circumstances leading to the completion of all the six Russian and six English books listed on the inner cover are commented upon in greater or lesser detail, whereby The Dare and A Kingdom by the Sea receive the most detailed treatment. This ranges from the pedantic recording or outer details - "I finished transcribing on 733 medium-sized Bristol cards (each about 100 words), with a fine-nibbed pen and in my smallest fair-copy hand, Ardis,. . ." [p. 231]- to instructive information on his method of composition ("Composing as I do, whole books in my mind before releasing the inner word and taking it down in pencil or pen" [p. 234]) to the presentation of central problems concerning his creative work such as changing over his literary language from Russian to English:

110 . . . the question confronting me in Paris, in the late Thirties, was precisely could I fight off the formula and rip up the ready-made, and switch from my glorious self-developed Russian, not to the dead leaden English of the high seas with dummies in sailor-suits, but an English I alone would be responsible for, in all its new ripples and changing light? [p. 124] Although, according to his own words, he presupposes in the reader a certain familiarity with the contents of his books 3 , Vadim's autobiography contains information on the contents of all his books except Polnolunie (Plenilune), - the information on The Dare4, See under Real5 and A Kingdom by the Sea6 being subject to particularly detailed treatment. This could of course have something to do with his own appraisal of these novels (he considers The Dare "the best in the series" [p. 229] and A Kingdom by the Sea is his "most vigorous, most festive, and commercially most successful novel" 7 ), and it is also of great significance that in The Dare and See under Real he has already dealt with the problem of the biography fictitiously, which now in Look at the Harlequins becomes a genuine problem. 8 He is not very much concerned about the reception of his books. This does not mean that he is indifferent to success — for instance he mentions with a touch of self-irony, that he had a turn-over of 39 copies of Camera Lucida in one year in one of the most well-known shops for exile literature [p. 93], that neither Slaughter in the Sun nor The Red Topper sold well, See under Real not being much better [p. 129] and that it was the success achieved by A Kingdom by the Sea that first released him from further financial worries. But, as already stated, he writes Look at the Harlequins for readers already acquainted with his works and the way he satirizes translations of his novels9 and critical opinions 10 leaves no room for doubt about his self-confidence which verges on self-complacency and is quite insensitive to every sort of criticism. Sometimes it is even expressed directly (even if under the euphoric influence of alcohol): Was I an excellent writer? I was an excellent writer. That avenue of statues and lilacs where Ada and I drew our first circles on the dappled sand was visualized and re-created by an artist of lasting worth, [p. 234]

Ill However it is the interrelation of life and works mentioned at the beginning, and once more aptly illustrated by this last quotation, that takes on the central role in the presentation of his "literary life". But this does not necessarily mean that Vadim's external and internal state at the time of composition is directly transposed into the world of fiction — in the case of See under Real [p. 122] and A Kingdom by the Sea [pp. 193 f.] he explicitly points to the contrast between the character of the novels and his mood during their creation —, but the narrator never tires of pointing out the origins of his fictitious works in his life. Besides the obvious last quotation, a few examples should suffice to illustrate this procedure, for instance his remarks when describing Dolly von Borg: She had flaxen hair and a freckled nose, and I chose the gingham frock with the glossy black belt for her to wear when I had her continue her mysterious progress right into the book I was writing. The Red Top Hat, in which she becomes graceful little Amy, the condemned man's ambiguous consoler, [p. 78] and his references to Iris' significance for his novels: She fitted her palm for a moment to the cheek of the teapot. And it went all into Ardis, it all went into Ardis, my poor dead love, [p· 26] If I have described so often in my American novels (A Kingdom by the Sea, Ardis) the unbearable magic of a girl's back, it is mainly because of my having loved Iris [p. 40] Iris replied (with that quaint non sequitur that I was to give to the heroine of my Ardis forty years later),. . . [p. 63] But the connection between life and work is also revealed the other way round: the autobiographer remarks when portraying Dolly von Borg's craftiness: What that slut had done to ensure a thwarted beau's complicity, I shall never know; but I should never have put her in my Krasnyy Tsilindr; that's the way you breed live monsters — from little

112 ballerinas in books, [pp. 144 f.] and he states when describing his daughter Bel: All this is easily described and this also goes for the regular striation of bright bloom along the outside of forearm and leg, which, in fact smacks of self-plagiarism, for I have given it both to Tamara and Esmeralda, not counting several incidental lassies in my short stories (see for example page 537 of the Exile from Mayda collection, Goodminton, New York, 1947). [p. 169] Should we also take as a further example his reference to the origin of that part in Ardis which plays such a decisive role at the end of the autobiography: . . .somewhere in my office I kept a bundle of notes (on the Substance of Space), prepared formerly toward an account of my young years and nightmares (the work now known as Ardis). [p. 223] then it must become clear just how the narrator endeavours above all to portray in his autobiography the relationship between life and work: Indeed, the present memoir derives much of its value from its being a catalogue raisonne of the roots and origins and amusing birth canals of many images in my Russian and especially English fiction, [p. 8]

2.

It is quite natural that Vadim, as author and sometime professor of literature (who gives a lecture on "European Masterpieces"), should mention in his autobiography not only his own books but also many other writers and works especially from Russian, French and English literature. This technique of literary allusion is at the same time a special stylistic problem in Look at the Harlequins! and thus must also be included in the framework of a more comprehensive treatment of the novel's narrative technique.

113 Because Look at the Harlequins! is an autobiography, the narrator is clearly subject to the laws inherent in this genre. The narrating-self is identical with the self whose experiences, actions and thoughts are being portrayed (i.e. as far as he is here telling the story of his own life) and yet again they are not identical, for the actual making of the experiences and their final depiction are not only separated from one another by the passage of time but also by the selective process of memory and the change in the assessment of the things experienced which results from an altered state of consciousness. Of course the autobiographer now has it in his power to vary the degree to which this distance is made manifest, thus making his art of narration appear either more naive or less naive as he chooses. Vadim evidently prefers the more reflected narrative technique and employs various devices to emphasize this point. One of these consists in his clearly incorporating the act of narration itself into his presentation, for instance by depicing his reactions to memories when in the process of writing or by pointing to how his present situation effects his description: Why do tears blur my glasses when I invoke that phantasm of fame as it tempted and tortured me then, five decades ago? [p. 23] If Bel is alive today, she is thirty-two — exactly your age at the moment of writing (February 15, 1974), [p. 168] I have, indeed, repeated the story of my dash to Leningrad in the late nineteen-sixties innumerable times in my mind, to packed audiences of my scribbling or dreaming selves — and yet I keep doubting both the necessity and the success of my dismal task. But you have argued the question, you are tenderly adamant, yes and your decree is that I should relate my adventure in order to lend a semblance of significance to my daughter's futile fate. [p. 199] Another especially effective device is contained in actually portraying the difference in attitude: "Through the prose of sun blisters came the poetry of her touch -", thus in my pocket diary, but I can improve upon my young

