The Five Senses in Nabokov's Works [1st ed.] 9783030454050, 9783030454067

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The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works Edited by Marie Bouchet Julie Loison-Charles · Isabelle Poulin

The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works “Though to his many passionate readers, Nabokov is ‘the high priest of sensuality and desire’ (Edmund White), scholars have been surprisingly slow to write about those qualities in his work. This collection takes up that challenge, offering a range of essays from senior figures in the world of Nabokov studies while also introducing exciting work from younger Nabokov scholars. The best work in this volume is not only about sight but touch, sound, taste, and smell, and the troubling relations of all these to one another, to memory, verbal sense, desire, and disgust.” —Thomas Karshan, Senior Lecturer in Literature, University of East Anglia, UK, President of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society “Nabokov may not have believed in ‘reality,’ but he surely believed in the senses, which deliver us such reality as we have access to. The fine essays in this volume take us on a sometimes uncomfortably intimate journey through Nabokov’s engagement with the body’s physical senses, and how, for him, they produce the raw material for experience, imagination and art.” —Stephen Blackwell, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA

Marie Bouchet · Julie Loison-Charles · Isabelle Poulin Editors

The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works

Editors Marie Bouchet University of Toulouse Toulouse, France

Julie Loison-Charles University of Lille Lille, France

Isabelle Poulin University Bordeaux Montaigne Bordeaux, France

ISBN 978-3-030-45405-0 ISBN 978-3-030-45406-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Peter Horree/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This collection of essays stems from the Second International Conference organized by the French Vladimir Nabokov Society (www.vladimirnabokov.org) in April 2016 in Biarritz, France. The conference was entitled “‘Do the Senses Make Sense?’ The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works,” and ambitioned to reflect upon a multi-faceted subject that had not been covered yet by Nabokovian criticism on a scale encompassing all his writings. The keynote speakers of the conference were Brian Boyd (University of Auckland, New Zealand) and Maurice Couturier (University of Nice, France). The present volume is composed of a selection of conference papers that were developed into book chapters, and of chapters specifically written for this book after the launching of a second international call for papers meant to cover areas of the topic that had not been dealt with in the conference presentations. The conference and the ensuing publication were made possible thanks to the generous help and financial support of Bordeaux Montaigne University (especially the TELEM research center), the Township of Biarritz, the Nouvelle Aquitaine Regional Senate, Toulouse University (notably the C.A.S. research center), Lille University, Lyon University, and the French Vladimir Nabokov Society, whom we would all like to thank wholeheartedly. The subject of the conference triggered the interest of Biarritz local artists, who responded with specific creations and events for the v

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conference. Dancer and choreographer Fabio Lopez (Illicite dance company) produced a special ballet piece inspired by Nabokov’s exile poem “The Pilgrim” (1930). Land artist Xavier Ride produced installations themed on the five senses and Nabokov’s works; they included a Nabokov quote written in grass that gradually grew over the month of the exhibit, and other pieces that invited the audience to see, touch, hear, smell, and draw. A selection of images by photographer Polina Jourdain Kolicheva also illustrated Nabokov’s synesthesia. The profusion of thanks we would like to address to the artists can barely match the quality of the art they produced for the conference. Texts by Nabokov were also read by Les Rendez-Vous Lecture in the Biarritz locations that the author visited or evoked in his autobiography. Those readings allowed Nabokov’s words to resonate within these very places, and invited passers-by to read his works. Fassbinder’s 1978 adaptation of Despair was shown at the Royal movie theater, whose director we also thank for his enthusiasm. The conference participants also visited Nabokov’s uncle’s former estate, called “Le Château de Perpignaa,” near Pau (some 100 km from Biarritz). It was the first time international nabokovians could visit the privately owned property that Nabokov recalls in his writings. We are very grateful to Didier Machu, from the University of Pau, thanks to whom that visit was made possible. We would also like to address special thanks to: – Morgane Allain-Roussel (Ph.D. candidate, Lyon University), with whom the conference was co-organized; – The devoted team of the Biarritz Médiathèque, especially its director Mayalen Sanchez, and her colleague Yohan Gabay; – Fabienne Oliva from the TELEM Research Center in Bordeaux; – Biarritz Mayor Michel Veunac, his deputy in charge of Culture Jocelyne Castaignède, and Alain Fourgeaux, Director of Culture for the Township of Biarritz.

Toulouse, France Lille, France Bordeaux, France

Marie Bouchet Julie Loison-Charles Isabelle Poulin

Contents

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‘Do the Senses Make Sense?’: An Introduction Marie Bouchet, Julie Loison-Charles, and Isabelle Poulin

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Part I The Role of the Senses in Nabokov’s Aesthetics and Metaphysics 2

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Senses, Minds, Meanings, and Values in Nabokov: Do the Senses Make Sense? Brian Boyd ‘To Breathe the Dust of This Painted Life’: Modes of Engaging the Senses in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading Lilla Farmasi Nabokov’s Visceral, Cerebral, and Aesthetic Senses Michael Rodgers

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Developing Transnational Style: Particularities of Nabokov’s Lexicon and Cognitive Frames in The Gift in Relation to the Five Senses Lyudmila Razumova

Part II

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Crossing Sensations and Languages: Multilingualism, Memory and Intermediality

An Eden of Sensations: The Five Senses in Speak, Memory Damien Mollaret

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A Look at the Spectropoetics of Photography in Nabokov’s Fiction Yannicke Chupin

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Visual Agnosia in Nabokov: When One of the Senses Can’t Make Sense Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

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Translating Taste and Switching Tongues Julie Loison-Charles

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Translation as Craft and Heroic Deed: On the Political Stakes of a Multilingual Sensoriality Isabelle Poulin

Part III

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Senses and the Body: From Pleasure to Displeasure

Sensuality and the Senses in Nabokov Maurice Couturier

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The ‘Eyes’ Have It: The Pleasures and Problems of Scopophilia in Nabokov’s Work Julian W. Connolly

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The Carmen in Nabokov’s Lolita Suzanne Fraysse

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‘I’d Like to Taste the Inside of Your Mouth’: The Mouth as Locus of Disgust in Nabokov’s Fiction Anastasia Tolstoy

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Synesthesia and Multisensoriality

An Introduction to Synesthesia via Vladimir Nabokov Jean-Michel Hupé Neurological Synesthesia vs Literary Synesthesia: Can Nabokov Help Bridge the Gap? Marie Bouchet Undulations and Vibrations, Tonalities and Harmonies: Nabokov, Acoustics and the Otherworld Sabine Metzger Vladimir Nabokov’s Musico-Literary Microcosm: “Sounds,” “Music,” and Nabokov’s Quartet Kiyoko Magome ‘Tactio Has Come of Age’: The Tactile Sense in Nabokov’s Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada Léopold Reigner

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Embodied Memories in Ada, or Ardor and Speak, Memory Nathalia Saliba Dias

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‘A Tactile Sensation Is a Blind Spot’: Nabokov’s Aesthetics of Touch Lara Delage-Toriel

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Marie Bouchet is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Toulouse, France, and the former Vice-President of the French Vladimir Nabokov Society. She has published over 30 academic papers on Nabokov in international, peer-reviewed journals, such as Nabokov Studies, Nabokov Online Journal, Transatlantica, Miranda, Revue Française de Littérature Comparée, Sillages Critiques, LISA, RFEA, and a book entitled Lolita: A Novel by Vladimir Nabokov, A Film by Stanley Kubrick (Paris: Atlande, 2009). She co-edited two collections of essays on Lolita. She is also one of the annotators of Ada for the French Pléiade, the reference edition of Nabokov’s works. Brian Boyd University Distinguished Professor of English, University of Auckland, has published on literature (American, Brazilian, English, Greek, Irish, New Zealand, Polish, Russian), art, and philosophy, from the Paleolithic to the present, but most of all on Vladimir Nabokov, as annotator, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, translator, and more (most recently: Stalking Nabokov: Selected Essays, 2011, Letters to Véra, co-edited with Olga Voronina, 2014, Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor, co-edited with Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019). His works have appeared in nineteen languages and won awards on four continents. Yannicke Chupin is Associate Professor of American Literature at Université de Cergy-Pontoise. A founding member of the French

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Vladimir Nabokov Society and currently its President, she is the author of Vladimir Nabokov, Fictions d’écrivains (2009), and the co-author of Aux Origines de Laura, le dernier manuscrit de Vladimir Nabokov (2011) as well as the coeditor of Nabokov et la France (2017). Besides writing on Nabokov, she has also published articles on Donald Barthelme, Steven Millhauser, Nicholson Baker, Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace. Julian W. Connolly is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Ivan Bunin (1982), Nabokov’s Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other (1992), The Intimate Stranger: Meetings with the Devil in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (2001), A Reader’s Guide to Nabokov’s Lolita (2009), and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (2013). He also edited the volumes Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading: A Course Companion (1997), Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives (1999), and The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov (2005). He has published over 90 articles on Russian literature. Maurice Couturier is Professor emeritus at the University of Nice. He wrote his dissertation on Nabokov, with Roland Barthes as a member of the jury. He is the chief specialist of Nabokov in France, and wrote seven books on him, translated six novels, Lolita among them, and directed the Nabokov Pléiade reference edition. He developed an original theory of the modern novel in three essays, Textual Communication: A Print-Based Theory of the Novel, La Figure de l’auteur and Roman et censure ou la mauvaise foi d’Eros. He is the author of five novels and the translator of David Lodge. Lara Delage-Toriel The author of a Ph.D. thesis on Vladimir Nabokov (Cambridge University, 2001), Lara Delage-Toriel is an Associate Professor of American Literature at Strasbourg University. Her publications include two book-length studies involving cross-media analysis, on A Streetcar Named Desire (Bréal, 2003) and on Lolita (Editions du Temps, 2009). She has co-edited Kaleidoscopic Nabokov: Perspectives Françaises (Houdiard, 2009) and Vladimir Nabokov et la France (Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2017). Her current interest is in the body as a matrix for creation and interpretation in contemporary North-American narrative fiction. She has also been the founding president of the French Vladimir Nabokov Society.

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Lilla Farmasi is an assistant research fellow at the University of Szeged, Hungary. The title of her dissertation is “Storytelling and the Perceptions of the Embodied Mind: Space and Movement in Narratives,” and it focuses on the ways human embodiment, text, and narratives influence each other. Her research interests include cognitive theories, postclassical narratology, the psychology of reading, and modern and postmodern American prose. She also investigates the possibilities of narrative theory across the disciplines, especially its applications in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Suzanne Fraysse teaches American literature at Aix-Marseille University. Her doctoral dissertation on Nabokov was published in 2000 (Folie, écriture et lecture dans l’œuvre de Vladimir Nabokov, PUP). She has published essays on Nabokov and on a variety of American authors as well as a book on The Scarlet Letter (La Lettre Écarlate et les récits d’esclaves, Harmattan, 2009). Jean-Michel Hupé has been a CNRS researcher at the Brain and Cognition lab (CerCo) in Toulouse (France) since 2004. He obtained his Ph.D. in neurosciences in 1999 from Université Claude Bernard (Lyon, France), studying with electrophysiological methods the functional role of connections in the visual cortex. He learnt psychophysics methods at New York University and has been studying the dynamics of perceptual (mostly visual) illusions since then. He has also been studying synesthesia since 2006, using interviews, surveys, psychophysics, and brain imaging techniques. Julie Loison-Charles is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Lille, France, and Vice-President of the French Vladimir Nabokov Society. She has published a monograph on Nabokov’s use of foreign words (Vladimir Nabokov, ou l’écriture du multilinguisme: mots étrangers et jeux de mots, Nanterre: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2016), as well as many articles on Nabokov’s multilingualism and his practice of translation. She has organized several conferences on Nabokov, the latest of which was a transatlantic symposium which took place first at the University of Lille and then at the University of North Carolina, USA. Kiyoko Magome is an associate professor at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. Her publications include “The Image of the String Quartet Lurking in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), The Influence of Music

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on American Literature Since 1890: A History of Aesthetic Counterpoint (Edwin Mellen, 2008), and “Edward Said’s Counterpoint” (Paradoxical Citizenship: Edward Said. Lexington Books, 2006). Supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Magome has been researching modernist musico-literary quartets and has published Japanese translations of American novels, such as Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall (Iwanami, 2014). Sabine Metzger teaches in the Department of American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. She has written her Ph.D. thesis on Eros and Morbid Artistry, which examines the interdependence of poiesis and existence in the oeuvre of John Hawkes. Her publications include articles on Gertrude Stein, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lafcadio Hearn, and Vladimir Nabokov. Currently, she is working on a book-length study on Nabokov and the auditory. Damien Mollaret an École Normale Supérieure de Lyon alumni, teaches Comparative Literature at Bordeaux Montaigne University. He has a teaching certification in French modern literature (agrégation de lettres modernes) and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature: “Splitting identities: Plurilingualism and Pseudonyms in the works of Fernando Pessoa, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Romain Gary” (2019). He has written articles on Nabokov: “The Jubilant Writings of Vladimir Nabokov,” “Portraits of Nabokovian and Borgesian Fictitious Writers,” “Vladimir Nabokov and His Impossible Portrait of Mademoiselle O,” “Measure and Excess of Chess Representations in the Literature and the Cinema.” Isabelle Poulin is Professor of Comparative Literature at Bordeaux Montaigne University. She published many books and essays on Nabokov and others, among which V. Nabokov, lecteur de l’autre, PUB 2005; Écritures de la douleur: Dostoïevski, Sarraute et Nabokov, Le Manuscrit, 2007; Poétiques du récit d’enfance : Benjamin, Sarraute et Nabokov, Atlande, 2012; Le Transport romanesque. Le Roman comme espace de la traduction, de Nabokov à Rabelais, Garnier, 2017. She is co-editor of the fourth volume (Twentieth Century) of Histoire des Traductions en Langue Française (Verdier, 2019). Lyudmila Razumova specializes in bilingual writing and studies of cosmopolitanism, nabokovian studies, translation studies, language teaching, and interpreting. Her current research focuses on translation of

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Nabokov’s English novels into Russian. She co-authored The Interpreter’s Companion: Russian Edition and published a number of academic articles and reviews. She is a Lecturer in Russian at King’s College London. Before joining King’s, she taught Literature, Film, Language and Translation courses at Yekaterinburg Institute of International Relations (Russia), University of Nebraska (as a visiting faculty) and Stony Brook University and worked as a researcher, translator and interpreter for businesses and cultural organizations. Léopold Reigner is a lecturer at the University of Rouen, France. He is the author of a Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Nabokov’s Flaubert: Interpretation, Continuity and Originality” which examines Gustave Flaubert’s artistic and cultural influence on Nabokov’s writing, and which he defended in November 2018. He is a member of the French Vladimir Nabokov Society. Dr. Michael Rodgers is Honorary Associate and Associate Lecturer in English Literature at The Open University and Lecturer in English and Communications at West College Scotland. His research interests include twentieth-century literature, theory, and film; the intersection between literature and philosophy; and the role of humor in literature. He is the author of Nabokov and Nietzsche: Problems and Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2018) and co-editor of Nabokov and the Question of Morality: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction (Palgrave, 2016). Nathalia Saliba Dias is a Ph.D. candidate at Humboldt University, Berlin. She is writing a thesis on Nabokov, time and eroticism, approaching it through the perspective of Queer Temporalites (2019). Her B.A. (2004) and M.A. (2006) from UFPR-Brazil were focused on Brazilian Portuguese Language and Literature with an emphasis on Comparative Studies. She is interested in American and European Modernism and Postmodernism, time, sexuality, feminist and queer theory. Susan Elizabeth Sweeney Murray Professor of Arts and Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross, has published many essays on Nabokov, most recently “Backwards, Contrariwise, Downside Up: Thinking in Different Directions in Nabokov” (in Nabokov Upside Down), “Nabokov in an Evening Gown” (Nabokov’s Women), and a book entitled Nabokov and the Question of Morality: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction, coedited with Michael Rodgers. She spent ten years coediting

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NABOKV-L and was twice elected president of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society. She also studies detective fiction, postmodernism, and American literature, and received the Gargano Award for an outstanding essay on Poe. Anastasia Tolstoy is a Junior Research Fellow in Russian Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford University. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where she completed a D.Phil. on Vladimir Nabokov and the Aesthetics of Disgust. Alongside Brian Boyd, she co-edited and translated Think, Write, Speak, a volume of Nabokov’s ‘public prose’ to be published by Penguin and Knopf in 2019. She also co-translated, with Thomas Karshan, Nabokov’s neo-Shakespearean blank verse drama The Tragedy of Mister Morn (2012).

CHAPTER 1

‘Do the Senses Make Sense?’: An Introduction Marie Bouchet, Julie Loison-Charles, and Isabelle Poulin

The pun on the various meanings of “sense” quoted in the title of this introduction is taken from the mock preface to Humbert’s confessions in Lolita. Its fictitious author John Ray Jr explains that it is because he won the “Poling Prize” for “a modest work (‘Do the Senses make Sense?’) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed” (Nabokov 1955, 7) that Humbert’s lawyer entrusted him with prefacing Humbert’s manuscript. In spite of, or because of, the suspicious name of that prize—a variant on the Pulitzer Prize which seems to rely only on polls—one can but ponder over this question, which is in fact the first interrogative sentence of the novel Lolita (and the first of the many enigmas in the following pages). The various significations one could assign to the question asked by John Ray powerfully resonate throughout Lolita, and throughout Nabokov’s works as a whole: are our senses rational? Do they make us behave in a rational way? Can we rely on our sensorial perceptions to understand the world around us? Do our

M. Bouchet (B) University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France J. Loison-Charles University of Lille, Lille, France I. Poulin University Bordeaux Montaigne, Bordeaux, France © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_1

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senses actually produce signification (make/produce sense)? Can we rely on our senses for logical deductions? This collection of essays invites the reader to delve into the way Nabokov answered these questions in his texts, as if his own work was in fact the very “modest work” “wherein certain morbid states and perversions ha[ve] been discussed.” This collection of essays offers the first large-scale reflection upon the importance and significance of the five senses in Nabokov’s work, poetics, and aesthetics.1 Many obvious elements from Nabokov’s life and works indicate the impact of senses on his creative process and on his aesthetic principles, all stemming from his way of experiencing the world around him. It is probably in his autobiographical writings that the key role of senses is the most blatant, as he repeatedly incorporates many sensorial elements within the flow of his memories, and even muses upon the sensorial education his mother was especially attentive to develop: My mother did everything to encourage the general sensitiveness I had to visual stimulation. How many were the aquarelles she painted for me; what a revelation it was when she showed me the lilac tree that grows out of mixed blue and red! Sometimes, in our St. Petersburg house, from a secret compartment in the wall of her dressing room (and my birth room), she would produce a mass of jewelry for my bedtime amusement. I was very small then, and those flashing tiaras and chokers and rings seemed to me hardly inferior in mystery and enchantment to the illumination in the city during imperial fetes, when, in the padded stillness of a frosty night, giant monograms, crowns, and other armorial designs, made of colored electric bulbs-sapphire, emerald, ruby-glowed with a kind of charmed constraint above snow-lined cornices on housefronts along residential streets. (Nabokov 1966, 36)

In this excerpt, one can see Nabokov’s creative mind at work in his extraordinary capacity to relate elements to one another—the very core of metaphor-production. By linking the jewels his mother put on display for him in the warm interior of their Petersburg house with the outside holiday street decorations of a bygone time, the writer not only powerfully conjures up the past, but also subtly prepares for later episodes in his autobiography, namely, when his mother has to sell her jewels to feed her family during their exile. Senses make particular sense in Nabokov’s world, but not only sight, as the above reflections may seem to indicate. In fact, the many studies of Nabokov’s references to visual arts and cinema can give the impression

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that sight is the all-dominating sense, and that Nabokov therefore followed the traditional hierarchy between senses inherited from Aristotle. This collection of essays strives to prove that things are a lot more complex in Nabokov’s case, since he was a man gifted with a spectacular visual, but also auditory, gustatory, olfactory, tactile, and kinetic memory. For example in the autobiographical short story “First Love”, which later became chapter 7 of Speak, Memory, Nabokov powerfully evokes Biarritz, the French sea resort on the Atlantic Ocean—a popular vacation spot for White Russians until 1917—and its Grande Plage, on which he “found himself digging, one day, side by side with a little French girl called Colette” (Nabokov 1966, 149), the author’s “first love.” Biarritz was the place where Nabokov had one of his first intense sensorial and emotional experiences, and offered many elements to stimulate his perceptive and imaginative self: from the “rising, rotating mass of foamy, green water” of the ocean to the unfamiliar sound of the Basque language, from the salty breeze on his lips to the “deep, mealy sand” in which he dug, from the “pistachio ice cream of a heavenly green” to the pine smell of the beach cabins, his sensorial memories saturate the text. This collection of essays therefore explores the key relation between the senses and memory. Damien Mollaret uses Speak, Memory as a basis for studying how Nabokov’s sensorial development in his childhood was later used to evoke his past. In this chapter, the many references to Proust are considered within an intertextual network (Proust, Chateaubriand, Calvino) that questions the link between writing (the art of language) and sensations, and especially the link between multilingual writing and sensations. His comparisons with Romain Gary (and his desire to consume landscapes, or things from the past such as Russian pickles), or Fernando Pessoa (likening himself to “scrupulous scholars of feeling”) emphasize the carnal dimension of language, beyond its arbitrary arrangement of signs, because these very signs are fully incarnated for polyglots. He therefore shows how multilingual writing can be seen as a form of resistance against the automaticity of perceptions. Many a critic has been impressed by the vividness and precision of Nabokov’s memories from a sensorial point of view, but in fact, Nabokov likes to remind his readers that perceptive processes are complex. This is exemplified by Susan Elisabeth Sweeney’s chapter, which focuses, on the contrary, on the failures of visual memory. In her analyses of Laughter in the Dark, The Enchanter and Lolita, she studies the way Nabokov describes visual agnosia, “an unusual neurological disorder (…) which involves the failure to recognize objects as

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either familiar or coherent visual shapes.” The examples she recalls span the inabilities to recognize faces, colors, traces, pages, letters, or words: characters and readers are confronted with these visual aberrations, so as to raise the readers’ awareness of their own perceptive mechanisms. As for Yannicke Chupin’s chapter, it focuses on a rarely explored feature of Nabokov’s visual intermedial references, namely, his very personal use of photography in his texts. She investigates the striking intertwining of photography—captured visual memories—and death in Nabokov’s universe. Borrowing from Derrida’s “spectropoetics” in Specters of Marx and relying on Barthes’s reflections on photography in Camera Lucida, her chapter shows how photographic references disseminate their lethal function in the text that surrounds them, as if the specific act of vision that photography entails was synonymous with killing. As recalled in Mollaret’s chapter, the central importance of sensory modalities in Nabokov’s work should also be related to his multilingualism, and his personal history. The writer came from an aristocratic family who frequently travelled, employed foreigners, and had access to an exceptional amount of foreign products when compared to their fellow Russian citizens; Nabokov’s senses were therefore constantly stimulated by new sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and textures in his childhood. His acute sensory perceptions were then probably further developed with the experiences of his émigré life as he moved around Europe and the United States. This explains the many instances of Nabokov elaborating upon the various taste/sound of foods depending on the language in which they are evoked, such as the “tartine au miel, so much better in French!” in Ada (Nabokov 1969, 81). With this aspect in mind, and from a study of food references in three of Nabokov’s self-translated texts (Ada, Lolita and Speak, Memory), Julie Loison-Charles questions what translating means, that is not only changing one’s linguistic system, but also changing one’s tongue. Nabokov indeed strives to find the equivalent gustative sensations triggered by various foods, thus inviting his readers into an intensely sensual community, characterized by a powerful stimulation of all senses. In her chapter, Isabelle Poulin examines the roles of sensory modalities from a more political angle, by studying another essential aspect of Nabokov’s works, his translation practice. She shows how translating sensorial sensations allows the text to reach out to communities, preserve rare linguistic idiosyncrasies, and open up to new horizons and new spaces via the senses, that is, via bodily experiences readers and writers share.

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The crucial importance of sensations should therefore not be limited to their role in the mnemonic process (as famously exemplified by Proust’s madeleine dipped in linden blossom tea, and recalled in Ada 2 ), but should be envisioned in their relationship to Nabokov’s writing processes and his aesthetics as a whole.3 In fact, one may even wonder whether the very practice of literature, the daily exercise of putting sensory experience into words, did not play a fundamental role in shaping, nourishing, and amplifying the richness and sharpness of Nabokov’s sensory perceptions. Similarly, Nabokov’s entomological practice, which ruined his eyesight, also had a significant, though paradoxical, impact on the acuteness of his visual perception of detail and color, and probably on his other modes of perception. However, in his chapter, Brian Boyd underlines that Nabokov’s keen interest in senses is not limited to sensory precision: his prose succeeds in awakening the reader’s sensory imagination, because he manages to intertwine imagination, emotion, and the senses. Boyd shows that, even if Nabokov usually stresses individual perception, he was also aware of a social element in perception. Finally, Boyd contends that Nabokov does not rely on the senses only to provide pleasure, since sensitivity also implies being able to experience pain. For Nabokov, art is beauty plus pity, and many characters in his novels are very sensitive to the senses, but most insensitive and cruel to some other characters. Likewise, in her chapter that brings about a fruitful dialog between cognitive theories and literary theory, Lilla Farmasi concentrates upon Invitation to a Beheading and explores the modalities developed by Nabokov to engage the sense perceptions of the reader, mostly via empathy (as in the highly corporeal evocations of Cincinnatus’s anxiety). She interrogates the function of bodily sensations in the narrative through the patterns and mechanisms of human perception that structure the text as a whole, and has a key role in the plot of the novel. In his chapter, Michael Rodgers focuses on another dimension of the relationship to the reader via the senses. He analyses two excerpts from Invitation to a Beheading and Despair to show how Nabokov titillates the reader’s visceral and cerebral senses to create aesthetic sense. Rodgers relies on passages in which Nabokov plays with words, not only in the English translation, but also in the Russian original and reveals how Nabokov triggers our desire to puzzle-solve, that is to make sense of the apparent nonsense of Nabokov’s plays-on-words. He underlines that body and brain are solicited to facilitate aesthetic appreciation: Nabokov’s artistic sense stems from combining recognition (physical sense) and interpretation (cerebral sense). Through

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a study of The Gift , Nabokov’s last Russian novel, which she presents as his last “translational” novel, Lyudmila Razumova draws upon the combination of the physical and the cerebral by demonstrating that the often-reproached “un-Russianness” of Nabokov stems from his unique vision of literary space, which he developed independently from national metaphysical or political preconceptions, through his own “supersensory insight.” Razumova bases her analyses on the “theory of linguistic personality” developed by Russian linguists, whose anthropocentric orientation sheds an interesting light on the sensorial dimension of Nabokov’s cognitive frames and lexical creations (sound play, synesthesia, multilingual puns). Several chapters from this collection also explore sensory modes that have been significantly neglected by scholarly criticism. The first one to be dealt with is hearing, as the importance of sound in Nabokov’s writing has often been overlooked in favor of his stunning visual images—criticism therefore aptly reflecting the Aristotelian hierarchy. Most previous studies mainly viewed Nabokov’s interest in sounds through the lens of poetic effects, via the alliterations and assonances one would expect from a poet. In her chapter, Sabine Metzger develops an original approach by drawing upon the metaphysical dimension of Nabokov’s acoustics. She demonstrates how Nabokov enquires into the impact of sound and into its physical aspects in particular, for it is precisely the latter which allows a relationship between the physical world of sounds and the otherworldly. Nabokov repeatedly asserted that he had no ear for music, and that despite his coming from a family of musicians (his cousin Nicolai Nabokov and his own son) and music lovers (his own parents) he did not appreciate music at all. Were it not only for the suspiciously adamant nature of his statements, reading Nabokov’s poetry and prose suffices to question his rejection of music. This is what Kyoko Magome does in her chapter, where she shows that despite his denials it is evident Nabokov had a very good knowledge of music, and especially musical structures, up to the point of structuring certain short stories and a collection of short stories (Nabokov’s Quartet ) on musical frameworks. Another seldom-studied sensory modality in Nabokov’s works is touch, the lowest sense in the Aristotelian hierarchy.4 In his chapter, Léopold Reigner shows that the 1951 poem “Voluptates Tactionum” announces the central role of touch in Nabokov’s later novels Ada, Lolita, and Pale Fire. He starts by presenting the hierarchy of senses in Lolita and Ada, and demonstrates that in Lolita, sight is chronologically and aesthetically

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the first sense used by Humbert to have access to Lolita, while touch is the last one, even if it becomes crucial when sight is unavailable. In Ada however, touch is one of the three essential senses in the relationship between Van and Ada. Reigner then explores the connection between touch and time in Ada, especially in Van’s essay “The Texture of Time.” Finally, Reigner shows that tactility is central to the act of writing, be it for John Shade in Pale Fire, in the short story “Terra Incognita,” or yet again, at the auctorial level, for Nabokov himself. Nathalia Saliba Dias’s chapter also dwells on touch in its relationship to time and concentrates on Ada and Speak, Memory. Saliba Dias relies on Elizabeth Freeman’s theory of “erotohistoriography,” which shows that the body is a fundamental part of mnemonic processes: memories are not only triggered by the senses, as with Proust’s madeleine, but enjoyable bodily sensations also make historical content intelligible. Lara Delage-Toriel also explores touch, but this time in relation to Nabokov’s larger aesthetics. In her chapter, she contends that the sense of touch affects writing and reading, physically, intellectually, and emotionally in Nabokov’s work. Likening the written page to skin, she shows that touch can be seen as an eloquent guide to grasp the specific qualities of Nabokov’s poetic tactics. One should also recall that Nabokov was a famous synesthete, and therefore one cannot attempt to study the importance of one given sense without taking into account its relation to the other ones. The knowledge brought by neuroscience and cognitive science in the field of synesthesia therefore opens up new perspectives for researchers interested in that topic in Nabokov’s oeuvre. Through Nabokov’s case, neuroscientist JeanMichel Hupé, one of the leading international specialists of synesthesia, questions the link between Nabokov’s exceptional creativity and sensory memory and his synesthesia. After reviewing what cognitive neuroscience has learnt so far about the possible mechanisms of synesthesia, he reaches the conclusion that there is little support in current research to naturalize Nabokov’s creative process on the basis of him being a synesthete. As for Marie Bouchet’s chapter, its analyses stem from the observation that Nabokov’s evocation of his synesthesia launched many discussions of his neurological condition, both by scientists and by literary scholars, while the term is unfortunately often used loosely. Following Don Barton Johnson,5 Bouchet argues it is crucial to distinguish between neurological synesthesia and literary synesthesia and she does so convincingly by drawing on the work of neuroscientists and providing a close reading of Nabokov’s erotic writing.

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A survey of senses in Nabokov’s fiction would, indeed, not be complete without significant attention dedicated to sensuality, as erotic texts and contexts entail a systematic heightening of the sensory modes. Senses are crucial elements of the texture of Nabokovian desire. As Maurice Couturier showed in his books on eroticism in Nabokov’s novels, the sensual aspect of his work has not received critical attention matching the public focus on the sexual content of novels like Lolita or Ada. This collection of essays contributes to filling this gap. In his chapter, Couturier develops a comparative analysis of the different types of relationship to sensual pleasure that Nabokov displayed in three of his novels, King, Queen, Knave (where “shameful sensuality” is expressed on the ironic mode), Lolita (which displays self-vindicating, “guilty and Edenic sensuality”), and Ada (showing a similar mix of guilty and heavenly sensuality, but on a “dazzled mode”). In his chapter, Julian W. Connolly focuses on sight in Nabokov’s scenes of desire, and more specifically on voyeuristic observation. He approaches the subject by drawing upon Laura Mulvey’s work on scopophilia (the pleasure derived from seeing other people as objects, primarily sexual). Indeed, as shown by both Couturier’s and Connolly’s chapters, eroticism is often filtered through the psyche of terrible characters (Humbert, Van) gifted with mesmerizing poetic style, as illustrated in the dazzling incipit of Lolita: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” (Nabokov 1955, 9). This much-commented upon opening provides a crucial entry into Humbert’s erotic obsession with Lolita, and if the reader can but be charmed by the poetic chiseling of these few lines, in which the alliterative pattern of the name Lolita is expanded onto the whole paragraph, one can also notice that in the very sensual and physical pleasure of pronouncing her name with tongue and teeth lies a form of devouring of the title-character, as her name is being rolled around the narrator’s mouth. The ambivalence of the poetic voice of Humbert is further analyzed by Suzanne Fraysse in her chapter, in which she first recalls Flaubert’s famous statement linking the five senses and lyrical poetry, and then wonders about Nabokov’s choice of impersonating lyrical poetry in such a “repulsive” character as Humbert. She delineates all the forms the “carmen” takes in the novel, especially in all its lyrical intertextual dimension, from Catullus to SaintJohn Perse, via Poe, Baudelaire, or Mallarmé, and in all the violations associated to the carmen—rape, usurpation of voices. At the other end

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of the sensation spectrum, Anastasia Tolstoy finally analyses Nabokov’s aesthetic use of disgust in his novels, and traces the beginning of his experimentation with that topic in his early poetry. The motif of disgust particularly culminates in King, Queen, Knave, as the novel teems with repulsive imagery, and as its central character, Franz, feels continuous nausea toward the world. Disgust is also to be found in Despair: not only is it present as a theme and through images, but, Tolstoy argues, it also penetrates the formal make-up of the text. Tolstoy concentrates on those two Russian novels, but finds striking parallels with several other books, including Lolita and Ada, which are usually mostly known for their evocation of sensual pleasures. By publishing these essays in this collection, we hope that they help “senses make sense” in Nabokov’s work, notably by readjusting certain assumptions about his work, his writing practice, and his aesthetics. We also hope that they modestly echo the sensual and sensorial pleasure of reading—the “tingle in the spine” (Nabokov 1980, XXV)—that Nabokov advocated as a Professor of Literature and that he aimed at as a writer.

Notes 1. See bibliography: besides an unpublished 2014 French PhD on Nabokov’s sensorial writing in Ada and Lolita by Nauf Al Maiman, and some scattered papers dedicated to vision or synesthesia, no comprehensive study of the five senses in Nabokov’s works has been published. 2. The reference to Proust’s famed memory magic philter is given during Ada’s light and shadow games in chapter 8 part 1: “The level of that gleaming infusion de tilleul would magically sink in its goblet of earth and finally dwindle to one precious drop” (Nabokov 1969, 57). 3. Keeping in mind that “aesthetics” stems for the Greek word for senses. 4. Aristotle’s classical hierarchy of the senses deems sight the highest of the senses, followed in order by hearing, smell, taste, and touch (Jutte 2005, 61). 5. Don Barton Johnson already operated this important distinction between “artistic synesthesia” and “neurological synesthesia” in his 1974 study (Johnson 1974, 85).

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Bibliography Al Maiman, Nauf. 2014. L’écriture des sens dans Ada ou l’ardeur et Lolita de Vladimir Nabokov: un hymne à la vie, une lutte contre la mort. PhD dissertation, University Paris 8. Bader, Julia. 1987. Sebastian Knight: The Oneness of Perception. In Vladimir Nabokov: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom, 15–26. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. Connolly, Julian W. 1997. To See or Be Seen: The Function of the Gaze in Nabokov’s Russian Fiction. In And Meaning for a Life Entire: Festschrift for Charles A. Moser on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Peter Rollberg, 371–390. Columbus: Slavica. Couturier, Maurice. 2004. Nabokov ou la cruauté du désir; lecture psychanalytique. Paris: Champ Vallon. ———. 2014. Nabokov’s Eros and the Poetics of Desire. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Foster, John Burt, Jr. 1989. Nabokov Before Proust: The Paradox of Anticipatory Memory. Slavic and East European Journal 33 (1): 78–94. ———. 1995. Nabokov and Proust. In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov, 472–481. New York and London: Garland. Green, Geoffrey. 1993. Visions of a ‘Perfect Past’: Nabokov, Autobiography, Biography, and Fiction. Cycnos 10 (1): 55–62. Johnson, Don Barton. 1974. Synesthesia, Polychromatism, and Nabokov. In A Book of Things About Nabokov, ed. Carl R. Proffer, 84–103. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Jutte, Robert. 2005. A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Koper-Vionnet, Isabelle. 2003. Le regard dans Autres Rivages de Vladimir Nabokov. In Le Regard dans les arts plastiques et la littérature (Angleterre, Etats-Unis), ed. Pierre Arnaud and Elizabeth Angel-Perez, 119–127. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1937. Despair. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. 1938. Laughter in the Dark. Reprint, New York: New Directions, 1991. ———. 1939. The Enchanter, trans. Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. 1951. Voluptates Tactionum. Reprint, Collected Poems. London: Penguin, 2012. 182. ———. 1955. The Annotated Lolita. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1995. ———. 1963. The Gift, trans. M. Scammell with the collaboration of the author. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. 1966. Speak, Memory. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1969. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. New York: McGraw-Hill. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw Hill.