114 preciosity. Through the itch of my s k i n , . . . [p. 27] I am much bolder now, of course, much bolder and prouder than the ambiguous hoodlum caught progressing that night between a seemingly endless fence with its tattered posters and a row of spaced streetlamps whose light would delicately select for its heartpiercing game overhead a young emerald-bright linden leaf. I now confess that I was bothered that night, and the next and some time before, by a dream feeling that my life was the non-man's life somewhere on this or another earth, [p. 89] But at the same time this difference also makes manifest the special situation of the author as autobiographer, in that it is his aim not to invent a life but to describe his own life as an historically given fact. Admittedly the portrayal of this, for the most part subjective, set of facts must remain subjective for the narrator has to rely on his necessarily selective memory and on aids to memory such as diaries and other documents. But Vadim tries to make clear that he at least intends to depict his 'true' life. This is shown for instance in the way he discusses the function of memory itself: I remember — after the passing of half a century! — that I wondered fleetingly if I had packed the right clothes. ( . . . ) Such lavishness in the registration of trivialities is due, I suppose, to their being accidentally caught in the advance light of a great event, [pp. 5 f.] or by his pointing to its limitations: My dealings with space and spatial transitions are so diabolically complicated that I do not recall whether I really walked, or drove, or limited myself to pacing up and down the open gallery running along the front side of our second floor, or what. [p. 175] And on the other hand he includes frequent references to the existence of old photographs, diaries, notes and such like, in order to make the abundance of details in his account appear feasible: At one end of the lawn a eucalypt [sic! ]cast its striate shade

115 across the canvas of a lounge chair. This is not the arrogance of total recall but an attempt at fond reconstruction based on old snapshots in an old bonbon box with a fleur-de-lis on its lid. [p. 12.] After fifty summers, or ten thousand hours, of sunbathing in various countries, on beaches, benches, roofs, rocks, decks, ledges, lawns, boards, and balconies, I might have been unable to recall my novitiate in sensory detail had not there been those old notes of mine which are such a solace to a pedantic memoirist throughout the account of his illnesses, marriages, and literary life, [p- 27.] For example when he quotes the whole of a supposedly fictitious loveletter to Iris, he does not forget to inform us immediately afterwards that he has preserved it and that it is now lying before him in an old briefcase along with "other mementos, other deaths" [p. 64]. He also makes a point of telling us that his notes enable him to distinguish between his real experiences and mere fantasies: Glancing through my oldest notes in pocket diaries, with telephone numbers and names elbowing their way among reports on events, factual or more or less fictional, I notice that dreams and other distortions of "reality" are written down in a special left-slanted hand — at least in the earlier entries, before I gave up following accepted distinctions, [p. 19]. It is conspicious that remarks of this sort are mostly confined to the first part of the book — the narrator most probably thinks that he can do without them later on once his reliability has been established. Not until depicting a rather extraordinary coincidence (he meets her because the folder containing his papers bursts open on the way to the parking lot and she helps him to gather them up) does he feel the need for yet another reference to his worthiness: Coincidence is a pimp and cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of fact recollected by a non-ordinary memoirist. Only asses and geese think that the re-collector skips this or that bit of his past because it is dull or shoddy (that

116 sort of episode here, for example, the interview with the Dean, and how scrupulously it is recorded! ). [p. 225]. But remarks like this and his occasional assertions about wanting to narrate events in chronological order ("I was to learn more, much more about those aching links only several decades later, so "let us not anticipate". . . [p. 7 ] ) should not lead us to assume that the life-story is supposed to be presented in its absolute entirety - as far as it may be recalled or reconstructed with the help of documents. We have of course already mentioned its definite thematic bias; it only remains to point to Vadim's own declaration about his memoirs being "oblique", "dealing mainly not with pedestrian history but with the mirages of romantic and literary matters", [p. 85]. This is of special significance as we are of course dealing with the autobiography of a writer who reflects upon the actual problem of presentation and who - as his account of The Dare11 and See under Real [pp. 120 f.] go to show — has repeatedly dealt in fiction with the special problems attached to writing a biography. In addition Vadim makes a point of informing the reader just how aware he is of the problems of presentation: I have been trying to do something very difficult and will tear it up if you say I have succeeded too well, because I do not want, and never wanted, to succeed, in this dismal business of Isabel Lee. . . [pp. 169 f.]. This penultimate part of LATH, this spirited episode in my otherwise somewhat passive existence, is horribly hard to set down, . . . [p.199]. A conscious structural pattern is also revealed in the very arrangement of the autobiography; whereas the separate chapters contain the depiction of separate incidents and hardly vary in length (usually six, but never less than two or more than ten pages), the division into seven parts demarcates the separate phases of life from one another, resulting in blocks of very varying length (between 12 and 70 pages). Thus a regular secondary structure is combined with an irregular primary structure to ensure a maximum of clarity and to help the reader recognise the change from a more or less continuous account to a concentration

117 on separate episodes (with an highly condensed description of the intervals between ). At the same time the primary arrangement underlines the thematic focal points of the autobiography. The first part comprises his life spent with Iris, the second and third parts his life with Annette (the incision occurring when they emigrate to the States), the fourth concerns his time spent with Bel and Louise, the fifth his journey to Bel in Leningrad, the sixth his life with his last lover, introduced as 'you', up to his bad bout of illness and the seventh the weeks following the attack up to his (stylistic) death. The deliberate shaping of the autobiography is also made manifest in the style. For instance Look at the Harlequins!, like all Vadim's books after See under Real, is written in English, but the occasional insertion of Russian words and phrases, that aptly occur most frequently in the first and second parts of the book in line with the author's circumstances, bears witness to the Russian past portrayed in the novel. Vadim does not however reckon with a reader who can understand Russian and therefore usually adds translations or explanations,! 2 if the meaning is not made obvious by the context.13 It is not so much the impression of authenticity that is here of primary importance but rather the narrator's general joy at playing with words and using language subtely. This is shown by his obvious preference for deliberately ambiguous statements ("I met the first of my three of four successive wives in somewhat odd circumstances" [p. 3]) and for word-play and alliteration. Whether he tells us in connection with a visit to the dentist: "His name was Molnar with that η like a grain in a cavity" [p. 18] or "A stiff borer is better than a limp one" [p. 21], or whether after his rendezvous with Dolly at his office he puts these words into Annette's mouth: "Did that girl get in touch with you at your office?" [p. 140], or whether when travelling across a map of France with his forefinger he remarks: the point of its nail stopped at the town of Petiver or Petit Ver, a small worm or verse, which sounded idyllic [p. 75] his taste for exploiting the ambiguity latent in language cannot fail to be overlooked. His sense for alliterative effects may be demonstrated by a phrase like "... I would have lost my reason long before finding my rhymes" [p. 7]. In addition, Vadim's sometimes extraordinary comparisons and metaphorical turns of phrase may also be regarded as an important charac-

118 teristic of his style; for instance when he sees parallels between his way of tackling language including his struggle with "the wrong shape of things" and the torments experienced by an elderly relative with several rather difficult children in her care [p. 86], or when he calls racingcyclists "hunchbacks on wheels" [p. 116], when he informs us that Ninella Langley's hair is "dyed a mother-in-law ginger" [p. 133] and when he paraphrases Louise's much loved stereo-equipment and similar gadgets with the words "singing furniture" [p. 186]. The same subtle irony contained in these examples is also present in most of the comparisons between real events and literary cliches, for instance when he says "Ν. N. sat in his easy chair as in a voluminous novel" [p. 11], "When a girl starts to speak like a novelette, all you need is a little patience" [p. 28], "Count Starov 'chewed his lips', as old men are wont to do in Russian novels" [p. 50], or (referring to a room in one of his most significant dreams): ... a room with no furniture except two separate beds: property masters are lazy, or economical, in one's dreams as well as in early novellas, [p. 102] The humourous undertones are above all to be found in the depictions of his sexual experiences which verge on self-irony: thus the account of his first romantic experience with Iris is smothered by his recollection of how, as an eleven-year-old, he attempted to observe a newly-wed couple [pp. 47 f.], his escapade with Dolly is contrasted with the everyday activities at University [p. 77], and his adventure with Louise with her husband's reading the newspaper [pp. 160 f.], and even the description of his way to the "connubial chamber" [p. 188] with Louise is just as intentionally funny. Idiosyncrasies of style like these betray that Sterne means more to him than simply the author of the "European Masterpieces" he talks about in his standard lecture - which brings us to the question of the function of the many authors' names appearing in Look at the Harlequins! This fact alone makes Vadim a "poeta doctus". He displays very good knowledge of Russian, English and French literature giving Pushkin 1 4 , Gogol15 and Tolstoy 16 , Shakespeare17, Byron 18 and Keats 19 obvious preference. These authors, not necessarily to be considered paradigms (an interpretation rarely supported by the relevant context), fit in particularly well - as do the many names from the Romantic pe-

119 riod - with Vadim's explicit aim of focusing on "the mirages of romantic and literary matters" [p. 85] in his autobiography. On the other hand "literary matters" also seem to include our being informed about his literary dislikes. They are directed against certain authors, such as Galsworthy [p. 98], and particularly Dostoevsky [p. 99f.], against "tractor novels from Moscow" 20 , holders of renowned literary awards [p. 187], but above all against incompetent translators (of his own works) 21 and critics [p. 77]. This obviously satirical strain further almost always re-appears in contexts - apart from the obligatory digs at Freud of course 22 - where there is talk of socialistic revolutionary ideas and especially of socialist Russia. When an "SR (Social Revolutionist)" has supposedly written a tedious biography on Alexander I bearing the title "The Monarch and the Mystic" [p. 81], and Charlie Everett, the future husband of Vadim's daughter Bel burns his passport and a tiny American flag ("bought at a souvenir stall especially for that purpose" [p. 200]) in the Russian Consulate's garden in Switzerland, the comic effect quite clearly predominates, as quite clearly in his description of Pushkin's statue in Leningrad: ... the statue of Pushkin erected some ten years before by a committee of weathermen. An Intourist folder had yielded a tinted photograph of the spot. The meteorological associations of the monument predominated over its cultural ones. Frock-coated Pushkin, the right- side lap of his garment permanently agitated by the Nevan breeze rather than by the violence of lyrical afflatus, stands looking upward and to the left while his right hand is stretched out the other way, sidewise, to test the rain (a very natural attitude at the time lilacs bloom in the Leningrad parks), [p. 211] But when Vadim asserts "I described the Bolshevist state as Philistine in repose and bestial in action" [p. 132] and he allows the secret agent Oleg to report on how his son-in-law was cured in a soviet work-camp by such nutcrackers, such shrinkers as are absolutely unknown in the philosophy of your Western sharlatanchi [p. 218], then the seriousness of his attacks cannot escape attention - a seriousness

120 that is not to be explained by his personal history alone, his escape from post-revolutionary Russia (obviously written in a more frivolous frame of mind). At all events his ironic description of academic life in Quirn appears almost harmless in the light of these attacks.

3. Despite the satirical involvement in the political sphere, the literary satire carries without doubt more weight. It ultimately governs the whole conclusion to the novel if we remember that the narrator describes his own death in spite of the fact that he recognises the rule, The I of the book Cannot die in the book [p. 239], for all "serious novels" and has previously stated that he is writing his autobiography on 15th February 1974 [p. 168] and yet according to the chronology of the last chapters must have died a few weeks after his last bout of illness on 15th July 1970, that is in July of that year. Does this mean that according to his own criteria this cannot be considered a "serious novel"?Perhaps this is true; but before drawing this conclusion it would seem worth taking a glance at the meaning of the title, the "harlequins" referred to there and their connection with the inner structure of the book. First of all there is Vadim's special sense for patterns and recurrent structures which is for instance shown when he uses chess notation to describe the effect of the lighted windows against the dark background of Oksman's house [p. 91] or in his noticing that he has the same dream every time he is about to fall in love. In this last case he explicitly interprets the "sense of recurrence" for himself as "a built-in feeling" [p. 102]. The above-mentioned fixation about having to give each future wive a detailed account of his illness before asking her to marry him, also belongs in this context. At the same time he feels that his destiny is unfolding in accordance with the autonomous pattern laid down by some 'plot' - like the destiny of a character in a novel in the hands of a clumsy author -, whereby his own plans unwittingly correct the "plotter's" mistakes so that the aim of the plot is ultimately realized:

121 ... a clumsy conspiracy, with nonsensical details and a main plotter who not only knew nothing of its real object but insisted on making inept moves that seemed to preclude the slightest possibility of success. Yet out of those very mistakes he unwittingly wove a web, in which a set of reciprocal blunders on my part caused me to get involved and fulfill the destiny that was the only aim of the plot. [p. 3] Thus Vadim remarks when describing the tea-breaks with his secretary Lyuba Savich: It was during those innocent intervals that there began a certain thematic movement on the part of fate. [p. 82] and when the 'chance' encounter with the last of his lovers leads him to reflect upon the role of coincidence in his autobiography he explicitly describes the events depicted from his life as "patterns of fact": Coincidence is a pimp and cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of fact recollected by a non-ordinary memoirist, [p. 225] Something intrinsically bound up with these patterns is, that throughout his life he is repeatedly plagued by the thought that his life is but the nonidentical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man's life, somewhere on this or another earth. A demon, I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man, that other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier, and crueler than your obedient servant, [p. 23] He is first overcome by this feeling when Oksman confuses the title of one of his novels (Camera Obscura instead of Camera Lucida) and it is still there after he has portrayed his most intimate experiences in Ardis because he is even afraid that his books are "an unconscious imitation of another's unearthly art" [p. 234]. And so he wonders what he could do to change these rather degrading circumstances, - could he escape them by deliberately altering the course of his life?

122 Should I, on the contrary, repattern my entire life?[p. 97] But the only thing he actually does is to sacrifice his pseudonym "V. Irisin" in favour of his own name. On the other hand he endeavours to show plainly the pattern character of his life in the actual arrangement of the autobiography: he tells us of the decision to inform Iris and later Annette about his illness before asking them to marry, at exactly parallel points at the end of the sixth chapter of Part I and Part II respectively. This close connection between life and work is revealed in other ways as well. Perhaps most obviously, when referring to how he has exercised restraint in the depiction of his last and most perfect love affair, he is able within the framework of his autobiography to point to the fact that he has already dealt with this problem 35 years ago in his fictitious biography See under Real. [p. 226] The insight he gains during his bad attack shortly before death: ...historically, art, or at least artifacts, had preceeded, not followed, nature [p. 244], is thus really true in this case. And then of course the pattern's relations are independent of the fixed direction of time. Even the vision of his future literary fame appeared to Vadim as "remembrance in reverse" [p. 23] just as the landlady at the rendezvous with Dolly in New York seems, "in mnemonic reverse", to be the prefiguration of the one in the Siberian hotels they visited later [p. 143]. His recurrent idea of not being able to execute a change of direction in space must here also be regarded as a sign anticipating his later physical condition. So the narrator could perhaps be right after all when at the end of the book he rejects as "merely an exquisite quibble" his lover's finding the cause of his complaint in a confusion of time and space [p. 253]. At all events he stresses when attempting to depict his time spent with Bel, that this blending of separate events into patterns, he has observed, transcends not only the order of time but also that of space: I see it today as a composite portrait of rapture, in which a mountain in Colorado, my translating Tamara into English. Bel's high school accomplishments, and an Oregon forest intergrade in patterns