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———. 1974. Look at the Harlequins! Reprint, Novels 1969–1974: Ada, Transparent Things, Look at the Harlequins!, ed. Brian Boyd. New York: Library of America, 1996. ———. 1980. Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace. ———. 1995. The Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 2002. Rivers, J.E. 1977. Proust, Nabokov and Ada. The French American Review 1: 173–197. Seidel, Michael. 1987. Stereoscope: Nabokov’s Ada and Pale Fire. In Vladimir Nabokov: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom, 235–257. New York: Chelsea House Publishers.

PART I

The Role of the Senses in Nabokov’s Aesthetics and Metaphysics

CHAPTER 2

Senses, Minds, Meanings, and Values in Nabokov: Do the Senses Make Sense? Brian Boyd

1 For humans our primary sense is vision. We are never more absorbed in looking at the world around us than when we ride in a train. We become a great moving eyeball feasting on the moving landscape. Here is Nabokov in his autobiography, evoking his eyes savoring his world in the trains of his childhood: The door of the compartment was open and I could see the corridor window, where the wires—six thin black wires—were doing their best to slant up, to ascend skywards, despite the lightning blows dealt them by one telegraph pole after another; but just as all six, in a triumphant swoop of pathetic elation, were about to reach the top of the window, a particularly vicious blow would bring them down, as low as they had ever been, and they would have to start all over again. When, on such journeys as these, the train changed its pace to a dignified amble and all but grazed housefronts and shop signs, as we passed through some big German town, I used to feel a twofold excitement, which terminal stations could not provide. I saw a city, with its toylike

B. Boyd (B) University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_2

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trams, linden trees and brick walls, enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors, and fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side. This informal contact between train and city was one part of the thrill. The other was putting myself in the place of some passer-by who, I imagined, was moved as I would be moved myself to see the long, romantic, auburn cars, with their intervestibular connecting curtains as black as bat wings and their metal lettering copper-bright in the low sun, unhurriedly negotiate an iron bridge across an everyday thoroughfare and then turn, with all windows suddenly ablaze, around a last block of houses. (Nabokov 1967, 43–44)

This is the Nabokov we think of when we think of Nabokov and the senses: the vividness of his evoking sensations we have also had in some form, and that we reanimate in our minds as we read. Now let me change tracks. Daniel Dor’s recent book The Instruction of Imagination stresses, as Nabokov does, that we all live in different experiential worlds: there is an experiential gap between each of us and anyone else, even between myself and my partner, say, even when we are standing side by side and looking at the same thing: we bring to the moment perhaps slightly different senses, certainly different sensitivities, different dispositions, habits, histories (Dor 2015). We are always richly embedded in experience, which is always endlessly detailed, specific, multisensory, and multileveled. But whereas experience is “analogue” and continuous, words are “digital” and “discrete”: compacted, flat, compressed into common terms easily exchanged. Language, Dor suggests, works by the speaker packing down the uniqueness and vividness of multidimensional experience into the flat, easily exchanged tokens of language, and listeners using the relevant elements of their own memories of multidimensional experience to expand the sense into a more or less adequate equivalent of what the speaker might have meant. Many people let their experience flatten into something close to language, if they accept the common terms of language as adequate filters of their experience. A writer as committed to the vividness of perception and imagination as Nabokov, on the other hand, wants to awaken readers to imagine in ways that approximate the multidimensionality of alert experience, and not just in ways limited to the easily traded common coinage of language. With Dor in mind, let’s come back from that siding to the track of Nabokov evoking the trains of his childhood.

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What strikes me as we follow this passage is how far beyond the senses it ranges in order to trigger our responses, our sensory imagination. Of course, the passage reflects memory, not immediate sensation, and it appeals to memories of sensations in us. For Nabokov, perception is inextricable from memory: Van Veen refers in Ada to “a complex system of those subtle bridges which the senses traverse […] between membrane and brain, and which always was and is a form of memory, even at the moment of its perception” (Nabokov 1969, 221). But the perceptions cannot be separated from imagination and emotion: the wires—six thin black wires—were doing their best [they have become animated, fitted with a human purpose—with the purpose attributed by the boy watching them through the window] to slant up, to ascend skywards, despite the lightning blows dealt them by one telegraph pole after another [a metaphor far beyond what the senses offer, but immediately eliciting our memories of the suddenness of the change of gradient in the line as each telegraph pole rushes past, the feeling of almost an assault on eye and ear and body as the pole blasts past ]; but just as all six, in a triumphant swoop of pathetic elation [Nabokov piles on the sense of animation, his young self’s urge, the natural human urge, to impose our desire to attain goals on the rhythm of ascent and re-descent ], were about to reach the top of the window, a particularly vicious blow would bring them down. (Nabokov 1969, 221)

With only sensory precision in the description, this passage would not trigger our imaginations, our inner senses, as it does now. The passage’s success depends on imagination and emotion becoming entangled with the senses, directing attention, making it matter for the child on the page and the wondering child in us. The next paragraph diverges in different ways from pure sensation. The first half depends on the boy’s understanding of the difference between countryside and town, on cognition rather than pure sensation, and on a feeling of imaginative distance, in “toylike trams, linden trees,” as well as on the awareness of sheer sensation and of space and movement, in the images filling the corridor window and entering the compartment by hobnobbing with the mirrors (in cognitive science, people now draw attention to the embodied mind, and the embedded mind: the mind not as static computer but embodied, in an active body, embedded in a changing environment). The sentence that fills the second half of the paragraph uses imagination—the boy imagining himself gliding past as seen from

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the point of view of a stationary townsman—to summon the senses, to “see the long, romantic, auburn cars, with their intervestibular connecting curtains as black as bat wings and their metal lettering copper-bright in the low sun,” but in a way that piles on imagination again (“as black as bat wings”—which of course when folded or unfolded are indeed quite remarkably like these accordion-like intercarriage curtains). Sensation is sharp but it intergrades with imagination, emotion, understanding, and memory.

2 Let us return to the question: Do the senses make sense? Apart from the pun on the senses of “sense,” Nabokov and John Ray, Jr. pointedly play on two senses, two meanings, that the sentence can have, but the answers to both senses of the sentence remain negative, I suspect. First, do the senses make sense? Does what we know come wholly through the sense impressions we have, and the associations we make between them, as empiricist philosophers from Locke to Hume and even Russell would have us believe? Or is there something innate in the mind that allows us to make sense of our worlds? Nabokov was not interested in adjudicating as a philosopher might between the arguments of British empiricism and those of Continental rationalism. He was both wary of the limitations of logical thought and fascinated by the power of thought: not for nothing are two of the heroes of his novels philosophers. But he also had doubts about categories and pigeonholes, including about the categories our minds make about our minds—sensation, emotion, cognition, imagination, memory—and he felt strongly that they “intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours” (Nabokov 1973, 309). He also felt that we would never understand “the nature of thought” (Nabokov 1973, 45), “the marvel of consciousness” (Nabokov 1976, 42), but at the same time he knew that to understand our world, or one of his fictional worlds, we need imagination to construct inferences far beyond the data the senses provide, however vivid the data may be. Second, do the senses make sense, are they veridical, do they give us true information, is it true information that they are important for? One way of answering that in Nabokov would be through looking at optical and other illusions and delusions, hallucinations, visions, and what John Ray, Jr. calls “certain morbid states and perversions,” (Nabokov

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1955, 3) in stories like “Terra Incognita” or Despair. But our ability to recognize characters’ mistakes as errors implies that there are standards of truth, and that these can be attained in part through using the senses non-erroneously, without distortion by other parts of the mind. From a standard human viewpoint, the senses are mostly sensible. Another way of answering the question would be in terms of Nabokov’s strong conviction that nature is deceptive, most strikingly in mimicry: “all nature is magic and deception” (Nabokov 1964, III, 498); “all art is 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” (Nabokov 1973, 11). A still more important answer to the question “Do the senses make sense?” would be that our senses are limited: they cannot make full sense of the world’s phenomena. We can understand mid-range things, but we cannot see or hear as far or as near as we would like. Van writes at one point of the need to place what we want to know “under the microscope of reality (which is the only reality)” (Nabokov 1969, 221): reality is vastly more detailed than our raw senses tell us. And our senses are not our only means of knowledge. Nabokov reveres vision, but in a review of a philosopher’s work he asks: “is visibility really as dominant as that in all imaginable knowledge of Nature? Though I personally would be satisfied to spend the whole of eternity gazing at a blue hill or a butterfly, I would feel the poorer if I accepted the idea of there not existing still more vivid means of knowing butterflies and hills” (Nabokov 1940). Although he happily used microscopes in his work as a lepidopterist, Nabokov knew that to understand the relationships of butterfly taxa he also had to depend on the knowledge science had built up, on systems of classification and analyses of relationships and functions that needed much more than what even augmented senses could directly provide, and on huge efforts of imaginative hypothesis construction. The most important answer of all for Nabokov, though, would I think be this. The senses for the most part do deliver reasonable images of the world, albeit limited to human capacities, yet there is always something irrational in the particular details of the world that the senses allow us to apprehend. Particular combinations of details in the world are unique, unrepeatable, and therefore vulnerable and precious. This is so central to Nabokov’s mode of thought, where it seems bound up with an almost mystical attitude, that I would like to quote a strikingly similar point made by a philosopher known for his rationalism, Karl Popper:

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it is the particular, the unique and concrete individual, which cannot be approached by rational methods, and not the abstract universal. Science can describe general types of landscape, for example, or of man, but it can never exhaust one single individual landscape, or one single individual man. The universal, the typical, is not only the domain of reason, but it is also largely the product of reason, in so far as it is the product of scientific abstraction. But the unique individual and his unique actions and experiences and relations to other individuals can never be fully rationalized. And it appears to be just this irrational realm of unique individuality which makes human relations important. Most people would feel, for example, that what makes their lives worth living would largely be destroyed if they themselves, and their lives, were in no sense unique but in all and every respect typical of a class of people, so that they repeated exactly all the actions and experiences of all other men who belong to this class. It is the uniqueness of our experiences which, in this sense, makes our lives worth living, the unique experience of a landscape, of a sunset, of the expression of a human face. (Popper 1945, II, 245)

We could almost say that especially for Nabokov the senses, when they offer up to us the mysterious particularity and individuality of the things of this world, do not “make sense,” cold rational sense. Rather, they make it possible for us to see the irrational value in the particular.

3 Nabokov is interested not so much in the two abstract philosophical questions that he punningly compacts into “Do the senses make sense?” as in what the particulars of the world offer to those who learn to appreciate them, and in what he can do to inspire readers to savor them to the maximum. Among the things that fascinate Nabokov about the senses is the tension between the commonality of our senses and the individuality of our perceptions: the gap between sensory information as more or less equally accessible to all who have been issued with the standard perceptual kit, on the one hand, and on the other the diversity of what happens to be perceived, noticed, digested, and absorbed by different individuals. Think of the analogy Nabokov makes in his Cornell lectures:

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Let us take three types of men walking though the same landscape. Number One is a city man on a well-deserved vacation. Number Two is a professional botanist. Number Three is a local farmer. Number One, the city man, is what is called a realistic, commonsensical, matter-of-fact type: he sees trees as trees and knows from his map that the road he is following is a nice new road leading to Newton, where there is a nice eating place recommended to him by a friend in his office. The botanist looks around and sees his environment in the very exact terms of plant life, precise biological and classified units such as specific trees and grasses, flowers and ferns, and for him this is reality; to him the world of the stolid tourist (who cannot distinguish an oak from an elm) seems a fantastic, vague, dreamy, nevernever world. Finally, the world of the local farmer differs from the two others in that his world is intensely emotional and personal since he has been born and bred there, and knows every trail and individual tree, and every shadow from every tree across every trail, all in warm connection with his everyday work, and his childhood, and a thousand small things and patterns which the other two—the humdrum tourist and the botanical taxonomist—simply cannot know in the given place at the given time. Our farmer will not know the relation of the surrounding vegetation to a botanical conception of the world, and the botanist will know nothing of any importance to him about that barn or that old field or that old house under its cottonwoods, which are afloat, as it were, in a medium of personal memories for one who was born there. So here we have three different worlds—three men, ordinary men who have different realities —and, of course, we could bring in a number of other beings: a blind man with a dog, a hunter with a dog, a dog with his man, a painter cruising in quest of a sunset, a girl out of gas—In every case it would be a world completely different from the rest since the most objective words tree, road, flower, sky, barn, thumb, rain have, in each, totally different subjective connotations. (Nabokov 1980, 252–253)

Another irony of the senses is that they depend on replicability, repeatability: a certain combination of wavelengths, for instance, always seems a certain color within a certain range of illumination to a certain species. And if you think in evolutionary terms, it is only the repeatability of these phenomena—the underlying regularity of the world—and the repeatability of what it offers for a particular species, that allows senses and their discriminations to evolve in the way they do. But these senses dependent on repeatability allow us to see individual, unrepeatable combinations of particulars.

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In this, to Nabokov the most exciting, the most heart-stopping aspect of the things of this world, the senses play a key part, but not the only part. Curiosity, attention, imagination, memory, emotion, and knowledge also play their parts, as does the example of others in looking at, understanding, and prizing the world. What is primary here is not our senses but our sensemaking, which determines how we use our senses. We cannot sharpen our senses themselves without technology: without spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, endoscopes, X-rays, ultrasound, infrared, CAT scans, PET scans, and the like. But even without technology we can sharpen the impression and impact of what we perceive. Nabokov wants to make a difference right here: to uproot us from taking for granted the senses and the things they allow us to focus on. He stresses not the replicability of things—their being more or less the same from moment to moment or instance to instance—but their uniqueness in particular combinations. Indeed, in his early adult work, from about 1919 to 1925, this sense of the pricelessness, the transcendental value of particulars and details, is almost programmatic, in work after work. There are three linked ideas in these early examples I would quote if there were space: the details of the world, if properly understood, are pricelessly unique and preciously frail; in that uniqueness they seem a gift of some divine generosity; and they have an immortality, in their vividness, stored up in some realm beyond receding time. As Nabokov writes in a poem of 1925, “all that is irrevocable is immortal” (Nabokov 1979, 164)1 or in a story of 1924, “Beneficence”: Here I became aware of the world’s tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I had sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated. (Nabokov 1995, 77)

Speaking of gifts, perhaps the most successful image of this kind is in Nabokov’s “favorite Russian poem” (Nabokov 1973, 14) in The Gift: One night between sunset and river On the old bridge we stood, you and I,

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Will you ever forget it, I queried, —That particular swift that went by? And you answered, so earnestly: Never! And what sobs made us suddenly shiver, What a cry life emitted in flight! Till we die, till tomorrow, for ever, You and I on the old bridge one night. (Nabokov 1963, 94)

By the time he wrote this Nabokov had sharpened the sense of the particular—the particular swift, here, that transcends its evanescence, by being assured, even at the very moment of its flying by, of a future recollection, and not just by one person but by two, to give it a doubly countersigned “forever.” Here in The Gift and in Nabokov’s other mature work the programmatic—the explicit and explicitly metaphysical—becomes only implicit, yet it still carries the same charge of the wonder of the particular. Nabokov later makes that charge explicit again in his lectures: “Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual” (Nabokov 1980, 251). He feels as if the charged particularity of a perception allows the thing perceived a kind of immortality in the purity of its apprehension and the prospect of its retention.

4 Nabokov stresses details and unique combinations as perceived by individuals. In Pnin, he writes: Genius is non-conformity […] at six, Victor already distinguished what so many adults never learn to see—the colors of shadows, the difference in tint between the shadow of an orange and that of a plum or of an avocado pear. (Nabokov 1957, 89–90)

But it is interesting that despite his stress on individual perception (and individual imagination and memory) and on the individuality in things perceived, Nabokov also acknowledges, even if he does not foreground it, a social element in perception. He recognizes an accumulating tradition of sharper, subtler perception, aided by art, and an accumulating tradition of scientific knowledge, that allows for an understanding deeper than the senses.

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Take the scientific, first. We have already seen his example of the three travelers in the landscape, including the botanist who “sees his environment in the very exact terms of plant life, precise biological and classified units such as specific trees and grasses, flowers and ferns” (Nabokov 1980, 252). Or think of the famous interview answer: “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 that it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another 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 steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable” (Nabokov 1973, 10– 11). Think also of his philosophy review: “I would feel the poorer if I accepted the idea of there not existing still more vivid means of knowing butterflies and hills” (Nabokov 1940)—still more vivid, that is, than vision allows. The knowledge that the naturalist acquires of the natural world requires individual effort, but individual effort at mastering for oneself what has been acquired socially, by other individuals working within scientific traditions of observing, collecting, classifying, communicating, and criticizing. Nabokov himself had guidebooks with him at home or when he traveled: he knew he had to depend on what others had found out about the plants, birds, and insects he wished to identify. And even that curiosity itself arises in part from a tradition of curiosity about natural history that developed strongly in the West for the first time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that was passed on to him immediately through family traditions and more remotely through the German tutors who first brought them into his family. In the same way, Nabokov stresses both individual breakthroughs in literary description, and accumulating traditions of perceptual refinement: Before [Gogol’s] and Pushkin’s advent Russian literature was purblind. What form it perceived was an outline directed by reason: it did not see color for itself but merely used the hackneyed combination of blind noun and dog-like adjective that Europe inherited from the ancients. The sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green, the eyes of beauty black, the clouds grey, and so on. It was Gogol (and after him Lermontov and Tolstoy) who first saw yellow and violet at all. That the sky could be pale

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green at sunrise, or the snow a rich blue on a cloudless day, would have sounded like heretical nonsense to your so-called “classical” writer, accustomed as he was to the rigid conventional color-schemes of the Eighteenth Century French school of literature. Thus the development of the art of description throughout the centuries may be profitably treated in terms of vision, the faceted eye becoming a unified and prodigiously complex organ and the dead dim “accepted colors” (in the sense of “idées reçues ”) yielding gradually their subtle shades and allowing new wonders of application. (Nabokov 1981, 24–25)

What Nabokov underplays here is that although individual writers may take the process of rendering sensory detail further, they do so, as he does, socially, in competition with their predecessors, in their desire to take observation and description further than writers before them. Notice how he explicitly links art and science in probing life more deeply, and how he thinks in terms of the individual artist and scientist, rather than in terms of participants in a process that would not continue to develop were it not social: Mark incidentally that the whole history of literary fiction as an evolutionary process may be said to be a gradual probing of deeper and deeper layers of life […] The point I want to make is that the artist, like the scientist, in the process of evolution of art and science, is always casting around, understanding a little more than his predecessor, penetrating further with a keener and more brilliant eye. (Nabokov 1981, 164–165)