123 of transposed time and twisted space that defy chronography and charting, [p. 168] It is important that this suspension of the categories of time and space in memory takes place in his mind. And a formulation so important for a proper understanding of the title, like The fiends of my incurable ailment, "flayed consciousness", were shoving aside my harlequins [p. 31] must be seen from this angle if passages are also taken into account which quite obviously indicate that the "harlequins" (amongst other things) are fictitious constructions, creations of the mind. An extremely informative passage is the conversation between Vadim and his (invented! ) great aunt: "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! " I did. By Jove, I did. I invented my grand-aunt in honor of my first daydreams.... [pp. 8f.] A character who has arisen from his imagination, from his "day-dreams", calls all real things and especially their combination with one another "harlequins", which establishes beyond doubt that these "harlequins" are coupled with the way the creative mind actively participates in viewing the world. But why does such an unusual word appear in this context? As shown by Flasdieck 24 , 'harlequin' was the name for a demonic creature in the Middle Ages, first for the savage multitude then for the (comic) devil in disguise, then for a bestial Devil's grimace in mask form and finally since the 16th century for the figure of a clown in the tradition of the commedia dell'arte, soon characterised by his colourfully checked trousers. Phrases like 'harlequin moth' and 'harlequin cabbage bug' were then derived from this article of clothing. A magic wand is a necessary requisite for the harlequin's scheming designs on stage, and in

124 the tradition of the English pantomine he is even supposed to be invisible to the clown and pantaloon. 25 The word's etymology better explains its very varied usage in Vadim's autobiography: the meaning mentioned above, of "harlequins" as product of the imagination, tallies with the stage figure's ability to conjure up magic and make himself invisible. It is striking in view of the history of the word that there should be a harlequin in the title of an autobiography narrated by someone whose father has been given the nick-name "Demon" [p. 96] and who believes that his life is determined by a "demon" [p. 89]; and also that "harlequins" as butterflies keep on cropping up in Vadim's life and in his book take on the function of a central image or even symbol, for the "Metamorphoza" is emphasized as a specific feature of the butterfly by his last lover [p. 226] and Vadim calls his successful transition from the Russian to English literary language a "literary metamorphosis" [p. 122]. But the title is even more complex. When talking about his notes on the motels, re-used at a later stage, which he took down in his diary during his journey across the American West, he says: LATH, LATH, Look At The Harlequins! Look at that strange fever rash of viatic tabulation in which I persevered as if I knew that those motor courts prefigured the stages of my future travels with my darling daughter, [pp. 156f.] and this obviously refers back to the pattern beyond every chronological order which was touched on above. This view is backed up by the frequent use of the abbreviated title, "LATH", which means a thin strip of wood used for constructing lattice or for forming an invisible groundwork to support plaster, because the narrator regards his life as a "web" [p. 3] and has even attempted to write a book with the title The Invisible Lath which he declares "is rather similar to that in the reader's hand" [p. 156]! The autobiography titled "LATH" would thus be a portrayal of the invisible but supporting lattice or basic pattern beneath the surface events in life. But what about the combination of Look at the Harlequins! and "LATH"? Obviously the latter is the abbreviation of the former; and yet the relevance of the other meaning of "lath" shows that this explanation does not suffice. First we should recall that the pattern of lattice appears on the harlequin's trousers - and also on the dust-cover of Look at the Harlequins! However if we look up the word "harlequin" in the Oxford

125 English Dictionary - and that is not as inept as it might seem when the author is someone like Nabokov who is known to be fond of dictionaries - we come to a surprising result for amongst other things we find: ... he usually wears particoloured bespangled tights and a visor, and carries a light bat of lath [! ] as a magic wand. "Lath", then as the material for the harlequin's magic wand, and the "harlequins" as the author's imaginative life, represented in the patterns of "LATH": perhaps a trifle too far-fetched to appear convincing at first glance, but certainly not so far-fetched as not to have been intended by Nabokov.

4. In discussing this last aspect it seemed necessary to depart from the purely immanent world of the autobiographer and to recall to mind Vadim's fictitious status by pointing to Nabokov as author of the whole. This factor has deliberately been ignored up to now so as not to detract from our examination of how strictly the narrator is modelled on the pattern of an author writing his memoirs. And yet this novel, more than any other of Nabokov's novels, virtually demands that the real author be taken into account, for anyone acquainted with Nabokov's life and works will very soon notice that much of this life and these works reappear in Vadim's 'invented' destiny and in those books that are supposedly Vadim's. A glance at the introductory book-list must already arouse this suspicion in the reader, and it is headed not, as might be expected, "Other Books by the Author", but more subtely "Other Books by the Narrator" whereby the titles by the latter allude to titles by the former, i.e. to Nabokov's other books. In the course of the novel this relationship becomes even more evident when we are told more about these books. However the sometimes striking similarities should not conceal the differences. Nabokov has written eight novels and one fragmentary novel (Solus Rex) in Russian, Vadim only six, and from Nabokov's eight English novels there are again two without counterparts. With exception of the novellette in verse Polnolunie (Plenilune) [p. 61 ] which is only briefly mentioned on one occasion, it is easy to guess which books are meant, as the order of composition and of publication coin-

126 cide. Vadim's Tamara corresponds to Nabokov's Mashen'ka^, not only suggested by Oksman's calling the title of the English translation Mary [p. 94] 2 7 but also by a series of allusions to the contents 28 .Paw« Takes Queen represents the counterpart to Zashchita Luzhina29 (Engl. The Defense30), recognised without difficulty by the chess theme and the allusion to the hero's spectacular fall from the window3*, and Vadim's Camera Lucida can easily be identified as Camera obscura32 (Engl. Camera obscura33) long before Oksman unwittingly names the Nabokovian title. We can almost sense Nabokov's satisfaction at having created a successful pun when he needlessly allows Vadim yet another counterpart to the altered American version Laughter in the Dark34 with the ominious title Slaughter in the Sun [p. 129]. Once again the many allusions to content in addition to the title 35 make clear that Krasny Tsilindr (The Red Top Hat) "the story of a beheading" [p. 80], is none after than Nabokov's Priglashenie na kasn'36 (Engl. Invitation to a Beheading37). The affinity between Vadim's The Dare ("Podarok Otchizne was its original title, which can be translated as "a gift to the fatherland' " [p. 99]) and Nabokov's DarM (Engl. The Gift39) is of particular interest, for the ingenious and satirical biography on Chernyshevsky contained in The Gift has in The Dare become a biography on Dostoevsky with - as can be taken from several remarks 40 - similar qualities, thus enabling Nabokov to convey indirectly his negative evaluation of this much-admired author, which he has also expressed elsewhere. See under Real, also like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight the fictitious biography of an author, marks the beginning of both 'authors'' series of English novels. In this case 41 as also in the case of Esmeralda and Her Pandarus42 alias Bend Sinister the close relation between the contents establishes their identity beyond doubt and alone the title of Vadim's next novel, Dr. Olga Repnin makes quite evident that it is the counterpart to Pnin.43 The connection between Vadim's anthology of stories Exile from Mayda and Nabokov's short stories 44 may indeed only be suggested, but then there is a positive orgy of burlesque parallels between A Kingdom by the Sea and Lolita45, and Ardis and Ada are very closely related to one another (we only have to think of "The Substance of Space" as substitute for "The Texture of Time" [p. 223]). There are even enough similarities in the material conditions of literary production; for instance the emigre magazine Sowremennija Zapiska in which Nabokov had most of his Russian novels first published,