It is telling here that Nabokov writes “his predecessor” in the singular, as if there is only one predecessor for a particular artist or scientist to outdo, rather than a whole tradition of increasing perceptual or taxonomic refinement. Nabokov emphasizes not only the subtler colors and light-and-shade effects of later writers, but also the way verbal description passes beyond an expository visual information dump, a lump sum slapped down in full the moment a person or a place comes into view. Instead, description becomes integrated into the actions and perceptions of the characters: the verbal rendering of landscapes will have to wait until, roughly speaking, the beginning of the nineteenth century to reach the same level as the dialogue had reached 200 years before; and it is only in the second part of the nineteenth century that descriptive passages referring to outside nature

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were integrated, were merged with the story, ceased to stick out in separate paragraphs, and became organic parts of the whole composition. (Nabokov 1983, 32)

Nabokov explains other limitations of the older mode when he discusses Dostoevski: “After describing the looks of a character, he uses the oldfashioned device of not referring to his specific physical appearance any more in the scenes with him. This is not the way of an artist, say Tolstoy, who sees his character in his mind all the time and knows exactly the specific gesture he will employ at this or that moment” (Nabokov 1981, 104). The senses are not switched on to orient us and switched off as soon as we have our bearings, but they remain with us as we read and with the characters as they act and move about in their world. We saw Nabokov remembering his view from a train compartment crossing Germany as a child. Let us look at another series of views from a moving vehicle, a car this time, driven of course by Humbert Humbert. Recall the question “Do the senses make sense?” and my answer that for Nabokov they do so as only one of many aspects of the mind’s sensemaking. Notice here too how the visual sense, in its attempt to fix particular impressions, mixes with memory, and imagination, and emotion, and reflection: Humbert’s individual experience as a European having to adjust his expectations in the light of European memories of American art designed for a European taste; Humbert’s increasing discrimination the more he is exposed to regional variations in America; the contrast between Lolita’s indifference to the landscape and Humbert’s increasing responsiveness; the causes of Humbert’s responsiveness, in his exposure to the best in Western visual art and to the literary precursors whom he—like Nabokov behind him—tries to outdo: Not only had Lo no eye for scenery but she furiously resented my calling her attention to this or that enchanting detail of landscape; which I myself learned to discern only after being exposed for quite a time to the delicate beauty ever present in the margin of our undeserving journey. By a paradox of pictorial thought, the average lowland North-American countryside had at first seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of amused recognition because of those painted oilcloths which were imported from America in the old days to be hung above washstands in Central-European nurseries, and which fascinated a drowsy child at bed time with the rustic green views they depicted—opaque curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook, the dull white of vague orchards in bloom, and perhaps a stone fence or hills

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of greenish gouache. But gradually the models of those elementary rusticities became stranger and stranger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them. Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dovegray cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummynecked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas. (Nabokov 1955, 152–153)

Notice the purely visual, the refined colors, “a platinum haze,” “dove-gray cloud,” “quick-silverish water and harsh green corn”; the visual combined with space and movement: “a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud,” “the whole arrangement opening like a fan”; the visual combining synesthetically with other senses: “a warm, peeled-peach tinge,” “hot still noons above a wilderness of clover”; or the emotional and imaginative additions: “a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness”; “fusing with the distant amorous mist”; “against the neutral swoon of the background”; the metacognitive reflections, “By a paradox of pictorial thought”; or the explicit comparisons with landscapes by Lorrain and El Greco. Here again, Nabokov extols the senses, and the particularity of the world Humbert traverses, but he intermingles what the senses perceive with the role of attention, curiosity, imagination, emotion, and Humbert’s prior experience of life and of visual and verbal art. The senses help make sense, but only along with many other aspects of the mind and of individual experience and even of the social tradition that inspires us to see, if we can, more sharply or subtly or synesthetically or interfusedly or freely or originally than others before us have done.

5 Nabokov celebrates the senses, and the details of the world they bring to light, but he also recognizes and tests for the negatives that are necessary corollaries of the senses’ positives. Here he asks, if you like, not, “Do the senses make sense?” but “Do the senses make value?”

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He rejects conventional limitations to what the senses should perceive or describe or admire. I have already quoted his hostility to what he sees as “the rigid conventional color-schemes of the Eighteenth Century French school of literature” (Nabokov 1981, 24). In the early story “Gods,” his narrator writes: “Today I understood the beauty of intersecting wires in the sky, and the hazy mosaic of factory chimneys, and this rusty tin with its inside-out, semidetached, serrated lid” (Nabokov 1995, 50). In his own voice Nabokov criticized the poetry of his brother Kirill: “why this naïve antithesis—there a star, here a factory, roses there, electricity here—how are factories worse than roses, might I ask?” (Boyd 1990, 362) Nabokov also acknowledges that pain, discomfort, and disgust are inextricable from our capacity to earn pleasure from the senses. The passage where he recalls the visual feast of his childhood train journeys continues: There were drawbacks to those optical amalgamations. The widewindowed dining car, a vista of chaste bottles of mineral water, miterfolded napkins, and dummy chocolate bars […] would be perceived at first as a cool haven beyond a consecution of reeling blue corridors; but as the meal progressed toward its fatal last course, and more and more dreadfully one equilibrist with a full tray would back against our table to let another equilibrist pass with another full tray, I would keep catching the car in the act of being recklessly sheathed, lurching waiters and all, in the landscape, while the landscape itself went through a complex system of motion, the daytime moon stubbornly keeping abreast of one’s plate, the distant meadows opening fanwise, the near trees sweeping up on invisible swings toward the track, a parallel rail line all at once committing suicide by anastomosis, a bank of nictitating grass rising, rising, rising, until the little witness of mixed velocities was made to disgorge his portion of omelette aux confitures de fraises. (Nabokov 1967, 144)

The feast of vision and the thrill of motion rise, as it were inexorably, like this heaving sentence, to the point of travel sickness, to a sudden surge of vomit. The charge of the senses can become overcharge. The capacity of the senses to register things exactly includes, inevitably, the capacity to register what we recoil from, like, in “Signs and Symbols,” the father taking out his dentures trailing “long tusks of saliva” (Nabokov 1995, 596) or, in Pnin, “the bright pat of dog dirt somebody had already slipped upon” (Nabokov 1957, 63) (which I think engages not only sight but touch and smell, our memories of slipping on that soft

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squelchy stinky texture). The novelist David Lipsky calls Nabokov “the best writer on the physical—on the temporary pleasures of our habitation in a body—that we have” and he adds that: “Martin Amis compared this strain of Nabokov to ‘a recreational drug more powerful than any yet discovered or devised’” (Lipsky 2016). I have mostly commented on vision, our dominant sense, but Nabokov’s hearing was also over-acute, and his ability to use sound, smell, touch, taste, kinesis, and proprioception add to his gift for rendering the body: captivatingly, in the kinds of scenes Lipsky and Amis have in mind—or even in Pnin’s tongue on a tour of inspection around his mouth before and after he has his teeth out—but also repellently. For example, from a novel saturated with sensory beauty, if not usually with sensuality, Kinbote hideously compares Gradus’s dim anticipated pleasure in killing the king to squeezing out a blackhead: There might be (I am allowing a lot) a slight, very slight, sensual satisfaction, not more I would say than what a petty hedonist enjoys at the moment when, retaining his breath, before a magnifying mirror, his thumbnails pressing with deadly accuracy on both sides of a full stop, he expulses totally the eely, semitransparent plug of a comedo—and exhales an Ah of relief. (Nabokov 1962, 278–279)

In Dreaming by the Book the Harvard critic Elaine Scarry discusses the devices by which writers evoke the immediacy of the senses in literature (Scarry 1999a). She has also written On Beauty and Being Just (Scarry 1999b), and she is famous for The Body in Pain (Scarry 1985), which Amnesty International regards as containing the best guide to the experience of torture ever written. A sensitivity to sensory pleasure and beauty can indeed be closely linked to a concern for physical pain. Like Scarry, Nabokov celebrates the senses, and beauty, and he also recognizes that with sensitivity inevitably comes the capacity for experiencing pain. He can evoke pain vividly even in a comic context, as when Kinbote explains preferring to issue dinner invitations to young folk rather than to elderly guests, who would be “surreptitiously trying, behind noncommittal smiles, to dislodge the red-hot torture point of a raspberry seed from between false gum and dead gum” (Nabokov 1962, 230). But the torture in Nabokov can be not metaphorical and hyperbolic but exactly of the kind Scarry writes about in The Body in Pain: the torture of David in Bend Sinister, or the harrowing evocation of Mira Belochkin and her fellow inmates in Pnin, or Pnin’s later outburst: “when we speak of injustice,

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we forget Armenian massacres, tortures which Tibet invented, colonists in Africa […]. The history of man is the history of pain!” (Nabokov 1957, 168) Art at its best, for Nabokov, is beauty plus pity, but he knows that the capacity for appreciating beauty can coexist with the capacity for inflicting pain, as Axel Rex and Humbert Humbert so memorably show. Recall, too, Nabokov’s denunciations of Cervantes for trying to elicit mirth from the humiliations and tortures of Don Quixote (Nabokov 1983). Nabokov has suggested from his earliest works the value of sensory alertness and tender responsiveness to the overlooked or disregarded details of the world. But at the same time, in some of his most memorable characters he exposes in them their false pride in a connoisseurship of the senses, a refinement they prize as sensitivity and even tenderness but actually perfectly compatible with insensitivity and even outright cruelty. The most exquisitely visual character in Nabokov, which is saying something, maybe the narrator of “The Vane Sisters,” with his fascination for the shadows of dripping icicle-drops or the neon tinge to parking-meter shadows. His refinement of the senses, along with his intelligence and education, might make him seem initially a stand-in for Nabokov, but his creator described him as “a rather callous observer of the superficial planes of life” (Nabokov 1989, 116) and with that cue we can see exactly how heartless, how untender he is in relation to Sybil and especially to Cynthia Vane. Humbert too prides himself in his visual sensitivity, especially in his adoration of Lolita’s features, but also in that American landscape montage we lingered over. There, Humbert characteristically complains: “Not only had Lo no eye for scenery but she furiously resented my calling her attention to this or that enchanting detail of landscape” (Nabokov 1955, 152). He is oblivious to the fact that her obliviousness to the landscape is yet another pointed reminder that she is still a child, and he is also oblivious to the fact that she has a tenderness for little creatures they come upon in their travels that evoke nothing in him. His refined sensitivity of vision, and his pride in his refinement and “sensitivity,” has nothing in common with the genuine sensitivity that would not allow him to cheat Charlotte or to cheat and torture Lolita herself. Van and Ada Veen too celebrate their prodigious individual awareness […], which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the

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continuum of life […]. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye […] the detail is all: the song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress; a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope; the dancing flitter of a Holly Blue or an Echo Azure— combined with other birds, flowers and butterflies: that has to be heard, smelled and seen through the transparency of death and ardent beauty. And the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then. (Nabokov 1969, 70–71)

It is in the midst of this paragraph trumpeting their sensory sensitivity that Ada refers to herself and Van as “a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperatorskaya cheta” (Nabokov 1969, 71). Nabokov might seem to endorse Ada’s extolling “prodigious individual awareness” and her prizing the “unprecedented and unrepeatable” and the “details that shine through or shade through.” But he does not endorse either her or Van or their haughty sense of superiority. Attention to particulars should invite us not to see ourselves as above everything else but to see how much value and frailty there can be in any particular. Instead of Ada’s “superimperiousness,” Nabokov proposes that A great writer’s world is […] a magic democracy where even some very minor character, even the most incidental character like the person [an incidental character in Bleak House] who tosses the twopence, has the right to live and breed. (Nabokov 1980, 124)

Ada and Van may extol their own sensitivity and their hypersensuality, but they demonstrate utter insensitivity to the vulnerabilities of the Lucette they drive to her suicide. Proud John Ray, Jr. has asked in the title of one of his “modest” books, Do the Senses Make Sense? Do they make sense? I think Nabokov answers, No: curiosity, attention, effort, imagination, emotion, thought, memory, and all we learn from others, including how to refine our perceptions and reflections, shape the senses as much as the senses shape them. Do the senses make sense? Not necessarily: there is, for instance, something senseless in the hypersensuality of Van and Ada and others of Nabokov’s obsessed lovers. And while the senses are valuable, even invaluable, they by themselves do not make value, as Van and Ada in their self-approving “sensitivity” and hypersensuality and actual insensitivity to others—even, often, to each

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other—so perfectly demonstrate. The sensory alertness that can record the uniqueness of things and moments allows us to glimpse their vulnerability, their evanescence, their impermanence. But it is up to us to choose whether to treasure or waste what life offers, to torture or show tenderness toward the frail inhabitants of our sensible world. Does that make sense?

Note 1. “Bessmertno vsyo, chto nevozvratno.” The English translation is mine.

Bibliography Boyd, Brian. 1990. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dor, Daniel. 2015. The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lipsky, David. 2016. Family Business: Mr. and Mrs. Nabokov’s HalfCentury. Harper’s Magazine, 28 January. http://harpers.org/archive/2016/ 02/family-business/. Accessed 1 March 2016. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1940. Professor Woodbridge in an Essay on Nature Postulates the Reality of the World. New York Sun, 10 December, p. 15. ———. 1955. Lolita. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1957. Pnin. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1962. Pale Fire. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1963. The Gift, trans. M. Scammell with Vladimir Nabokov. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. 1964. Eugene Onegin, rev. ed. Reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. ———. 1967. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1969. Ada or Ardor. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1990. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1990. ———. 1976. Interview with George Feifer. Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 14 November, pp. 40–46. ———. 1979. Stikhi. Ann Arbor: Ardis. ———. 1980. Lectures on Literature, ed. F. Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / Bruccoli Clark. ———. 1981. Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. F. Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / Bruccoli Clark.

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———. 1983. Lectures on Don Quixote, ed. F. Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / Bruccoli Clark. ———. 1989. Selected Letters 1940–1977, ed. D. Nabokov and M. J. Bruccoli. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / Bruccoli Clark Layman. ———. 1995. Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, ed. D. Nabokov, rev. ed. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 2008. Popper, Karl R. 1945. The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols., 5th ed. Reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999a. Dreaming by the Book. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. ———. 1999b. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 3

‘To Breathe the Dust of This Painted Life’: Modes of Engaging the Senses in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading Lilla Farmasi

Reading Vladimir Nabokov’s works is an experience for all the bodily senses. For instance, the quote from Invitation to a Beheading (Nabokov 1959, 68) that was imported into the title of this chapter engages vision and smell, as well as the sense of the movements of breathing, not to mention physical pain. Nabokov was an exceptional reader as well: he was a well-known synesthete, which means he experienced, for instance, a plethora of colors and textures when he read a text. But what does a Nabokov story feel like for other readers? One has the impression that Nabokov’s texts are always colorful, dense, alive, and moving. I plan to explore the modes in Invitation to a Beheading (first publication, in Russian: 1935–1936) that engage sense perceptions and therefore create the peculiar nature of this text. This novel can be read as social criticism (although Nabokov repeatedly claimed he never had the intention to tackle any problems on a social level), as a representation of a surreal world, but several of its scenes can also be interpreted as representations of experiences of a heavily corporeal nature, such as fear and

L. Farmasi (B) University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_3

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anxiety. Besides the author’s astonishing techniques of depicting ordinary and synesthetic sense perceptions and his extraordinary vocabulary, the patterns of dynamic structures and mechanisms of human perception sometimes seem to structure and motivate the whole of his texts as well as the plots of his novels. My aim is to examine where sense perceptions are traceable in Nabokov’s prose and what can their function be in a narrative when it comes to the formulation of storyworlds and the production of meaning. I aim at further developing the dialog of cognitive science and literary theory to better understand the complex relationship between the human consciousness, the body, and literary narratives. One of my claims is that besides the author’s techniques of representation of sense perceptions, and the vocabulary of his works, the patterns of dynamic structures and mechanisms of perception may occasionally structure and motivate his stories even on the level of the plot, thereby contributing to the overall meaning-making a reader carries out when reading his stories. I will also investigate the role of sense perceptions in the formulation of the characterization and the diegetic world of the novel. To search in, and also beyond vocabulary and figurative language, I plan to approach the novel with the theories of postclassical narratology, embodied cognitive theories, and contemporary phenomenology. After briefly outlining these fields of study, I will narrow my focus to the representations, and the different potential roles of sense perceptions in the process of reading a Nabokov story. In the second half of this chapter, since Nabokov knew Edgar Allan Poe’s works very well and was probably acquainted with Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” I will attempt a comparative analysis with Poe’s story and will examine how the representations of Cincinnatus’s sense perceptions and consciousness influence the way we make sense of the story, with special regard to its genre.

Embodiment, Cognition, and Literature To understand how the senses make sense when it comes to experience in general, one has to turn to the study of consciousness, and the most popular approach to it today is cognitive science. Recent theories of cognition focus on human embodied experience, for instance the processes of perception. My work is strongly based on these, so-called second-generation cognitive theories, understood as the post-Cartesian approaches to human cognition and often referred to as “4E cognition.”