127 corresponds to the magazine Patria in Vadim's case, and as with Lolita the publishers also had trouble with A Kingdom by the Sea and the "obscenity charges... by stuffy censors" [p. 201], to mention but two examples. But this list of parallels between Vadim's and Nabokov's books merely serves the purpose of showing to what extent Nabokov is here playing a game with the partly serious and partly burlesque treatment of his own literary work in the sphere of fiction. To identify Vadim as a pseudo-Nabokov we need look no further than the points of agreement in their 'lives' - quite apart from the telling name given to the narrator. And then of course Vadim N.(Vladimir Vladimirovich Naborcroft? [p. 24]) was born on the same day as Nabokov in Leningrad (as may be deduced from particulars on the death of his father [p. 96]), and like Nabokov spent his youth in Russia (at least the winters), studied in Cambridge after his flight from post-revolutionary Russia, lived on the Cote d'Azur, in Paris, in the United States and finally in Switzerland, was also professor of literature at an American college (Quirn = Cornell 47 ) and eventually acquires an American passport 48 as Nabokov does etc. Even young Vadim's hopes of becoming an important Russian writer [pp. 23f.] may (if we forget their burlesque over-emphasis) without much hesitation be taken for young Nabokov's, just as there are also good reasons for accepting Vadim's assessment of his own works 49 as Nabokov's. 50 But on the other hand we surely do not need to emphasize the fact that Nabokov neither suffers from the same, or even a similar, complaint nor possesses "three of four successive wives" [p. 3] like Vadim. The many points of similarity, the ironically inverted parallels and demonstrative differences between the lives of the narrator and the author mean that Look at the Harlequins! may be regarded as a sort of parody on an autobiography by Nabokov. It is only a question of the intention behind a biographie romance of this kind which the biographer in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight had after all already considered to be "the worst kind of literature yet invented" 51 . We might come closer to a solution to this question by observing in which spheres most of the "serious" parallels occur, where the tendency towards achieving distance with irony or parody is at its strongest and where the differences are particularly striking. But as this has, for the most part been covered by the preceding account, a few brief indications should here suffice. Without doubt the greatest similarities between Vadim and Vladimir are to be found in the outer framework to their lives, in their emigration, places of residence and such like, but above all in the sphere which Vadim calls his "literary

128

life". This does not so much refer to outward details, as for instance the fact that both first write their novels on a number of separate cards, but more especially to the way both come to terms with the problem of changing their literary language from Russian to English and to their special taste for 'harlequins' as creations of the imagination. There are also far-reaching parallels in the sphere of literary products, though mostly in the shape of ironic inversion or burlesque exaggeration; Vadim's statements on his books - if read properly - might well be noteworthy comments made by Nabokov on his own works. Even the narrator's lifelong grappling with the problem of space may - as suggested at the end of the book - be understood as an indirect presentation of Nabokov's preoccupation with the problem of time, and indeed the remark made by Van, the narrator in Ada, about the chronological sequence of events being converted by memory into spatial order, gives it added significance. The most striking differences between the two lives, as we indicated above, are to be found in the private sphere in the more narrow sense. Particularly in Vadim's comprehensive accounts of his love life. Now why should Nabokov provide such far-reaching fabrications in this very sphere when he otherwise establishes as much closer relation between Vadim's life and his own and if he is not interested in treating this side of his life in more detail anyway? At this point we should perhaps think back to the narrator's expressed aim when he says that the value of his book is largely due to the fact that it is a catalogue raisonne of the roots and origins and amusing birth canals of many images in my Russian and especially English fiction, [p. 8]. But it is just this function that Look at the Harlequins! does not fulfill in respect of Nabokov's novels. Ardis or Ada serves as a good example to illustrate this point. Whereas Vadim's main concern is to point out autobiographical sources (both Iris 52 and his cousin Ada Bredow [p. 169] as well as his father Demon [p. 96] are supposed to have been incorporated into Ardis), Nabokov quite rightly would not stand for speculations made by critics fanatical about autobiography or even worse by avid followers of Freud who comb the adventures of the fictitious hero, Van, for parallels to the real author's life. Indeed in the preface to the English edition of The Defense Nabokov has quite clearly shown his

129 contempt for all those who read the products of his imagination with a view to gaining information on his private life: For the benefit of such sleuths I may as well confess that 1 gave Luzhin my French governess, my pocket chess set, my sweet temper, and the stone of the peach I plucked in my own walled garden, [p. 53]. Seen from this angle Look at the Harlequins! takes on the form of a scathing satire. The target of this satire is the naive expectation of a unity between author and work, which was already ridiculed in the fictitious biography The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. But in contrast to this novel where this expectation is only an illusion within the fictitious sphere, Nabokov offers himself as 'living' example. He begins with his own novels and stories, creates imaginary parallels, easily recognisable as burlesque counterparts, and then invents in Vadim a fictitious author whose private life explains the genesis of these works. To enhance the satire he further conceals this procedure by allowing Vadim to write an autobiography in which he endeavours to demonstrate the unity between life and work. By thus creating a biography which greatly resembles his own in its outer frame and as regards literary production and yet which differs very much in the region of 'private' matters, Nabokov has refuted the notion of a unity between life and work much more effectively than would be possible in the purely fictitious sphere. From Nabokov's novels we may only derive Vadim's life, but not his own. This would only be possible if Vadim were Nabokov. But Vadim's life - according to his own words - is merely "a parody, an inferior variant of another man's life" [p. 89] And, as the premise of unity between author and work is not valid, Vadim can do no more than impersonate that other m a n . . . that other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier, and crueler than your obedient servant, [p. 89]

130 NOTES 1. Look at the Harlequins! (New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1974), p. 225. The page numbers in square brackets refer to this edition. 2. Cf. p. 55; as Nabokov did as well (cf. his introduction to Mary, London, 1971, p. XI.). 3. Cf. p. 99. 4. Cf. pp. 99-101. 5. Cf. pp. 121-122. 6. Cf. pp. 215-216. 7. Cf. p. 193; "the best of my English romaunts" as he caWsArdis (p. 23), which is most obviously autobiographical. 8. Cf. pp. 215-216 and pp. 121-122. 9. Cf. pp. 55, 58 and 118. 10.Cf. pp. 132, 135 and 161. 11.Cf. pp. 99-101. 12.Cf. pp. 25,99. 13.Cf. p. 88. 14.Cf.'pp. 21, 23, 29, 95, 177, 232. 15. Cf. pp. 3, 95,210,211. 16.Cf. pp. 8, 23, 98, 165, 203. 17.Cf. pp. 21, 31f., 67. 18.Cf. pp. 77, 115,166, 213. 19.Cf. pp. 77, 115, 166, 213. 20. Cf. pp. 90, 133. 21.Cf. pp. 55f., 118. 22.CT. pp. 17f., 119. 23. P. 89; cf. p. 96 24. Η. M. Flasdieck, "Harlekin. Germanischer Mythos in romanischer Wandlung", Anglia 61 (1937), pp. 225-340. 25.Cf. Oxford English Dictionary, "Harlequin". 26. Berlin, 1926. 27.New York, 1970. 28.Cf. pp. 55, 57, 58, 83, 169, 228. 29. In: Sovremennija Zapiski, 40-42 (Paris 1929/30), as book Berlin, 1931. 30. London, 1964. 31.Look at the Harlequins! , p. 58; cf. also pp. 83, 228. 32. In: Sovremennija Zapiski, 49-52 (Paris 1932/33), as book Paris, 1932. 33. London, 1936. 34. Indianapolis and New York, 1938. 35.Cf. pp. 78, 80f., 83, 129,145, 148f., 228. 36. In: Sovremennija Zapiski, 58-60 (Paris 1935/36), as book Paris, 1938. 37. New York, 1959. 38. In: Sovremennija Zapiski, 63-67 (Paris 1937/38), as book New York, 1952. 39. New York, 1963. 40.Look at the Harlequins! , p. 99-101. 41 .Look at the Harlequins!, pp. 120-122, 129, 226. 42.Look at the Harlequins!, pp. 132,138, 162, 169, 228. 43. Cf. further: Look at the Harlequins! , pp. 135,161, 162, 224 and 229. 44. E.g. Nabokov's Dozen, New York, 1958. 45.Cf. especially: Look at the Harlequins! , pp. 215f., 218.