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These are the “embodied,” “enactive,” “embedded,” or “extended,” cognition, which all more or less agree regarding the workings of cognition, but all put the emphasis elsewhere in its system.1 In contrast to standard cognitive science that conceptualized human cognition with the help of the metaphor of computation,2 they all picture the mind as sensitive to its environment, by which they mean the workings of the brain, the body, and even in a broader sense, the (physical) environment of the individual. These approaches imagine a mind-body-environment system in which the three components are in dynamic interaction with each other, therefore “lower” forms and functions of human cognition, such as sense perceptions, or the motor system, might have a significant role in the workings of more abstract processes in human consciousness, such as the process of meaning-making during language comprehension and production, or the reading process. Therefore, in the light of these theories, sense perceptions are conceived as parts of the human consciousness. In the past few decades, cognitive theories appeared across various disciplines due to an immensely influential “cognitive revolution.” As a part of this greater cognitive turn, literary theory has incorporated cognitive theories, too, and, as a result, has grown a branch named cognitive poetics. In literary theory the terms “cognitive literary theory”; “cognitive poetics”; “cognitive stylistics”; and “cognitive rhetorics” are all in use (Hamilton and Schneider 2002, 640). Cognitive narratology has become one of the most successful branches both within cognitive poetics and among today’s narratological endeavors, moreover, it has arguably been overtheorized (Nünning 2003, 256). Narrative theories, “cross-fertilized” (Herman 2013, xi) with the study of human cognition, usually understand narratives as tools or a strategy of mental processes and meaning-making, or as a structure that is partly responsible for organizing human consciousness, as it is conceptualized as a “basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change” (Herman 2007, 3). Second-generation cognitive narratology, as its name suggests, applies second-generation cognitive theories. According to it, storytelling and the interpretation of stories can both be viewed as processes of embodied cognition, if we accept the notion that these forms of cognition can be shaped by certain aspects of the human body (Horváth 2011, 465). The focus of cognitive narratology is on the processes of narrative understanding, the comprehension of narratives in other words, and the objects of its study are the narrative structures, components, or storytelling strategies that influence narrative understanding. This approach should be viewed as

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“the investigation of mental processes and representations corresponding to the textual features and structures of narrative” (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003, 24) or the study of “the way specific discourse patterns trigger narrative experiences” (Herman 2013, 105). Cognitive narratology is not concerned with unique readerly experiences, but with potentially universal structures in the interaction between an individual and a story. Due to this view, cognitive narratology is often conceptualized as the descendant of reader-response criticism. One of the basic principles of cognitive poetics is that literary texts are fundamentally influenced by the architecture of the human mind and the ways in which it processes information (Szabó 2012, 9). I do not believe that all literary texts lend themselves equally to an analysis with this approach. On the other hand, some Nabokov stories, despite the fact that they are obviously the result of very conscious writerly organization, planning, and styling, due to their topic, such as the problems of memory, fear and anxiety, and their strong focus on the consciousness of their protagonists reflect or represent universal characteristics of these states of mind, such as their temporal or spatial structure, or their embodied experiences of the represented events of the storyworld. As I will attempt to show, the representations of sense perceptions of the focalizing characters of these stories are sources for examining these narratological problems. As for the reading process, during the interpretation of literary works the reader constructs a series of simulations. Even if due to their mediated nature we do not directly experience things when we hear, or see, or read about them, according to empirical evidence, we embody them through the simulation process (Barlassina and Gordon 2017). Cognition, and therefore language and narratives, are deeply and meaningfully tied to sensory and motoric bodily processes and to the environment. According to the theories of embodied simulation and readerly experience, several aspects of embodiment can motivate the construction of narratives and their interpretations. When it comes to sense perceptions, Marco Caracciolo’s theory of understanding the “dynamics that [supposedly] tie together readers’ familiarity with perception and their imaginative responses to stories” (Caracciolo 2014, 93) explains that “people’s imaginings can take on a sensory aspect, resulting in what is commonly known as mental imagery and sensory imagination” (Caracciolo 2014, 93). Performing a mental simulation therefore involves quite simply “imagining undergoing an experience” (Caracciolo 2014, 94). As for the process of this phenomenon, as empirical evidence shows, the structure of

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sensorimotor patterns is the same in perceptual and simulated experience (Caracciolo 2014, 95). At the beginning of Speak, Memory, as he tries to recall his earliest experiences, Nabokov explains that memory, which, in his view works the same way as imagination, is often guided by perception: “In probing my childhood (which is the next best to probing one’s eternity) I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaces flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold” (Nabokov 1966, 10). It shows that such supposedly abstract and disembodied cognitive processes as imagination, memory, or even the interpretation of a text and sense perception, a typically low-level cognitive process can be strongly intertwined. In fact, as has been mentioned, according to cognitive theories, the narrative itself is an organizational principle for human experience. This is one of the occasions where embodiment and cognition visibly cooperate. After a brief discussion of the role(s) of embodiment and sense perceptions in Nabokov’s prose, I will examine Invitation to a Beheading to see which parts of a story are capable of triggering a similar reaction in the reader and therefore contribute to meaning-making possibly on a presymbolic level.

Embodiment and Sense Perceptions in Nabokov’s Works In Nabokov’s works embodiment is an immensely important element in many respects. Themes related to sexuality, or the problematization of identity through characters’ bodies, among many others, are recurring in the oeuvre. Representations of sense perceptions, especially vision, are important and characteristic of his stories. Different images of reflections in water, in puddles, or patches of light that break through the foliage of a tree leave strong impressions in the readers and have an influence on the whole process of a reader’s meaning-making. In this section I will consider examples from his work where embodied experiences play important roles. In the posthumously published protonovel, The Original of Laura (2009), text, narrative, (mental) image, and corporeality are strongly intertwined, and the work revolves around questions of materiality, intermediality, and human embodiment. Nabokov is always interested in the individual, in the representation of the consciousness of a character. He strongly rejected social or political

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connotations, as he claims in Strong Opinions ‚ “I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions” (Nabokov 1973, 14). Brian Boyd also notes that each of Nabokov’s novels is driven by a character (Boyd 2011, 161) as the writer “constructs his stories to reflect the unique, unpredictable rhythm of an individual character’s mind” (Boyd 2011, 174). Thus, Nabokov tends to build stories around the dramatic experiences that go on in a person’s consciousness, through very conscious narrative composition, but embodiment has a crucial role in unconsciously shaping the mind. In my analysis I will treat sense perceptions as parts of the human (or, in this case, the characters’3 ) consciousness.4 When describing Nabokov, the storyteller, and the Nabokovian narrative, Brian Boyd observes that a Nabokov novel always intimates that the narrative is also something else, a strategy as much as a story: an image or a metaphor, a joke, a problem, a design, a playful puzzle, or a series of interlocking puzzles prepared by the author for us somehow to solve. The riddling strategy nevertheless arises out of the particular circumstances of the story, out of some special constraint or situation in the story, rather than being imposed on it arbitrarily, and is therefore different from work to work. (Boyd 2011, 161)

Focusing on the reader with the evolutionary cognitive poetics’ approach he also claims that we have an “avidity for pattern,” stating that in general the human mind delights in finding patterns (Boyd 2011, 324); moreover, the very act of getting engaged in reading (for example finding patterns) matters before creating the meaning of a particular piece of fiction (Boyd 2011, 325). But the discovery of a pattern can also be understood as a contribution to the making of symbolic meaning. The patterns of consciousness are easily observable in The Defense: as Caracciolo explains, this novel gets readers to “engage with [Luzhin’s] consciousness,” as opposed to simply understanding or categorizing it, as he submerges himself in the “chess world,” a virtual reality that restructures his consciousness as he internalizes it. It is only possible through the representations of Luzhin’s experiences, among which his perceptions, e.g., what he sees and how he interprets it play an important part. Luzhin’s story can be read as “an allegory of the relationship between narrative patterns and experience.” I am currently attempting to identify the possible roles of such patterns in a Nabokov story. Through the sense

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perceptions, one can have access to the consciousness of the protagonist, which, in my analysis, may organize the whole narrative world for the reader to engage with. It is important to keep in mind that there are always more than one sense engaged at a time, and that there are more than five senses (such as the sense of balance or pain). In the following section I will examine how senses and perceptions contribute to building narrative meaning in Invitation to a Beheading .

Invitation to a Beheading: Liquidity, Current, and “the Idea of Revolution” In order to show how sense perceptions can become significant in a story I will examine examples from the vocabulary, characterization, the construction of its storyworld, as well as the narrative dynamics of Nabokov’s novel. I also aim at tracing the potential experience these phenomena elicit from the reader. I am developing an idea of a dynamic, changeable plot structure, which in fact, fits the way Nabokov saw reality: as an elusive and unattainable thing.5 In Invitation to a Beheading , through twenty chapters and twenty days we follow the experiences of the protagonist, Cincinnatus, who is sentenced to death. We witness his last days, or, I should rather say, the last days he spends in the (seemingly) absurd, theater-like, nightmarish world where he does not belong. In my analysis I will attempt to examine what different representations of sense perceptions allow the reader to learn about the consciousness of the focalizercharacter and how they contribute to the overall readerly experience of the narrative. Through a comparative analysis of the protagonists’ sense perceptions and other embodied experiences in Invitation to a Beheading and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” I will claim that the scenes of the novel, which are traditionally interpreted as absurd, can be understood as defamiliarized representations of quite ordinary embodied experiences. The importance of sense perceptions in the story is obvious if one observes the passage where Cincinnatus is led to a terrace on the top of the tower to look around. As they march up, the narrative space around the characters is entirely built by the descriptions of the light or the lack of it: Here and there is was necessary to turn on a light; a dusty bulb, up above or at the side, would burst into bitter yellow light. Sometimes, also, […]

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they would shuffle on through dense darkness. At one spot, […] an unexpected and inexplicable sunbeam fell from above […]. (Nabokov 1959, 26)

The sight (or the lack) of rays of sunlight, the light of sunset and the moon repeatedly appear and take part in forming the atmosphere, the mood, and the overall meaning and experience of the story. The novel also repeatedly drives our attention to the perceptions of different kinds of the sight and feel of water and other liquids. Besides water, vaporized and melted liquid “qualities” are extremely important on different levels of the story. For instance, when the Tamara Gardens and the sight beyond them are first described as Cincinnatus is taken for a walk to a terrace, the reader is mainly given descriptions of lights and water in the scenery: […] an amethystine shimmer at the end, where the famous fountain played; and still farther, towards the hazy folds of the hills that formed the horizon, there was the dark stipple of oak groves, with, here and there, a pond gleaming like a hand-mirror, while other bright ovals of water gathered, glowing through the tender mist, over there to the west, where the serpentine Strop had its source. (Nabokov 1959, 27, my emphasis)

As for its vocabulary, as most Nabokov texts, it engages the reader by incorporating into the text various, often unusual, somatic cross-modal, or synesthetic experiences. A good example is the quote in the title of this chapter. Cincinnatus imagines his execution in terms of an intriguingly vivid, painful, and tense bodily experience, yet not as an actual beheading, but the removal of an aching tooth: “the wrenching, yanking, and crunch of a monstrous tooth, his whole body being the inflamed gum with his head that tooth” (Nabokov 1959, 52). The horrific scene is a fantasy of his future execution, while the “inflammation” metaphors and the pain attempt to render his present experience. At the beginning of the third chapter, Cincinnatus hears voices from the corridor: various depths, voices “whizzed,” “surged up,” there was a “hubbub,” “bass,” “bustle,” “whining,” “muttering,” as well as “cracking,” “booming,” “huffing,” and “clattering” sounds all of these expressions are crowded on about half a page, which makes this part dense with voices and noises (Nabokov 1959, 20), and potentially triggers an intense series of simulations in the reader. The text therefore repeatedly takes up a strongly corporeal quality, which invites the reader to embody sense experiences in the form of mental simulations.

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The protagonist spends his free time writing to himself about himself, and the process is crucial partly because it is also an important source of anxiety as he does not know whether he will have time to put everything he wants to into words. In chapter eight, Cincinnatus deeply suffers from the difficulties of expressing himself and explains that “brought up in the air, the word bursts, as burst those spherical fishes that breathe and blaze only in the compressed musk of the depths […]” (Nabokov 1959, 70). This image, which contains experiences of vision, seeing light, movement, as well as a sense of pressure, the feeling of water, and the anguished struggle of a fish that has been yanked out of its natural environment, besides the illustration of the writing process, can be interpreted as the representation of the state of mind of someone who suffers from severe anxiety. When it comes to characterization, the sight and feeling of evaporated and liquid qualities are, again, foregrounded. Already at the beginning, when the judge announces the sentence to Cincinnatus, his movements resemble the image of a sticky, dense liquid: “he was moving as though ungluing himself” (Nabokov 1959, 1) from Cincinnatus. As for evaporation, characters sometimes simply disappear, vanish, for instance the director when he is introduced “in spite of his majestic solidity, he calmly vanished, dissolving into the air” (Nabokov 1959, 4), or Cincinnatus when he takes off his body parts as if they were items of clothing: He stood up and took off the dressing-gown, the skullcap, the slippers. He took off the linen trousers and shirt. He took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk. He took off his hips and his legs, he took off his arms like gauntlets and threw them in the corner. What was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly coloring the air. (Nabokov 1959, 19, my emphasis)

As for liquids, and melting, M’sieur Pierre’s first description is also remarkable with regards to the material he is “made of”: Seated on a chair, sideways to the table, as still as if he were made of candy, was a beardless little fat man, about thirty years old, dressed in old-fashioned but clean and freshly ironed prison pyjamas; […] his honeyblond hair was parted in the middle of his remarkably round head, his long eyelashes cast shadows on his cherubic cheek, and the whiteness of his wonderful, even teeth gleamed between his crimson lips. He seemed to

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be all frosted with gloss, melting just a little in the shaft of sunlight falling on him from above. (Nabokov 1959, 40–41)

This description, crowded with metaphoric vocabulary, such as the candy, the honey-colored hair, or the red lips6 plays with the sight of a person and a piece of confectionery product. M’sieur Pierre even appears to be melting in the sunlight. Emmie in another scene is “splashed out” by Rodion from the cell to the corridor as though he was emptying a water bucket (Nabokov 1959, 81), and, when getting out of the prison through a tunnel, Cincinnatus “oozes out” of the fort like a drop of water (Nabokov 1959, 131). In all of these examples characters “behave” or look like liquids, therefore through these instances of characterization also evoke the sight and feel of liquids in the reader, and contribute to the overall nature of the work. The quality of the body of Cincinnatus is a problematic question, as it is rather undefinable, as he evokes different sense impressions in different people. He is described as being “light as a leaf” (Nabokov 1959, 3), small, and skinny, with light complexion for the reader, and we know that in the eyes of others he is opaque. Therefore, when compared to other characters in the storyworld sometimes it is him who appears heavy, dark, and unusually thick: “he was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another” (Nabokov 1959, 11). “He seemed pitch black to everyone else as though he had been cut out of a cord-size block of night” (Nabokov 1959, 13). His figure is unstable and quite difficult to imagine for the reader. The instability of Cincinnatus’ character is in connection with the overall nature of the novel, which is mainly shown through sense impressions. Throughout the story the reader encounters confusing changes in the degree of density of things and characters: they melt, turn into air or water. There is an overarching process of unstable and unreliable motion on almost every level of the story, and eventually the whole storyworld collapses, disappears into a cloud. The unstable stream of events also shows in the way the narrative time is conceptualized and constructed. Narrative time does not exist independently from narrative space7 and Invitation is a sterling example of that since narrative time seems to follow the nature of narrative space. Time is in fact measured precisely in a way as each chapter contains the events of

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one day, but it is subverted as well, as we know that the clock in Cincinnatus’ cell is quite unreliable. The story therefore does represent a very forceful sort of motion, a current one might say, flowing in circles regarding the chapters—each one begins with a new day, but with a similar issue: Cincinnatus inquiring about the time of his execution, or his torturers showing up in his cell with various ideas of activities, always dismissing Cincinnatus’ questions, wishes, and demands. Considering the plot, it is just as whimsical, and seemingly unmotivated as the whole storyworld is to Cincinnatus who feels out of place and alien all his life. He is running in circles, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes almost literally: he involuntarily ends up back in his cell each time he thought he had left it. The unreliable, unstable state of things (from objects to places, to characters) might reflect on the unstable mental state of the individual, who perceives and attempts to make sense of his environment‚ namely‚ Cincinnatus. This impression is strengthened by the continuous representations of everything melting, evaporating, or simply moving as water does. As I demonstrated, it is a characteristic of the narrative on the level of vocabulary, metaphors, characterization, and discourse as well. This characteristic might contribute to the overall understanding of the narrative. While narrative comprehension is a very complex process, I think we can and we have to observe its parts, which are accessible to our conscious examinations even if eventually the whole process is always more than the sum of its parts. I do not believe that today we can tell why and how exactly, yet it has to be described in as much detail as possible. This analysis is meant to be such an attempt. In the next, last section I will explain how my approach to these representations entails a different practice of meaningmaking, which might shed new light on the genre of the novel that is traditionally absurdist and thereby renders certain scenes meaningless.

Embodied Experience and the Absurd: “How Frightened I Am. How Sick with Fright.” Invitation to a Beheading is an unmistakable, but not quite typical Nabokov story. It seems to abandon realistic representations for the sake of creating abstract and absurd scenes (Hetényi 2015, 385) in an uncanny fictional world. The parallel between the dictatorial system of this world and the soviet regime might seem obvious (Hetényi 2015, 401). The novel has also been assumed to have a strong connection with Kafka’s nightmarish world, although Nabokov has rejected the idea and claimed

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that he did not even know about Kafka’s work at the time when Invitation to a Beheading was created. Without a strong interpretative frame‚ this novel truly remains extremely elusive. If we accept Nabokov’s claim that he is interested in the experiences of the individual, I believe the absurd scenes gain a mundane meaning, i.e., they are representations of the embodied experiences of Cincinnatus’ anxiety and fear, and the distorted, and sometimes hallucinatory sense perceptions caused by his psychological state. This way, what is usually understood as absurdity becomes an emphasizing force in a representation of the processes of cognition of an individual, who is sentenced to death, but not told the time of this certain and untimely death. The beginning of the first chapter of the novel could be interpreted as a full-blown absurd scene: In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper. All rose, exchanging smiles. The hoary judge put his mouth close to his ear, panted for a moment, made the announcement and slowly moved away, as though unglueing himself. Thereupon Cincinnatus was taken back to the fortress. […] He was calm; however, he had to be supported during the journey through the long corridors, since he planted his feet unsteadily, like a child who has just learned to walk, or as if he were about to fall through like a man who has dreamt that he is walking on water only to have a sudden doubt: but is this possible? […] Who was becoming sea-sick? Cincinnatus. He broke out in a sweat, everything grew dark, and he could feel every rootlet of every hair. (Nabokov 1959, 1–2)

While scenes such as this leave a lot to the reader’s imagination, and are easy to interpret symbolically, since Cincinnatus is the focalizing character in the story, I believe these can be understood as representations of his state of mind and his ability to perceive what happens around him after learning what his sentence is. He walks unsteadily because all his strength leaves him as fear takes over his mind, and Nabokov shows his skill of creating an artistic representation of an ordinary feeling, therefore the absurd scenes can be understood as instances of defamiliarization. When contrasted with the beginning of another story, Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” which employs first-person narration, but which is remarkably similar to Invitation in its topic, it is easy to observe that the

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embodied experiences of the protagonist are the same as Cincinnatus’. Poe’s short story helps attributing meaning to the absurd parts of Nabokov’s Invitation. I WAS sick—sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence—the dread sentence of death—was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. […] presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw; but with how terrible an exaggeration […] then, all at once, there came a most deadly nausea over my spirit, and I felt every fibre in my frame thrill as if I had touched the wire of a galvanic battery […] I had swooned; but still will not say that all of consciousness was lost. What of it there remained I will not attempt to define, or even to describe […]. (Poe 1842, 231–232)