131 46. Cf. Look at the Harlequins!, pp. 26, 40, 63, 96, 169, 231. 47. Derived from the same etymological source, cf. J. Skow, "Butterflies Are Free", Ήπιε, Atlantic Edition (October 7, 1974), p. 66. 48.Look at the Harlequins!, p. 248. And the number of the passport might even be Nabokov's own! 49.Cf. pp. 96 (Ardis), 193 (A Kingdom by the Sea), 228 (The Dare). 50. With reference to Dar cf. Nabokov, Speak Memory, Penguin Edition (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 214. 51. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, p. 17. 52.Cf. pp. 26, 40, 63. 53. The Defense (2nd edition, London, 1969), p. 10.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

NABOKOV'S ENGLISH NOVELS The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941. Quotes taken from the Penguin Edition, Harmondsworth, 1964. Bend Sinister. New York: Henry Holt, 1947. Quotes taken from the English edition, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972. Lolita. Paris: Olympia Press, 1955. New York: Putnam, 1968. Quotes taken from the Corgi Edition, London, 1969. Pnin. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957. Quotes taken from the Atheneum PB Edition, New York, 1967. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962. Quotes taken from the English edition, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962. Ada or Ardor. A Family Chronicle. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1969. Quotes taken from this edition. Transparent Things. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1972. Quotes taken from the English edition, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973. Look at the Harlequins! . New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1974. Quotes taken from this edition.

133 BOOKS AND ARTICLES ON THE ENGLISH NOVELS IN GENERAL a) Books Appel, Alfred, Jr. and Charles Newman (eds.)· Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations and Tributes, Evanston, 111., 1970. Bader, Julia. Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels. Berkeley, Calif., 1972. Dembo, L. S. (ed.). Nabokov: The Man und His Work. Madison, 1967. Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. London, 1967. Fowler, Douglas. Readin&Nabokov. Ithaca, Ν. Y., 1974. Moynahan, Julian. Vladimir Nabokov. (University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, 96). Minneapolis, 1971. Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. London, 1974. Newman, Charles (ed.). TriQuarterly, No. 17 (Winter 1970), For Vladimir Nabokov on his seventieth birthday. Evanston, 111., 1970. Rowe, William Woodin. Nabokov's Deceptive World. New York, 1971. Stegner, Page. Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York, 1966. Zimmer, Dieter E. Vladimir Nabokov: Bibliographie des Gesamtwerks. Reinbek, 1963. b) Shorter Articles Appel, Alfred, Jr. "The Art of Nabokov's Artifice". University of Denver Quarterly, III (Summer 1968), pp. 25-37. . "An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov". Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VIII, 2 (Spring 1967), pp. 127-52. Dillard, R. H. W. "Not Text, but Texture: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov". TheHollins Critic, III, 3 (1966), pp. 1-12. Dommergues, Pierre. "Entretien avec Vladimir Nabokov". Les Langues Modernes, 62 (1968), pp. 92-102. Gardner, Thomas. "Vladimir Nabokov". Studium Generale, 21 (1968), pp. 94110.

Gezari, Janet Krasny. "Game Fiction: The World of Play and the Novels of Vladimir Nabokov". Dissertation Yale University, 1971; cf. Dissertation Abstracts International, 32 (1972), p. 6974 A.

134 Hayman, John G. "After 'Lolita': A Conversation with Vladimir Nabokov - with Digressions". The Twentieth Century (London), 166 (December 1959), pp. 444-50 Hughes, Daniel. "Nabokov: Spiral and Glass". Novel, 1 (1968), pp. 178-85. Janeway, Elizabeth. "Nabokov the Magician". The Atlantic Monthly, 220 (1967), pp. 66-71. Lee, L. L. "Vladimir Nabokov's Great Spiral of Being". Western Humanities Review, 18(1964), pp. 225-36. Mossman, James. " 'To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless' - Vladimir Nabokov in conversation with James Mossman". The Listener, 23 October 1969, pp. 560-61. Piyce-Jones, Alan. "The Fabulist's Worlds: Vladimir Nabokov". The Creative Present - Notes on Contemporary American Fiction, ed. N. Balakian and C. Simmons. Garden City, Ν. Y. 1963, pp. 65-78. Purdy, Strother Β. "Solus Rex: Nabokov and the Chess Novel". Modern Fiction Studies, XIV, No. 4 (Winter 1968/69), pp. 379-95. Scheer-Schätzler, Brigitte. "Vladimir Nabokov". Amerikanische Literatur der Gegenwart, ed. Μ. Christadler. Stuttgart, 1973, pp. 210-32. Smith, Peter Duval. "Vladimir Nabokov on his Life and Work: A BBC television interview with Peter Duval Smith". The Listener, LXVIII (22 November 1962), pp. 856-58. Vortriede, Werner. "Die Masken des Vladimir Nabokov". Merkur, XX (1966), pp. 138-51. BOOKS, ARTICLES AND REVIEWS ON THE INDIVIDUAL NOVELS. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight M e n , Walter. "Fiction". The Spectator, No. 6149 (3 May 1946), pp. 462-64. Bader, Julia. " 'Sebastian Knight': The Oneness of Perception". Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels. Berkeley, Calif., 1972, pp. 13-30. Bryden, Ronald. "Quest for Sebastian". The Spectator, No. 6900 (23. September 1960), pp. 453-54. "Curious Quest". Times Literary Supplement, 30 September 1960, p. 625 Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. London, 1967, see pp. 26-32 et passim. Fromberg, Susan. "The Unwritten Chapters in 'The Real Life of Sebastian Knight' ". Modern Fiction Studies, 13 (1967), pp. 427-42. Johnson, W. R. "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight". Carleton Miscellany, IV, 4(1963), pp. 111-14. Nicol, Charles. "The Mirrors of Sebastian Knight". Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, 1967, pp. 85-94. Stegner, Page. " "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight': The Immortality of Art". Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York, 1966, pp. 63-75. Stuart, Dabney. " 'The Real Life of Sebastian Knight': Angles of Perception". Modern Language Quaterly, XXIX (1968), pp. 312-28. Bend Sinister Bader, Julia, " 'Bend Sinister': The Pattern of Concentric Circles" Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels. Berkeley, Calif., 1972, pp. 95-122.

135 Borland, Hal. "Strategy of Terror". New York Times Magazine, 15 June 1947, p. 10. Coleman, John. "Style and the Man". The Spectator, No. 6874 (25 March 1960), pp. 444-45. Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. London, 1967, see pp. 198-203 et passim. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. "The Handle: 'Invitation to a Beheading' and 'Bend Sinister' ". TriQuarterly, No. 17 (Winter 1970). Evanston, 1970, pp. 60-71. Kermode, Frank. "Aesthetic Bliss". Encounter, XIV (June 1960), pp. 81-86. Lee, L. L. " 'Bend Sinister': Nabokov's Political Dream". Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, 1967, pp. 95-105; Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VIII, 2 (Spring 1967), pp. 193203. Schossberger, Emily. "The Individual and the State". Chicago Sun Book Week, 22 June 1957, p. 4. Stegner, Page. " 'Bend Sinister': A Matter of Style". Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York, 1966, pp. 76-89.