What Poe’s narrator does not even attempt to describe, Nabokov’s does at the very beginning of Invitation. In fact, all through the novel, Cincinnatus’ consciousness is almost as unstable as that of Poe’s narrator’s, who suspects that he is drugged by the Inquisition. In Nabokov’s novel each chapter contains the events and experiences of one day in Cincinnatus’ life. The beginnings and the ends of each chapter therefore show the first and last significant event, or the first and last memory Cincinnatus has of the given day. Hence, abrupt, awkward endings and beginnings without introductions might reflect processes in Cincinnatus’ consciousness such as fainting, especially in chapters five and eight, which end with “it” becoming dark. In chapter eight it definitely means that the lights went out in the cell while in chapter five it possibly means that his senses were leaving Cincinnatus, especially considering that he is very confused at the beginning of chapter six. Chapter six begins with a description of a state of mind, the happiness entailed by the promised visit of his wife, Marthe, slowly forming after Cincinnatus wakes up: What was it – through everything terrible, nocturnal, unwieldy – what was that thing? It had been last to move aside, reluctantly yielding to the huge, heavy wagons of sleep, and now was first to hurry back […] swelling, growing more distinct […]. (Nabokov 1959, 48)

Chapter nine ends midsentence, with the words “The door slammed with a crash. It was hard to believe that in this cell, only a moment ago –”

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(Nabokov 1959, 81). A possible explanation for this is that since throughout the novel the perceptions of Cincinnatus are reported, switching to internal focalization occasionally, which results in awkward stops in storytelling such as the one at the end of chapter nine‚ when Cincinnatus loses consciousness. One of the most absurd scenes of the story can be found in the first chapter, after Cincinnatus’s sentence is announced, when Rodion comes to Cincinnatus’s cell and they start to waltz around in the fortress. Considering that it ends with stating that it was a brief “swoon’s friendly embrace” (Nabokov 1959, 3), the waltz is a delusional vision that Cincinnatus sees as he swoons, which, in the English translation, is incidentally the same word that Poe’s narrator uses. There is another example of fainting and the sense perceptions that come with it, this time represented as a feeling of getting tangled and sinking in water after the cell had “turned into” water: Here the walls of the cell started to bulge and dimple, like reflections in disturbed water; the director began to ripple, the cot became a boat. Cincinnatus grabbed the side in order to keep his balance, but the oarlock came off in his hand, and, neck-deep, among a thousand speckled flowers, he began to swim, got tangled, began sinking. […] They fished him out. (Nabokov 1959, 39)

When characters disappear, turn into air in Nabokov’s story, it is deemed absurd because these scenes lack an explanation. Poe’s narrator also remembers that the judges “magically” disappear after the sentence was announced: “the figures of the judges vanished, as if magically, from before me; the tall candles sank into nothingness” (Poe 1842, 232), but right after telling this, adds that the experience was due to him swooning at that moment. This explanation perfectly fits all the disappearance experiences of Cincinnatus. The novel in fact ceases to be absurd if we accept that in these scenes it is not the diegetic world that collapses, changes, and works completely unpredictably, but Cincinnatus’ perceptions and understanding of it. These scenes in my reading are the defamiliarized representations of the mental and embodied experiences of the protagonist, who goes through the extraordinary, yet natural feelings of fear of death, and extreme panic and anxiety, which is especially visible when compared to Poe’s short story. Nabokov’s strategy of representing these feelings

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results in what can be interpreted as sheer absurd, but actually it may be an artistic, metaphoric representation of the embodied consciousness of a person who is sentenced to death without the knowledge of the time of his execution.

Conclusion According to the theories of embodied cognition, human consciousness is heavily shaped by perceptions. Therefore, a story that is built around a consciousness might also share the nature of its perceptions. I believe Nabokov’s Invitation to Beheading is such a story, and this chapter was an attempt at reading the novel with this approach. Besides placing a special focus on the representations of perceptions in its vocabulary and also in its descriptions of the narrative space, the novel thematizes the perceptions (mainly through vision and touch) of liquids in characterization and in the description of Cincinnatus’ experiences of metaphoric or literal scenes of swimming, sinking, or evaporating. Through representing the movements of water in its structure and the advances of the narrative itself, I claimed that the story pulls the reader into the current of its plot and contributes to the reader’s construction of the meaning of the novel. A story that is constructed through a consciousness that is mainly characterized by anxiety, panic, and fear, follows the nature of this consciousness, which in Invitation is manifested metaphorically in the unpredictable and unstable movements of water and other liquids. The reader, who is evolved to be sensitive to patterns, to the basic structure of the things he or she encounters and, according to embodied cognitive theories, evolved to engage with them on a mental as well as on a corporeal level may feel the familiar structures of his or her perceptions and the experiences they build—even if they are not constructed in an experience in the real world, but with a mediated experience of a storyworld. The reading process of a Nabokovian story, which is full of patterns of nature and human embodiment on several levels: on the level of its vocabulary, its representations of events and characterization, and even in its discourse, is an exceptionally good example of such an experience. As for the process of meaning-making, I believe this method of interpretation helps the reader gain an understanding of scenes in the novel, which are assumed to be meaningless and interpreted as sheer absurd. If one investigates the patterns of sense perceptions in the novel and if one accepts that Cincinnatus’ consciousness is represented in the story, the

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absurd scenes can be understood as representations of the anxiety and the fear that the protagonist goes through. Edgar Allan Poe’s description of the experiences of another man who had been sentenced to death in “The Pit and the Pendulum” helps one adopt an interpretative frame to the odd scenes in Invitation to a Beheading with which the absurd becomes the defamiliarized representation of subjective embodied experiences of fear and anxiety, with the help of the distorted sense perceptions that they entail, and the scenes where characters vanish, places transform, and the world falls apart actually become not only meaningful in their own right, but reasonable and logical.

Notes 1. These approaches, also called the post-Cartesian alternatives, although they are far from a unified field of study, all believe cognition to be much more dynamic, flexible, and changing, and imagine that the body and its environment have a vital role in making it up. 2. This approach assumes that human cognition consists of context-free processes of symbol manipulation, akin to the workings of a computer. 3. In this respect I share the idea that the representations of literary characters’ experiences potentially share the structures and patterns of real people’s experiences (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003, 140). 4. Consciousness, according to the theories of embodied cognition, includes processes of the body and the brain, such as sense perceptions. 5. In Strong Opinions he explains the different views of reality and the problem of its imitation (Nabokov 1973, 101–102) and dismisses the idea of a unified, objective reality in favor of subjective, unstable versions of reality (Nabokov 1973, 131). 6. In the Russian original and the Hungarian version (which was translated from the Russian) his lips are claimed to look like a cherry, which also strengthens the metaphor of the confectionary product. 7. As Elena Gomel suggests the adoption of the concept of spacetime from post-Newtonian physics (Gomel 2014, 26).

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Bibliography Barlassina, Luca, and Robert M. Gordon. 2017. Folk Psychology as Mental Simulation. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/folkpsych-simulation/. Accessed 7 July 2017. Bortolussi, Marisa, and Peter Dixon. 2003. Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyd, Brian. 2011. Stalking Nabokov: Selected Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Caracciolo, Marco. 2014. The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. Berlin: De Gruyter. Gomel, Elena. 2014. Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature. New York: Routledge. Hamilton, Craig A., and Ralf Schneider. 2002. From Iser to Turner and Beyond: Reception Theory Meets Cognitive Criticism. Style 36 (4): 640–658. Herman, David (ed.). 2007. The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2013. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hetényi, Zsuzsa. 2015. Nabokov regényösvényein. Budapest: Kalligram Kiadó. Horváth, Márta. 2011. “Megtestesült olvasás”– A kognitív narratológia empirikus alapjai [Embodied Reading—The Empirical Roots of Cognitive Narratology]. Literatura 37 (1): 3–16. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1959. Invitation to a Beheading. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 2010. ———. 1966. Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited. Reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 2011. Nünning, Ansgar. 2003. Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Developments, Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the Term. In What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, ed. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, 239–276. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1842. The Pit and the Pendulum. Reprint. In Selected Poetry and Prose of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. T.O. Mabbott, 230–233. New York: The Modern Library, 1951. Szabó, Erzsébet. 2012. A narratívák olvasásának kognitív modellálása [Cognitive Modelling of the Reading of Narratives]. Literatura 38 (2): 115–125.

CHAPTER 4

Nabokov’s Visceral, Cerebral, and Aesthetic Senses Michael Rodgers

The role of sense in Vladimir Nabokov’s work takes many guises. “Common sense,” for example, is subjected to his wrath in Lectures on Literature (Nabokov 1980, 371–380), while the notion of a “moral sense” permeates his output, remaining incorrigibly difficult to define categorically.1 In Transitional Nabokov, Stephen Blackwell explores what he calls Nabokov’s “fugitive sense” and its relationship with ephemerality and memory (2009, 15–30). Two more obvious things may come to mind when thinking about Nabokov and sense, however. Firstly, Nabokov’s writing is inflected with innumerable sensory experiences directly related to the body. Not only is this inextricably linked to both his synesthesia and multilingualism, but whether the reader thumbing “the right-hand, still untasted part” (11) of Invitation to a Beheading , the advice to “caress the details […] the divine details” (Nabokov 1980, xxiii), or “the telltale tingle between the shoulder blades” (Nabokov 1980, 64) of what Nabokov deems authentic literature, the visceral worlds of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste are never far from the page for both author and reader. Secondly, Nabokov frequently invokes

M. Rodgers (B) The Open University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_4

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a “sixth” sense in his work—something he calls “artistic sense” in “Good Readers and Good Writers,” proposing “to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance” (Nabokov 1980, 3–4), and “aesthetic” sense in Lolita.2 Yet, two further senses are also integral to Nabokov’s output: “cerebral” sense (in other words, the intellectual challenges placed on the reader) and “nonsense.” This essay investigates what I call the visceral, cerebral, and aesthetic senses in Nabokov’s work, focusing on two ostensibly nonsensical, punning extracts from Despair and Invitation to a Beheading as illustrative examples. It argues that the interplay between the visceral and cerebral senses engenders aesthetic sense, with the universal desire to puzzle-solve at the heart of our reading experience. I have previously discussed particular aspects of Nabokov’s sensory engagement in relation to memory (more specifically, how Nabokov’s multi-sensory tableaux of his schoolroom in Vyra in Speak, Memory allows for a reenactment of memory to occur), as well as what I call Fyodor’s “willed aesthetic perception” (Rodgers 2018, 149) in The Gift .3 Here, I want to explore Nabokov’s engagement with senses in relation to the meta-fictive opening to chapter three of Despair, where Herman Karlovich offers readers several variations of how to open the chapter and explicitly draws our attention to literary artifice.4 A few pages into his self-aggrandizing monologue on his literary aptitude, he provides the following short paragraph: I liked, as I like still, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by the mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them unawares. What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog? (Nabokov 1965, 47)

This extract, I argue, not only neatly encapsulates a journey from nonsense to sense, but also the interplay between the visceral, cerebral, and aesthetic senses. At a basic level, readers are given some revelations about an unreliable narrator and posed three rhetorical questions. The questions initially evoke nonsense at a semantic level—it is difficult to reconcile these incongruous words, especially given such ostensibly incompatible connection(s) between largely abstract nouns. Such perplexing language, of course, piques our natural inclination to puzzle-solve; our innate desire to try to “make sense” of that which we do not understand. Following Blackwell’s claim, in this respect, that “we remain determined to find meaning, or to create it” (Blackwell 2009, 25), readers may be inclined

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to rephrase these rhetorical questions in order to facilitate some sort of meaning: “what is this jest in majesty?” as, perhaps, “how does joking relate to magnificence?”; “what is this ass in passion?” as, perhaps, “what might foolery in lust equate to”? Rather than answering the questions per se then, readers may, on one level, interpret these questions as Herman’s pondering about the relationship between joking and magnificent things, and the foolish things that lust can make us do. The third question posed, “how do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?”, is even more puzzling than the previous two in that there appears to be no semantic sense whatsoever in correlating religious figures and canines. Despite reframing the predicament then, these questions continue to resist easy comprehension—readers still cannot effectively answer these questions without going further with their investigations. Such provocative juxtapositions—humor and gravity, foolishness and devotion, animal and spiritual beings—effectively risk remaining unresolved. One way in which critics have previously understood this last question is to trace allusions and repetitions. Sergei Davydov, for example, astutely notes that “the last pun is borrowed from Joyce, and Sirin seems to have a fitting Joycean answer to Herman’s last question”—namely a dream sequence later in Despair which acts as “the ultimate variant of [Herman’s] future, postmortem habitation” (Davydov 1995, 98).5 Another way, however, that this interpretative impasse can be traversed is to acknowledge the help provided from the corporeal senses of sight and sound—the apparent nonsense presented to us is offset by the visceral senses in the form of pattern detection. In other words, seeing and hearing the repetition of syllables within words reveals, both morphologically and phonologically, the repetition of “jest” inside majesty; “ass” inside passion—our bodily faculties automatically conduct detective work for us, chaperoning us to a new level of meaning. As such, this epiphanic shift from nonsense to sense continues: given that both “ass” and “jest” are words in their own right, possible answers to the questions “what is this jest in majesty” or “ass in passion” now exist.6 Rather than continuing to rephrase these rhetorical questions to make them more easily understandable, or ponder them in ever more abstract fashion, we can answer them through sensory help: they are words within words. Even further, our cerebral sense recognizes that they are (at least, quasi) examples of “tmesis” or “infixation”—literary techniques where words are slotted, or infixed, within another.7 Although the idea of incongruous things

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combining (God and Devil; a live dog) is made explicit in the third example, Nabokov, here, cajoles readers to see that God and devil combine morphologically to form a “live dog” backwards: more specifically, at the level of a reverse “palindrome,” otherwise called a “semordnilap” (with an overlap of the “d”).8 Blackwell claims that Nabokov’s works “reward the effort […] with complicated structures and hidden puzzles that, once worked out, resolve ‘with [what Zoran Kuzmanovich calls] an almost audible click’” (Kuzmanovich 2006, 23). Once this “audible click” happens here, we can answer Herman’s third question differently, and simply, by answering: “formally.” As the increasing nonsensicality of the questions may prepare us for, words normally considered content words metamorphose into morphological symbols. In other words, a cognitive shift occurs from comprehending words at the level of content to the level of form, facilitating an “aesthetic” appreciation of what linguistic signs can achieve. As Jürgen Bodenstein claims, “Nabokov opens new approaches into the nature of things; he shows by imaginative use of linguistic coincidences surprising and puzzling similarities and differences, correspondences and contraries, which reflect aspects of a mysterious, insufficiently comprehended reality” (Bodenstein 1977, 126). Carl Proffer claims that “the metamorphosis of Otchaianie into Despair is a special case, because while translating the novel Nabokov made certain revisions” (Proffer 1968, 258). He continues, By reserving the right to revise, Nabokov escapes the theoretical strictures which he places on translators, including himself. He so values the sonorities and humour of alliteration, onomatopoeia, and puns that when translating his own work he is often unable to adhere to his standards of literalism. (Proffer 1968, 258)

Although Proffer is correct in saying that “puns are not translated literally and explained in footnotes (the way the Nabokov of Onegin would suggest),” his comment that “Nabokov simply replaces Russian puns with English plays on words” (Proffer 1968, 259) seems not quite to do things justice. The Russian original of the passage in question from Despair instead reveals a similar commitment not just to wordplay, but also to the interplay between visceral, cerebral, and aesthetic senses: Mne npaviloc – i do cix pop npavitc – ctavit clova v glypoe poloenie, coqetat ix xytovcko cvadbo kalambypa,

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vyvopaqivat naiznanky, zactavat ix vpacplox. Qto delaet covetcki vetep v clove vetepinap? Otkyda tomat v avtomate? Kak iz zybpa cdelat apbyz? (Nabokov 1936, 45–46) I liked – and still like – to put words in a stupid position, to combine them with a clownish wedding of a pun, to turn them inside out, to catch them off guard. What is a Soviet wind doing in the word veterinarian? From where is the tomato in automaton? How do you make a watermelon from a buffalo? [my translation]

In the Russian, we are presented with similar priming to that in the English passage (“pun,” “turn [words] inside out”), as well as both ostensible nonsense and innovative wordplay, yet the questions presented are different in both content and form. In the first question, “what is a Soviet wind doing in the word veterinarian?,” we can recognize the repetition of “vetep” (“wind”) at the beginning of the word “vetepinap” (“veterinarian”). In the second, “where is the tomato in automaton?,” we recognize “tomat” (“tomato”) in the latter half of “avtomate” (“automaton”). In the third, “how do you make a watermelon from a buffalo?,” we eventually recognize the reverse palindrome, or semordnilap, at play (“zybpa” [“buffalo”] backwards becomes “apbyz” [“watermelon”]). Rather than Proffer’s idea of puns simply being replaced at a superficial level, Nabokov, in both the Russian original and English translation, relies on the interaction between the reader’s visceral and cerebral senses in order to create aesthetic sense.9 It is an appreciation of not only seeing language doing more than it normally does through paranomasia, but also the multilayered dimension of the process (more specifically, detecting pattern through homonymy and polysemy, as well as recognizing particular literary techniques at play). In Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov, Leland de la Durantaye claims that, For [Nabokov], a magic trick in language is not merely a sensual explosion of sight, sound, and colour, but necessarily involves anticipating and playing upon the expectations of meaning. For Nabokov, the simple giving way to this magical side of language leads to nothing grander than the inarticulate logorrhea of Joyce’s last work […]. For Nabokov, “verbal magic” relies not only upon the graceful, barely perceptible oscillation between two meanings (the pun), but also on the graceful, barely perceptible oscillation between two realms of language: those which Benjamin called the semiotic and the magical. For Nabokov, language is magical when and

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where its meaning fits snugly in its sight and sound. (De la Durantaye 2007, 146)

Durantaye’s definition of Nabokov’s “verbal magic” can be easily related to the passage in question from Despair, not only because of the dependence on the visceral senses (“its meaning fits snugly in its sight and sound”) but also the play on expectations of meaning. The combination of the visceral and cerebral senses facilitates our ability to reconfigure and rethink Herman’s rhetorical question(s) at an entirely different, arguably “higher,” level: namely, how might words, and the intelligent combinations of them, amuse and create delight? This, essentially, is the essence of Nabokov’s “aesthetic” sense; recognizing and appreciating that the “ironical difference between ostensible meaning and concealed ambiguity is part of the deception which, in Nabokov’s view, characterises all worthwhile art” (Bodenstein 1977, 140). The second example of Nabokov’s predilection for supposed nonsense, jeux de mots, and cognitive challenge can be found in his dystopian novella, Invitation to a Beheading , however, I also want to frame this in terms of a further “sense”: that of humor. In chapter ten, about halfway through Cincinnatus’s inexorable journey toward his execution, we meet the following passage: ‘Take the word “anxiety”,’ Cincinnatus’ brother-in-law, the wit, was saying to him. ‘Now take away the word “tiny”, eh? Comes out funny, doesn’t it? Yes, friend, you’ve really got yourself in a mess. In truth, what made you do such a thing?’ (Nabokov 1959, 88)

Like the passage in Despair, readers are faced with an ostensible non-sequitur; a seemingly nonsensical passage that initially induces bemusement. On deeper examination, however, and by following the “instruction” provided, readers who are inclined to remove each letter of “tiny” in turn from “anxiety” are explicitly rewarded with the revelation of the instrument used for Cincinnatus’s execution: the “axe” (a n x i e t y).10 Grasping the full effect of this passage hinges not only on the reader’s participation, but also sensory help and cognitive challenge—for many, this passage may be glossed over if they deem the apparent nonsense unworthy of the necessary effort. Indeed, we have the meta-fictive suggestion relating Cincinnatus’s anxiety to those readers who may not follow the language play occurring or, indeed, even bother

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with the game of perception and cognition—those who interpret at the level of complete words, rather than individual letters, will not be privy to what the passage yields and, like Cincinnatus, may find themselves in a proverbial mess.11 As Nabokov remarked to Alden Whitman, “an eccentric is a person whose mind and senses are excited by things that the average citizen does not even notice” (Nabokov 1990, 132). Interestingly, we can again see that Nabokov is committed to the same kind of sensory interplay in the original. Discussing Pushkin’s “Poltava” in his article “Pushkinian Subtexts in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading ,” Alexander Dolinin examines the differences between Nabokov’s Russian original and his English translation: It should be noted that the words topor (axe) and ropot (murmuring) appear in close proximity in Pushkin’s text and constitute a palindrome that is actualized in Invitation to a Beheading . Cf. “Voz’mi-ka slovo “ropot”, – govoril TSintsinnatu ego shurin, ostriak, – i prochti obratno. A? Smeshno poluchaetsia? Da, brat, – vliapalsia ty v istoriiu” (P 108) (literally, “Take the word ropot [murmur],” Cincinnatus’s brother-in-law, the wit, was saying to him. And now read it backwards. Eh? Comes out funny, doesn’t it? Yes, friend, you’ve really got yourself in a mess.” The palindrome being lost in English, Nabokov settled for wordplay that retains the reference to axe: “Take the word ‘anxiety,’” Cincinnatus’s brother-in-law, the wit, was saying to him. “Now take away the word ‘tiny’, Eh? Comes out funny, doesn’t it? Yes, friend, you’ve really got yourself in a mess” [I 103–104]; Translator’s note). (Dolinin, n.d.)

Whereas the English asks us to “take away the word ‘tiny’” from “anxiety,” the Russian tells us to read the “ropot” backwards (giving “axe” [topor] from “murmur”]. It can be argued that the English translation demands more from the reader both viscerally and cognitively in terms of perception and comprehension—not only is “taking a word away” from another far more oblique in instruction than being explicitly told to read a word backwards, but recognizing the anagram of “tiny” within “anxiety” is far more difficult for the eye (especially if the letters of that word being taken away are not in order). Yet, given Nabokov’s dismissal of Joyce’s last novel—“I detest Finnegans Wake in which a cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory” (Nabokov 1973, 102)—it suggests that something more exists than just simple wordplay, regardless of translation constraints. In both Russian original and English translation, Nabokov

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does indeed afford those readers willing to undertake the necessary effort “something else”: namely, an “aesthetic sense” that appreciates not just the pleasure in seeing ostensibly unrelated arrangements of words intermingle in unusual fashion, but also de la Durantaye’s idea of an “oscillation between the semiotic and the magical.” The revelation of the object that will serve to execute Cincinnatus is exactly the kind of “verbal magic” given that its “meaning fits snugly in its sight and sound” (Nabokov 1959, 146). This notion of puzzle solving is inextricably tied to reward and pleasure—the reader must ultimately decide whether there is an adequate pay-off for undertaking the cognitive challenge(s). This “pay-off,” as Marcel Danesi writes in The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life, is “in a sense, clairvoyance, since it entails perceiving things that are not immediately evident” (Danesi 2002, 30), echoing Blackwell’s claim that Nabokov’s works “seek to stimulate readers’ desire to know and understand them: they encourage readers towards acts of discovery” (Blackwell 1995, 23).12 Of course, experienced Nabokov readers will probably expect exactly this kind of “pay-off” within such a noticeably cryptic passage, especially given a section that shortly precedes the passage in question: sensing with my criminal intuition how words are combined, what one must do for a commonplace word to come alive and to share its neighbour’s sheen, heat, shadow, while reflecting itself in its neighbour and renewing the neighbouring word in the process, so that the whole line is live iridescence. (Nabokov 1965, 79)

Just as he does in Despair and “The Vane Sisters,” Nabokov frames the interplay of the visceral and cerebral senses in relation to an aesthetic component: here, “live iridescence.”13 Interestingly, the above passage is followed by Cincinnatus’s lament that, “while I sense the nature of this word propinquity, I am nevertheless unable to achieve it, yet that is what is indispensable to me for my task” (Nabokov 1959, 79). Imprisoned for “gnostical turpitude” (Nabokov 1959, 61), Cincinnatus’s “task” is not just presumably to escape his literal imprisonment, but also his bodily confines and earthly understanding—as de la Durantaye claims, “the generalization of language is the hallmark of the nightmarish world in which Cincinnatus lives” (Durantaye 2007, 138). Yet, despite Cincinnatus being “not an ordinary – I am the one among you who is alive” and having

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“the capacity to conjoin [his array of finely-tuned senses] in one point” (Nabokov 1959, 45), he remains unable to “sense the nature” of this “word propinquity.” We are reminded of Nabokov’s comment in “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” that “the pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible” (Nabokov 1980, 379). If, unlike Cincinnatus, readers are able to do this in the “anxiety” passage, we are suddenly afforded a similar kind of “release” that Cincinnatus eventually experiences at the novella’s close—namely, an aesthetic revelation of the “commonplace” through a combination of visceral and cerebral sense (arguably bringing about our very own charge of “gnostical turpitude” as a result).14 As Bodenstein claims, Nabokov’s verbal art is the art of creating harmony and meaning through the activity of organising separate words in magical combinations which produce various similarities, correspondence, and coherences. Words are related to each other on several levels (morphology, phonology, syntax, rhythm, and meaning) to interact and to heighten, in their multiple correlations, the expressive power of language […] it opens new ways of perceiving reality and changes our concepts by transforming its confusing manifestations into aesthetic patterns of poetic language. (Bodenstein 1977, 157)

The passage from Invitation is also curious for another reason. Given Cincinnatus’s brother-in-law’s utterance that it “comes out funny, doesn’t it?” after giving his command, we also have the presence of humor at play on different levels. On one level, “funny” here can describe the apparent nonsensicality of the instruction (i.e., funny as in absurd). On another, the “funniness” of the word “axe” being revealed relates to the gallows humor that pervades the text as a whole; the sense in which readers are frequently cajoled to laugh at Cincinnatus’s predicament (and ultimate downfall). “Funny,” however, also relates to the way in which the instruction works and the reader’s grasp of what is going on as a result; a cerebral recognition of the language game(s) at play. Although it would be contentious to call this passage a bona fide joke, it is very likely that readers smile having gone through the necessary cognitive effort and worked out the puzzle. In “Laughter and Literature: A Play Theory of Humour,” Brian Boyd claims that:

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only if a joke involves surprise, and allows us to retrieve sense, will it be funny […] A discrepant event will make an eight-month-old infant vigilant; it will first stare, then become distressed if it cannot assimilate the event into what it knows; but if it suddenly understands something new, an infant will produce what development psychologists call the smile of mastery. And for adults, the faster the surprise and the richer the retrieval, the better the joke will be. (Boyd 2004, 11–12)

Rather than the Freudian notion of infants smiling simply indicating sensory pleasure, the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, in Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood (1951), instead viewed infants smiling as a manifestation of accomplishment. As Thomas R. Schultz claims, “after a period of relatively serious accommodation to a stimulus, the infant reveals his success at assimilating it by expressions of pleasurable emotion” (Schultz 2017, 27). In the passage from Invitation then, readers are not only rewarded by having the murder weapon revealed to them before it appears properly (thus acting as a highly sophisticated example of foreshadowing), but also experience “the smile of mastery” given the way in which this murder weapon is revealed (in other words, an aesthetic appreciation of seeing a word emerge, anagrammatically, from apparently unrelated arrangements of letters directly in their line of sight). Given that Cincinnatus’s brother-in-law is described as a wit, it is perhaps no real surprise that such a clever revelation of the murderous weapon occurs: Nabokov […] constantly toys with our expectations in order to suggest to us how much we share, how much we take for granted, how many possibilities we do not see, how many surprises might lurk around the corner of life. He shows us how there are far more possibilities (in words, phrases, images, things, people, moments, stories, worlds) than those we blandly expect, and he makes us enjoy the sudden surprise when we recognize the gap between what we hadn’t even known we expected and what we actually find. (Boyd 2004, 16)15

This notion of incongruity—one of the three major theories of humor alongside “superiority” and “relief”— is obviously relatable to Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of “ostranenie” (“making strange”): a process that “disrupts […] our habitual perception of the world, enabling us to ‘see’ things afresh” (Baldick 2004, 62). Yet, Nabokov’s commitment to verbal ingenuity and scorn toward clichéd, ready-made phrases can also be related to what Henri Bergson, in “Laughter,” calls “something

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mechanical encrusted on the living”: “the attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine” (Bergson 2017, 227). Simon Critchley, for example, claims that “what fascinates Bergson is the comic quality of the automaton, the world of the jack-in-the-box, the marionette, the doll, the robot” (Critchley 2002, 56). Advancing the “play” theory of humor by suggesting that “grasping and gasping at that difference is the essence of sophisticated human humor” (Critchley 2002, 12), Boyd foregrounds the notions of ostensible nonsense, cognitive ability, and the smile of mastery. By relating Nabokov’s writing, for example, to Beckett’s “startling and comic transformations” (Critchley 2002, 17) of proverbs and clichés, Boyd also brings into focus the importance of the visceral and cerebral senses in engendering aesthetic sense through wordplay. As such, Nabokov and Beckett’s word innovation is not only exemplary of what Bergson might call their verbal “élan vital,” but also how “the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign exposes the frequently illogic workings of the human mind […] the control language purports to exert over reality is undermined by its inherent quality of multiple meaning” (Critchley 2002, 123). In The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, Michael Wood claims that Nabokov is a writer who cannot hear a word as saying only one thing if there is a chance that it can be got to say more, by whatever contortions of tongue or syntax. Of course, Nabokov is only dabbling in what was the delirious method of Finnegans Wake, but the spirit is the same. A commitment to puns, even to lame or labored puns, signals a language haunted by meanings far in excess of the one in front of us. This is not exactly Benjamin’s “pure language,” but there is a philosophical implication here, something like Wittgenstein’s “Whatever we see could be other than it is.” Everything we say is shadowed by a crowd of ghosts, speaking our own language or others. Language, even the most brilliant language, is a kind of shortfall of reason, a leap into graphic or phonetic chaos, the beginning of a story which loves nonsense, but not only nonsense, and (probably) has no end. (Wood 1994, 211)

Although Wood foregrounds Nabokov’s predilection for dovetailing sound and sense (“contortions of tongue or syntax”) in the context of language play, interestingly, and despite Nabokov’s pronouncements, he proposes that Nabokov “dabbles” in a method similar to Joyce’s in Finnegans

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Wake. In calling this method “delirious,” Wood echoes what de la Durantaye calls “the inarticulate logorrhea of Joyce’s last work” (Durantaye 2007, 146), touching on the suggestion of incoherence, feverishness, and “real” nonsense. As we have seen, however, Nabokov is not only a writer adamantly opposed to “cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue” (Nabokov 1973, 102), but also one acutely preoccupied with both “making sense” and transposing his own sensory infatuation to the page, foregrounding language’s multiplicity of meaning in its relationship with “the inconclusive and treacherous nature of reality” (Bodenstein 1977, 123). In Lectures on Literature, Nabokov laments those “who are by temperament or education immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature, for those who do not experience the telltale tingle between the shoulder blades” (Nabokov 1980, 64). Although his dictum ostensibly conflates only physiological response (“the telltale tingle between the shoulder blades”) as aesthetic sense, one recognizes that this physiological response is a combination of both brain and body; a symbiosis of cerebral understanding and visceral response engendering epiphanic realization (such as experiencing a frisson while reading beautiful poetry). Such “aesthetic vibrancy” is necessarily dependent on the ability of the visceral and cerebral senses recognizing and experiencing the given stimulus. The first stage in both examples from Despair and Invitation to a Beheading is to offer supposed nonsense which, in turn, piques our desire to puzzle-solve; to try to make meaning. The second stage in both draws on both our bodily and cerebral senses in order to detect pattern, words within words, recognition of literary techniques at play. The third stage is the engendering of aesthetic sense as a consequence—whether this be a recognition of the “verbal magic” of words doing unfamiliar things in Despair or, through the “smile of mastery,” the humor inherent in the language play of Invitation. In such examples, we are reminded of the Impressionist Camille Pissarro’s claim: “blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing!” (in Friedenthal 1963, 146).

Notes 1. Nabokov writes that “commonsense at its worst is sense made common, and so everything is comfortably cheapened by its touch” (Nabokov 1980, 372). Humbert Humbert’s couplet in Lolita reads, “The moral sense in mortals is the duty / We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty” (Nabokov

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1955, 285). Leona Toker claims that “‘the mortal sense of beauty’ is a euphemism for carnal pleasure, the pleasure of the senses that must be held in check by one’s moral alertness” (Toker 1989, 228). Nabokov writes, “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” (Nabokov 1955, 314–315). See Rodgers (2018, 40–41; 147–149). As Julian Connolly claims, Fyodor possesses “the capacity to perceive, reshape, and arrange impressions derived from living experience to create new, unique works of art” (Connolly 2005, 149). Carl Proffer claims that “the whole story could be a madman’s memoir or a poet’s fabrication” (Proffer 1968, 266). Davydov suggests that the pun derives from the following passage in Ulysses: “The voice of all the damned: Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof, Aiulella! (From on high the voice of Adonai calls.) Dooooooooooog! The voice of all the blessed: Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! (From on high the voice of Adonai calls.) Goooooooooood! (Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1961, pp. 599–600)” (Davydov 1995, 98). In contrast to the revelatory nature of epiphany, Klaus Conrad coined the term “apophenia” to describe the tendency to perceive meaningfulness from unrelated phenomena (including “pareidolia”—the tendency to perceive “unfounded” meaningfulness in visual patterns). Ned Flanders’s “wel-diddly-elcome,” or the expletive infixation “absofucking-lutely,” are well-known examples. “Semordnilap,” “palindromes” spelled backwards, refers to a word forming another word when its letters are reversed. In chapter seven of Despair, for example, Herman writes, “meanwhile the consumptive pen in my hand went on spitting words: can’t stop, can’t stop, cans, pots, he’ll to hell” (Nabokov 1965, 102). One is reminded of Groucho Marx’s joke, “what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic, and a dyslexic? Someone who stays up all night wondering if there really is a Dog”. The experience is not identical, however: in one respect, it could be said that identifying the repetition of words at the start and end of other words in close proximity to one another is easier for the eye than needing to recognize the tmesis at play in the English translation. Similarly, although the third question in both Russian and English contains a semordnilap, again the English translation arguably asks more of the reader in terms of the wordplay hinging on a two-word semordnilap. We are, of course, primed for such a word by the title of the text. In the example given, Nabokov’s technique of isolating particular letters from an existing word is close to what is sometimes called a “kangaroo” word— a word which contains a smaller version of itself within its spelling (for

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11.

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example, “respite,” and its “joey” word, “rest”). However, Nabokov not only asks us to do this with unrelated words (“anxiety” and “tiny”), but also to privilege the remaining letters instead of those “extracted.” We are reminded of Nabokov’s lament that Katharine White and The New Yorker “completely failed me as readers ” (Nabokov 1989, 17) for not noticing the acrostic in his short story, “The Vane Sisters.” As is common with Nabokov however, we are “let in” on the game prior to us taking part—the paragraph containing the acrostic, “Icicles by Cynthia meter from me Sybil” (Nabokov 1995, 631), makes overt reference to the phrase “inept acrostics” inside of it. Similarly, the paragraph in Despair lets us see (perhaps with hindsight) what Nabokov might be up to: Herman mentions “binding words by the mock marriage of a pun.” Yet, although readers can be said to be primed for such wordplay, they may also remain stumped. In a letter to Katharine White, Nabokov writes, “You may argue that reading downwards, or upwards, or diagonally is not what an editor can be expected to do; but by means of various allusions to trick-reading I have arranged matters so that the reader almost automatically slips into this discovery” (Nabokov 1989, 117). Blackwell, however, tempers this by relating these “acts of discovery” to a “fugitive” sense within Nabokov’s work that presents a “mirage of interpretative stability” (Blackwell 2009, 23), citing Brian Boyd’s revised argument(s) in Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (Boyd 1999). Durantaye claims that, “when this happens, language shrugs off is habitual generality and acquires a nuanced richness and individuality all its own” (De la Durantaye 2007, 138). Leona Toker suggests that Cincinnatus’s “gnostical turpitude” is shared by Martin Edelweiss of Glory: “suddenly Martin again experienced a feeling he had known on more than one occasion as a child: an unbearable intensification of all his senses, a magical and demanding impulse, the presence of something for which alone it was worth living” (Gl, 20) (Toker 1989, 98). In Nikolai Gogol, Nabokov reminds us that “the difference between the comic side of things, and their cosmic side, depends upon one sibilant” (Nabokov 1944, 142).

Bibliography Baldick, Chris. 2004. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bergson, Henri. 1901. On Laughter. In Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Magda Romanska and Alan Ackerman, 221–227. Reprint, New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

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Blackwell, Stephen. 2009. Nabokov’s Fugitive Sense. In Transitional Nabokov, ed. Will Norman and Duncan White, 15–29. London: Peter Lang. Bodenstein, Jürgen. 1977. The Excitement of Verbal Adventure: A Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s English Prose. PhD diss., University of Heidelberg. Boyd, Brian. 2004. Laughter and Literature: A Play Theory of Humor. Philosophy and Literature 28 (1) (April): 1–22. Connolly, Julian. 2005. The Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Critchley, Simon. 2002. On Humour. London: Routledge. Danesi, Marcel. 2002. The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Davydov, Sergei. 1995. Despair. In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov, 88–100. New York: Garland. De la Durantaye, Leland. 2007. Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dolinin, Alexander. n.d. Pushkinian Subtexts in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Jeff Edmunds. https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/ dolininpush.htm. Friedenthal, Richard. 1963. Letters of the Great Artists: From Blake to Pollock. New York: Random House. Joyce, James. 1922. Ulysses. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1961. Kuzmanovich, Zoran. 2006. From the Editor. Nabokov Studies 10: viii. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1932. Glory. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972 ———. 1936. Otchaianie. Reprint, Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1978. ———. 1944. Nikolai Gogol. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 2011. ———. 1955. Lolita. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2000. ———. 1959. Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Dmitri Nabokov with the author. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2001. ———. 1965. Despair. Revised and translated by the author. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2000. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1990. ———. 1980. Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt. ———. 1989. Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940–77, ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli. London: Vintage. ———. 1995. Collected Short Stories. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2001. Piaget, Jean. 1951. Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Proffer, Carl R. 1968. From Otchaianie to Despair. Slavic Review 27 (2): 258– 267. Rodgers, Michael. 2018. Nabokov and Nietzsche: Problems and Perspectives. New York: Bloomsbury.