Lolita Allen, Walter. "Simply Lolita". New Statesman, LVIII (7 November 1959), pp. 631-32. Aldrige, A. Owen. " 'Lolita' and 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses' ". Wisconsin' Studies in Contemporary Literature, II (Fall 1961), pp. 20-26. Alvarenga, Octavio Mello. "Proust e Nabokov: Aproximafoes". Revista do livro (Rio de Janeiro), June 1960, pp. 85-98. Amis, Kingsley. "She Was a Child and I Was a Child". The Spectator, No. 6854 (6 November 1959), pp. 635-36. Appel, Alfred, Jr. "Backgrounds of'Lolita' ". TriQuarterly, No. 17 (Winter 1970). Evanston, 111., 1970, pp. 17-40. - . " 'Lolita': The Springboard of Parody". Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, 1967, pp. 106-43; Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VIII, 2 (Spring 1967), pp. 204-41. Bader, Julia. " 'Lolita': The Quest for Ecstasy". Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels. Berkeley, Calif., 1972, pp. 57-81. Baker, George. " 'Lolita': Literature or Pornography? ". Saturday Review, XL (22 June 1957), p. 18. Brick, Allan. "The Madman in his Cell: Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov and the Stereotypes". Massachusetts Review, Fall 1959, pp. 40-55. Cranston, Maurice. "Obscenity in the Eye of Only Some Beholders - Contradictions in the Case of'Lolita' ". Manchester Guardian, 14 May 1957, p. 5. Dupee, F. W. " 'Lolita' in America; Literary Letter from New York". Encounter, February 1959, pp. 30-35. Fiedler, Leslie A. "The Profanation of the Child". The New Leader, 23 June 1958, pp. 26-29. Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. London, 1967, see pp. 323-50 et passim. Green, Martin. "The Morality of'Lolita' ". Kenyon Review, XXVIII (1966), pp. 352-77.

136 Hiatt, L. R. "Nabokov's 'Lolita': A 'Freudian* Cryptic Crossword". American Imago, 24 (1967), pp. 360-70. Hicks, Granville. " 'Lolita' and Her Problems". Saturday Review, XLI (16 August 1958), pp. 12, 38. Hinchliffe, Arnold P. "Belinda in America". Studi Americani, 6 (1960), pp. 339-47. Hollander, John. "The Perilous Magic of Nymphets". Partisan Review XXIII (Fall 1956), pp. 557-60. Hughes, D. J. "Reality and the Hero: 'Lolita' and 'Henderson the Rain King' ". Modern Fiction Studies, VI, No. 4 (Winter 1960/61), pp. 345-64. "Ithaca and 'Lolita' ". Newsweek, 24 November 1958, pp. 50-51. Janeway, Elizabeth. "The Tragedy of Man Driven By Desire". The New York Times Book Review, 17 August 1958. pp. 5, 25. Josipovici, G. D. " 'Lolita': Parody and the Pursuit of Beauty". Critical Quarterly, VI (1964), pp. 35-48. Jones, David L. "Dolores Disparue". Symposium, XX (1966), pp. 135-40. Levin, Bernard. "Why All the Fuss? ". The Spectator, No. 6811 (9 January 1959), pp. 32-33. " 'Lolita' and Its Critics". Manchester Guardian, 23 January 1959, p. 6. Malcolm, Donald. "Lo, the Poor Nymphet". New Yorker, XXXIV (8 November 1958), pp. 187-90. Mitchell, Charles. "Mythic Seriousness in 'Lolita'". Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 5 (1963), pp. 329-43. Nabokov, Vladimir. "On a Book Entitled 'Lolita' ". Anchor Review, No. 2 (1957), pp. 105-12; also in: Encounter, XII (April 1959), pp. 73-76. Nemerov, Howard. "The Morality of Art". Kenyon Review, XIX (Spring 1957), pp. 313-21; also in: H. Nemerov, Poetry and Fiction: Essays. New Brunswick, N. J., 1963, pp. 260-66. "New Fiction". London Times, 12 November 1959, p. 15. Oliphant, Robert. "Public Voices and Wise Guys". The Virginia Quarterly Review, XXXVII (1961), pp. 522-37. Pack, Claus. "Humbert Humbert und seine Lolita: Der Sensations-roman Vladimir Nabokovs und die Massstäbe". Wort und Wahrheit, 15 (1960), pp. 55-57. Parker, Dorothy. "Sex - without the asterisks". Esquire, L, No. 4 (October 1958), pp. 102-03. Phillips, Elizabeth. "The Hocus-Pocus of 'Lolita'". Literature and Psychology^ X (1960), pp. 97-101. Proffer, Carl R. Keys to Lolita. Bloomington,1968. Rougemont, Denis de. "Nouvelles metamorphoses de Tristan". Preuves, 96 (1959), pp. 14-27. Rubenstein, E. "Approaching 'Lolita* ".Minnesota Review, 6 (1966), pp. 36167. Seldon, E. S. "Lolita and Justine". Evergreen Review, 1958, pp. 156-59. "A Sense of the Absurd". Times Literary Supplement, 13 November 1959, p. 657. Slonim, Marc, " 'Doctor Zhivago' and 'Lolita' ". International Literary Annual, 2 (1959), pp. 213-25. Stegner, Page. " 'Lolita': A Palliative of Articulate Art". Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York, 1966, pp. 102-15. Strainchamps, Ethel. "Nabokov's Handling of English Syntax". American Speech, XXXVI (1961), pp. 234-35.

137 Teirlinch, Herman. "Marginal Notes on Nabokov's 'Lolita' ". The Literary Review (Fairleigh Dickinson University), 7 (Spring 1964), pp. 439-42. Thiebaut, Marcel. "Nabokov et Lolita". Revue de Paris, August 1959, pp. 14352. Toynbee, Philip. "In Love With Language." The Observer, 8 November 1959, p. 22. Trilling, Lionel. "The Last Lover: Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita' ". Encounter, 11 (1958), pp. 9-19. Uphaus, Robert W. "Nabokov's Kunstlerroman: Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Man". Twentieth Century Literature, 13 (1967), pp. 104-10. Wills, Garry. "The Devil and Lolita". New York Review of Books, 21 February 1974, pp. 4-6. Pnin Amis, Kingsley, "Russian Salad". The Spectator, No. 6744 (27 September 1957), p. 403. Bader, Julia. " 'Pnin': Pattern Broken by Life". Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels. Berkeley, Calif., 1972, pp. 82-94. Elliott, George P. "Fiction Chronicle". Hudson Review, X (Summer 1957), pp. 289-95. Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. London, 1967, see pp. 129-40 et passim. Gordon, Ambrose, Jr. "The Double Pnin". Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, 1967, pp. 144-56. Havinghurst, Walter. "Po Amerikanski". Saturday Review, XL (9 March 1957), pp. 14-15. High, Roger. "Pnin - a preposterous little explosion". Geste, IV (March 1959), pp. 16-18. "Lightly Go." Times Literary Supplement, 4 October 1957, p. 598. Maddocks, Melvin. "Respecting the Rule to 'Write About What You Know' ". Christian Science Monitor, 7 March 1957, p. 5. Mizener, Arthur. "The Seriousness of Vladimir Nabokov". The Sewanee Review, LXXVI (1968), pp. 655-64. "New Leases of Life? ". Times Literary Supplement, 2 September 1960, p. 562. "Pnin & Pan". Time, LXIX (18 March 1957), pp. 60-62. Stegner, Page. " 'Pnin': Redemption through Aesthetics". Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York, 1966, pp. 90-101. Zapadov, V. "Derzavin i Pnin". Russkaja Literatura (Leningrad), VIII (1965), pp. 114-19. Pale Fire Adams, Robert Martin. "Fiction Chronicle". Hudson Review, XV (Autumn 1962), pp. 420-30. "After Lolita - is this Nabokov just pulling our legs? ". London Daily Mail, 8 November 1962, p. 12. Bader, Julia. " 'Pale Fire': Refracted Shades of the Poet". Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels. Berkeley, Calif., 1972, pp. 31-56.

138 Berberova, Nina. "The mechanics of'Pale Fire' ". TriQuarterly, No. 17 (Winter 1970). Evanston, 111., 1970, pp. 147-59. Bradbury, Malcolm. "New Novels". Punch, CCXLIII (12 December 1962) pp. 875-76. Chester, Alfred. "Nabokov's Anti-Novel". Commentary, XXXIV (1962), pp. 449-51. Goyne, George. "Jesting Footnotes Tell a Story". The New York Times Book Review, 27 May, 1962, pp. 1,18. Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. London, 1967, see pp. 291-322 et passim. . " 'Pale Fire': The labyrinth of a great novel". TriQuarterly, No. 8, Evanston, 111., 1966/67, pp. 13-36. Flower, Timothy Frank. "Forms of Re-Creation in Nabokov's 'Pale Fire' ". Dissertation Rutgers University, 1972; cf. Dissertation Abstracts International, 32 (1972), p. 6927 A. Galati, Frank Joseph. "A Study of Mirror Analogues in Vladimir Nabokov's 'Pale Fire' ". Dissertation Northwestern University, 1971; cf. Dissertation Abstracts International, 32 (1971), p. 3462 A. Janeway, Elizabeth. "Nabokov: The Magician". The Atlantic Monthly, 220 (1967), pp. 66-71. Kermode, Frank. "Zemblances". New Statesman, LXIV (9 November 1962), pp. 671-72. Krueger, John R. "Nabokov's Zemblan: A Constructed Language of Fiction", Linguistics, 31 (May 1967), pp. 44-49. Lee, L. L. "Vladimir Nabokov's Great Spiral of Being". Western Humanities Review, 18 (1964), pp. 225-36. Lemer, Laurence. "Nabokov's Cryptogram". The Listener, LXVIII (29 November 1962), p. 931. Levine, Jay Arnold. "The Design of Ά Tale of a Tub' (With a Digression on a Mad Modern Critic)". English Literary History, 33 (1966), pp. 198-227. Lewald, H. Ernest. "Antecedentes y claves para Έ1 fuego palido' de Nabokov". Sur (Buenos Aires), No. 322-23 (1970), pp. 199-207. Lyons, John O. " 'Pale Fire' and the Fine Art of Annotation". Nabokov: The Man and His Work, ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison, 1967, pp. 157-64; M'sconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VIII, 2 (Spring 1967), pp. 242-49. McCarthy, Mary. "A Bolt from the Blue". New Republic, CXLVI (4 June 1962), pp. 21-27. Also as "Vladimir Nabokov's 'Pale Fire' ". Encounter, 19 (October 1962), pp. 71-84. Macdonald, Dwight. "Virtuosity Rewarded, or Dr. Kinbote's Revenge". Partisan Review, XXIX (1962), pp. 437-42. Maloff, Saul. "The World of Rococo". The Nation, CXCIV (16 June 1962), pp. 541-42. "Multivalence". Times Literary Supplement, 16 November 1962, p. 869. Nordell, Roderick. "Nabokov: Parody, Pedantry, and Waste". Christian Science Monitor, 31 May 1962, p. 7. Peden, William. "Inverted Commentary on Four Cantos". Saturday Review, XLV (26 May 1962), p. 30. Raven, Simon. "Nabokov's Blueprint". The Spectator, No. 7014 (30 November 1962), pp. 864-65. Riemer, Andrew. "Dim Glow, Faint Blaze - The Meaning of'Pale Fire' ". Balcony, 6(1967), pp. 41-48.

139 Rovet, Jeanine. "Vladimir Nabokov: Le Demon de l'Analogie". Temps Modernes, XXI (1966), pp. 2279-82. "The Russian Box Trick". Time, LXXIX (1 June, 1962), p. 57. Stegner, Page. " 'Pale Fire': Patterns in the Game". Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York, 1966, pp. 116-32. Toynbee, Philip. "Nabokov's Conundrum". The Observer, 11 November 1962, p. 24. Williams, Carol, T. " 'The Web of Sense': 'Pale Fire' in the Nabokov Canon". Critique, VI (Winter 1963), pp. 29-45.

Ada Adams, Robert Martin. "Passion among the Polyglots". Hudson Review, Winter 1969/70, pp. 717-24. Alter, Robert. "Nabokov's Ardor". Commentary, 48 (August 1969), pp. 47-50. Appel, Alfred, Jr. " 'Ada' described". TriQuarterly, No. 17 (Winter 1970). Evanston, 111., 1970, pp. 160-86. Bader, Julia. " 'Ada': The Spiral Texture of Details, Doubles, and Artistry". Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels. Berkeley, Calif., 1972, pp. 123-62. Bok, Sissela. "Redemption Through Art in Nabokov's 'Ada' ". Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 12, 3 (1971), pp. 110-20. Dalton, Elizabeth. "Ada or Nada". Partisan Review, 1970/71, pp. 155-58. Dommergues, Pierre. "Les structures elementaires de l'aristocratie 'Ada ou Ardeur', de Vladimir Nabokov". Le Monde, 18 October 1969 (Supplement au numero 7702), p. VII. Ellmann, Mary. "Recent Novels: The Languages of Art". Yale Review, 59 (1969), pp. 111-21. Enright, D. J. "Pun-Up". The Listener, 2 October 1969, p. 457. Harper, Howard M. "Trendsin Recent American Fiction". Contemporary Literature, Spring 1971, pp. 204ff. especially pp. 216-19. Heidenry, John. "Vladimir in Dreamland". Commonwealth, 90 (9 May 1969), pp. 231-34. Johnson, Carol. "Nabokov's Ada: Word's End". Art International, 13 (1969), No. 8, pp. 42-43. Johnson, D. "Nabokov's 'Ada' and Puskin's 'Eugene Onegin' ". The Slavic and East European Journal (Madison), 15 (1971), No. 3, pp. 316-23. Kazin, Alfred. "In the Mind of Nabokov". Saturday Review, 10 May 1969, p. 27. Leonard, Jeffrey, "In place of lost time: 'Ada* " Tri Quarterly, No. 17 (Winter 1970), Evanston, 111., 1970, pp. 136-46. "Nabokov's Waterloo". Times Literary Supplement, 2 October 1969, p. 1121. "Prospero's Progress". Time (Atlantic Edition), 23 May 1969, pp. 49-54. Toynbee, Philip. "Too much of a good thing". The Observer, 5 October 1969, p. 34. Updike, John."Van Loves Ada, Ada Loves Van". New Yorker, 2 August 1969, pp. 67-75.

140 Transparent Things Alter, Robert. "Mirrors for Immortality". Saturday Review, 11 November 1972, pp. 72-76. Gallant, M. "Transparent Things". The New York Times Book Review, 19 November 1972, VII, pp. 1-2. Hope, Francis. "The person in question". The Observer, 6 May 1973, p. 37. Lehmann-Haupt, C. "Ignoring Nabokov's Directions". New York Times, 13 November 1972, p. 35. "Making Fictions". Times Literary Supplement, 4 May 1973, p. 488. Updike, John. "The Translucing of Hugh Person". New Yorker, 18 November 1972, pp. 242-45. Weeks, Edward. "The peripatetic Reviewer". Atlantic Monthly, December 1972, pp. 141-42. Wood, Michael. "Tender Trousers". New York Review of Books, 16 November 1972, pp. 12-13. Look at the Harlequins! Pritchett, V. S. "Nabokov's Touch" The New York Review of Books, XXI, No, 19 (28 November 1974), p. 3. Skow, John. "Butterflies Are Free". Time (Atlantic Edition), 7 October 1974, p. 66.