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Schultz, Thomas R. 2017. A Cognitive-Developmental Analysis of Humour. In Humor and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications, ed. Antony Chapman and Hugh Foot, 11–36. New York: Routledge. Toker, Leona. 1989. Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wood, Michael. 1994. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. London: Chatto & Windus.

CHAPTER 5

Developing Transnational Style: Particularities of Nabokov’s Lexicon and Cognitive Frames in The Gift in Relation to the Five Senses Lyudmila Razumova

In Extraterritorial, George Steiner noted the linguistic “unhousedness” of Nabokov, Beckett, and Borges, whose writing had been effecting the “language revolution […], the change in the ways culture inhabits language” (Steiner 1971, viii). Steiner called for a thorough examination of the “polysemic nature of Nabokov’s uses of language[s]” and sketched a few directions for the inquiry: the influence of local and literary background, including Nabokov’s Cambridge period, the author’s translations and, most importantly, the study of Nabokov’s Russian prose and particularly his poetry (Steiner 1971, 9–10). Nearly 50 years later, literature outside the national paradigm no longer appears exceptional, but scholars are yet to develop a comprehensive method of studying bilingual authors’ use of language. In discussions of bi/translingual writing,1 much attention is paid to the authors’ production in a second language, which is presumed to be marked by interference and an increased awareness of the interplay between sense and sound (a frequent use of alliterative sequences, interlingual puns based on

L. Razumova (B) King’s College London, London, UK © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_5

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homophones, false cognates, and intentional mistranslations). However, in Nabokov’s case, there are multiple deviations from standard usage, even in his first literary language, Russian. This chapter examines Nabokov’s translingual idiolect with a particular focus on the author’s use of sensory terms, lexicon, and cognitive structures in his major Russian novel, Dar (The Gift ). I will demonstrate how the author’s peculiarities of lexicon, cognitive frames and intertextual relations in the novel, which draws so extensively on Russian classical poetry and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose, tend to play against the cognitive expectations of Russian readers and critics. Together with Nabokov’s narratological puzzles, these features might have been the reason for accusations of the author’s excessive emphasis on physicality, lack of spirituality, and “foreignness.”2 After all, even soul, a prized cultural concept in Russian literature, is exteriorized and described in sensory terms in The Gift . In Nabokov’s Canon from Onegin to Ada, Marijeta Bozovic argues that Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin translation-cum-commentary and multilingual Ada are Nabokov’s attempts to rewrite the Western canon and to present Russian literature differently, i.e., as much more central in the world republic of letters and distinctly transcultural and translingual. This rewriting allows Nabokov to position his own work as a continuation of the alternative canon and a model for the next generations of translingual writers. Bozovic’s argument is convincing; however, I believe that, both linguistically and compositionally, Nabokov’s experiment started much earlier than the Onegin translation, and The Gift , written in Russian and published in 1937–1938, is arguably Nabokov’s first transnational novel: The Gift is an example of overcoming the constraints of émigré literature and a lab for developing new compositional techniques that can be used in any language. To gain a better understanding of these evolving techniques and their relation to senses, I will resort to the main concepts of the theory of linguistic personality. First, I will briefly describe the categories that I am going to borrow from the theory. Then, I will outline the elements of the novel significant to the discussion of Nabokov’s translingual strategies and will analyze characteristic features of the novel’s lexicon and cognitive concepts. Finally, I will discuss how Nabokov’s continuous dialog with Russian literature helps him develop his philosophical position and a literary space of his own based on a “supersensory insight” (Nabokov 1963, 322).

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Reconciling Linguistic and Literary Studies of Translingual Writers and the Theory of Linguistic Personality If literary studies associated translingual writing with the literature of exile, linguists, until recently, used to consider literary bilingualism as a marginal practice hardly deserving a serious study outside language pedagogy.3 At present, linguistic studies of translingual writing often consist in comparison of texts written and self-translated by bilingual authors. While the last decade has seen an increase in much-needed interdisciplinary studies in self-translation that redefine the notions of original and translation and focus on the ideological underpinnings of this practice (Castro et al. 2017; Ferraro and Rainier 2016; Lagarde 2015), it would be erroneous to reduce linguistic studies of texts written by bi/translingual writers solely to self-translation. Recent genetic studies4 that examine manuscripts and drafts of multilingual writers and translators, including Nabokov, have been extremely promising and have contributed to a better understanding of the author’s writing, translation, and collaboration practices. Another notable study that attempts to combine thematic and linguistic analyses of Nabokov’s original and translated works is Nassim Winnie Berdjis’ book on imagery in The Gift and other novels written in the 1930s. It provides the most detailed catalog of images based on senses and analyzes them in terms of Jakobson’s opposition between metaphor and metonymy (Berdjis 1995). Yet, there is still a need for more methods that would elucidate the position of translingual texts within and without their literary traditions through the study of linguistic changes without denying the authors’ and their audiences’ subjectivity and historical experiences. The theory of linguistic personality [iazykovaia lichnost’ ] introduced an important anthropocentric move in cognitive linguistics and appeared to be able to mediate between linguistics and literary studies. However, as it was mostly developed in Russia, focusing on Russian language and literature, there arises an inevitable issue of cultural translatability of the theory and its applicability to translingual writers. It is also worth remembering that the very premise of the theory—a manifestation of one’s subjectivity or even collective dimensions of such subjectivity in and through a national language—is questionable. I have selectively applied categories from the methodology of linguistic personality that was originally introduced by Bogin and developed by Karaulov to Nabokov’s texts in Russian and in English and drawn

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upon Karakuts-Borodina’s work on Nabokov’s Russian prose. The theory defines linguistic personality as an ensemble of language and speech meanings that organize human experience within a certain culture; it hinges on the idea of a verbalized national worldview and describes the following levels of linguistic personality (Karaulov 1987): (1). the verbal-semantic or structural level that includes the standard language means used by an individual within a given language (lexicon); (2). the linguo-cognitive level (conceptosphere) reflecting an individual world view; and, (3). the pragmatic level (intertextual and philosophical orientation).5 The multiplicity of discourses in a literary text, however, complicates the use of the theory even for a monolingual author, let alone for a bilingual one. Yet, the study of Karaulov’s three levels and his emphasis on the inter-dependence of multiple discursive practices and particular historical circumstances can be a productive tool for approaching Nabokov’s texts. The decision to switch to another language is not necessarily the one that clearly sets a writer apart from the community of other émigrés or fellow-writers in his home country. In a new country, according to Miłosz, the change of language in a wider sense is inevitable: even if the author keeps writing in his native language, it has to be defamiliarized enough to develop “new eyes” (Miłosz 1976, 281). The Gift sets itself the same diabolical task: while it continues a dialog with evolving Russian literature, each chapter re-evaluates and re-adjusts the narrator’s and the reader’s positions by rejecting everything that interferes with the lucidity of the new vision—former attachments, stylistic penchants, and verbal and ethical automatisms.

The Gift ’s Metamorphoses Nabokov’s ninth Russian novel, Dar (The Gift ), is a generous offering to his future Russian readers. Even after the novel’s translation into English in 1952, the novel’s popularity could never rival that of Lolita or Invitation to a Beheading . According to Pekka Tammi, although The Gift was finally recognized as one of the major canonical works, it happened to be one of the author’s least reviewed and studied novels (Tammi 1985, 82). Nabokov started to plan for The Gift in the winter of 1932–1933 and completed the manuscript only in 1938. He had originally conceived his title as Da (Yes)—an affirmation of love and an allusion to Molly’s monolog in the last chapter of Ulysses punctuated by an accelerating series of “yeses,” and claimed that the major theme of The Gift was poetry and

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literature itself. Pushkin, the “golden reserve of our literature” (Nabokov 1963, 84), acts as a guide in the literary peregrinations of the protagonist Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev. Alexander Dolinin rightly notes that “the intensity and scope of The Gift ’s dialog with various literary traditions and voices (unprecedented in Russian prose) can be fully explicated only if we read it as a programmatic statement, a Magna Carta of exilic creative behavior, rather than just the first prototype of the intertextual play in Pale Fire or Ada” (Dolinin 1995, 146). Fyodor’s gift writes itself into a new type of novel through a series of metamorphoses characteristic of Nabokov’s beloved butterflies: from the refined but inexperienced poet we see in the first chapter, he becomes a writer of prose in which “мыcль и мyзыкa coшлиcь, кaк вo cнe cклaдки жизни” (Nabokov 1938, 256)—“thought and music are conjoined as are the folds of life in sleep” (Nabokov 1963, 71). What distinguishes the novel from a Künstlerroman is the enactment of each stage of Fyodor’s literary development. Chapter one contains the largest number of poems, most of which are plot-driven and devoted to childhood. Then, Nabokov provides a detailed quasiautobiographical account of Fyodor’s “versificatory illness”: in his youth Fyodor had a predilection for epithets that conveniently filled any gaps, like “тaинcтвeнный и зaдyмчивый” (“unnumerable” and “intangible”) and toyed with “handy adjectives of the amphibrachic type” “пeчaльный, любимый, мятeжный” (dejected, enchanted, rebellious) (Nabokov 1938, 332; 1963, 162). After abandoning the poems that were “but the models of [his] future novels” (Nabokov 1963, 71), Fyodor mostly focuses on a projected biography of his entomologist father inspired by Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum. The biography was never completed, but it was later replaced by a novel within a novel, Life of Chernyshevsky (chapter 4), which required a most laborious research on behalf of Fyodor and Nabokov himself. Despite the general open-mindedness of émigré circles, the chapter antagonized the real critics as much as it did the fictional ones who read it as an unforgivable assault on “oднoгo из чиcтeйшиx, дoблecтнeйшиx cынoв либepaльнoй Poccии” (Nabokov 1938, 482)—“one of the purest and most valorous sons of liberal Russia” (Nabokov 1963, 319); therefore, chapter four was not published until 1952. Chapter five opens with a spate of reviews of Life of Chernyshevsky and reveals that all the previous parts were important exercises that enabled Fyodor to detect the creative impulse behind

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his destiny to be used for his new complex novel “c типaми, c любoвью, c cyдьбoй, c paзгoвopaми” (Nabokov 1938, 525) —“with ‘types,’ love, fate, conversations, … descriptions of nature” —The Gift itself (Nabokov 1963, 349). Anticipating his bliss with Zina and already adumbrating this moment as a memory to be cherished in the future, Godunov-Cherdyntsev ends the book with an Onegin stanza written as if it were a prose passage: Пpoщaй жe, книгa! Для видeний – oтcpoчки cмepтнoй тoжe нeт. C кoлeн пoднимeтcя Eвгeний, нo yдaляeтcя пoэт. И вce жe cлyx нe мoжeт cpaзy paccтaтьcя c мyзыкoй, paccкaзy дaть зaмepeть…cyдьбa caмa eщe звeнит, – и для yмa внимaтeльнoгo нeт гpaницы – тaм, гдe пocтaвил тoчкy я: пpoдлeнный пpизpaк бытия cинeeт зa чepтoй cтpaницы, кaк зaвтpaшниe oблaкa, – и нe кoнчaeтcя cтpoкa. (Nabokov 1938, 541) Good-by, my book! Like mortal eyes, imagined ones must close one day. Onegin from his knees will rise—but his creator strolls away. And yet the ear cannot right now part with the music and allow the tale to fade; the chords of fate itself continue to vibrate; and no obstruction for the sage exists where I have put the End: the shadows of my world extend beyond the skyline of the page, blue as tomorrow’s morning haze—nor does this terminate the phrase. The End. (Nabokov 1963, 378)

The final passage becomes a prophetic pronouncement: the gift that sprang from poetry as its source is finally subsumed into a novel, and the music of fate itself is still reverberating (“cyдьбa caмa eщe звeнит”) in imitation of the poetic word. The passage acknowledges Fyodor’s death as a poet, as well as, perhaps, the death of émigré literature, but his gift reserves to itself the right to resurrect and to live on beyond the last page. The novel that stems from exilic experience and makes it so central to creative writing eventually defies exile and showcases a formidable collection of narrative and linguistic tools that will become even more prominent in Nabokov’s later work.

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Potted Souls and Dignified Lakes: Peculiarities of Lexicon6 and Cognitive Frames in Nabokov’s Dar (The Gift) Individual particularities of the author’s idiolect and style, according to Karaulov’s model, can only be effectuated on the linguo-cognitive and pragmatic levels. Following Karakuts-Borodina, I consider a study of units of lexicon equally significant, especially for a bilingual writer (KarakutsBorodina 2003, 18). Continuous and at times excessive punning in a foreign language is often attributed to the writer’s fresh perception of many phonetic and semantic turns that are viewed as pedestrian by most native speakers. However, even Nabokov’s first literary language contains a significant number of non-standard units that hinge on striking visual and sound impressions: Nonce-word and neologisms based on visual impressions. There is a significant number of irregularities and nonce-words, but they are few when compared with Bend Sinister, Pale Fire or Ada, and are used sparingly. Many coined epithets are based on similes ending in ‘видный, oбpaзный, пoдoбный’ (like) кoнчeeвoвидный (Koncheyevoid), жopж-caндo-цapcтвeннoe (George-Sandesque regality)7 ; others tend to literalize the visual perception in a mammoth of a word: “бpиллиaнтoвoлyннoлилитoвocизoлaзopeвoгpoзнocaпфиpиcтocинeлилoвo”. The word was more than halved in translation: “The illuminated sign of a music hall ran up the steps of vertically placed letters, they went out all together, and the light again scrambled up: what Babylonian world would reach up to the sky? … a compound name for a trillion tints: diamondimlunalilithlilasafieryviolenviolet and so on” (Nabokov 1963, 337). The most interesting ironic nonce-noun Ямщикнeгoнилoшaдeйнocть is based on a culturally significant allusion (from a popular maudlin song “Ямщик, нe гoни лoшaдeй”): “oт cтиxoв oнa тpeбoвaлa тoлькo ямщикнeгoнилoшaдeйнocти.” “Her taste in poetry was limited to fashionable gypsy lyrics ” (Nabokov 1963, 87). Hybrid names, favored by Nabokov in both languages, often betray characters’ insensitivity and flawed ideas about art and literature: “‘Vrublyov’s frescoes ’—an amusing cross between two Russian painters (Rublyov and Vrubel) […]” (Nabokov 1963, 51); a writer Shirin who was “blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and blockhead to boot” (Nabokov 1963, 315) could be a botched twin of Sirin-Nabokov—due to his speech impediment, he pronounces his own name as Sirin—or,

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according to Dolinin, a combination of two Russian nationalists Iurii Shrinsky-Shikmatov and the novelist Ivan Shmelev, “who was known as a singer of Russian shir; (boundlessness, open space)” (Dolinin 1995, 149). Sense and sound. Nabokov is extremely keen on playing with rhythm and sound in both languages,8 and alliterative sequences are very common in The Gift : “бaнaльный бec бyльвapныx блaжeнcтв”— “oh trite demon of cheap thrills” (Nabokov 1963, 341); “кoгдa дpyжбa былa вeликoдyшнa и влaжнa”—“when friendship was magnanimous and moist” (Nabokov 1963, 210–211) Nabokov’s revision of Michael Scammel’s first translation9 of The Gift shows the same tendency: whenever possible, Nabokov opted for keeping alliteration and onomatopoeia or compensated for them by focusing on different consonants: Vladimir Nabokov, Dar: “C тaкoй жe coлиднoй cepьeзнocтью” Michael Scammel: “with equally respectable seriousness ” Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift: “with equally stolid seriousness ” Vladimir Nabokov, Dar: “Peзкocтью взглядoв и paзвязнocтью мaнep…” Michael Scammel: “with the sharpness of his views and the undue familiarity of his manner” Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift: “with the harshness of his views and the brashness of his ways” (Nabokov 1963, 222). Synesthesia. In addition to Fyodor’s famous description of synesthetic awareness of different alphabets, a number of striking images in the novel is based on concomitant activation of multiple senses: “Mнoгoyгoльный звyк”—“a polygon of music” (Nabokov 1963, 358); “цвeт дoмa … cpaзy oтзывaющийcя вo pтy нeпpиятным oвcяным вкycoм, a тo и xaлвoй …” (Nabokov 1938, 192) “the color of a building … that immediately provoked an unpleasant taste in the mouth, a smack of oatmeal, or even halvah” (Nabokov 1963, 16). Nabokov reveled in his perception of color and played with innumerable shades of lilac and violet in a number of his Russian works.10 In The Gift , various overtones of lilac are mentioned more than twenty times. They are often associated with literature or other personally significant elements of the novel. Dolinin suggests that in Nabokov’s Russian prose, these colors signify authorial presence as they evoke his pen-name, Sirin11 (Dolinin 2004, 451).

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Lepidopterological Terminology. Winding, Proustean sentences in The Gift are replete with precise botanical and lepidopterological terms. By contrast, the content can be quite humorous. For instance, the chapter intended as a sketch for a novel about Fyodor’s father provides detailed descriptions of lepidoptera: […] мoй oтeц oткpыл иcтиннyю пpиpoдy poгoвиcтoгo oбpaзoвaния, пoявляющeгocя пoд кoнцoм бpюшкa y oплoдoтвopeнныx caмoк aпoллoнoв, выяcнив, чтo этo cyпpyг, paбoтaя пapoй шпaдлeвидныx oтpocткoв, нaлaгaeт нa cyпpyгy лeпнoй пoяc вepнocти coбcтвeннoй выдeлки, пoлyчaющeгocя дpyгим y кaждoгo видa этoгo poдa, тo лoдoчкoй, тo yлиткoй, тo – кaк y peдчaйшeгo тeмнo-пeпeльнoгo orpheus Godunov— нaпoдoбиe мaлeнькoй лиpы. (Nabokov 1938, 295) […] my father discovered the true nature of the corneal formation appearing beneath the abdomen in the impregnated females of Parnassians, and explained how her mate, working with a pair of spatulate appendages, places and molds on her a chastity belt of his own manufacture, shaped differently in every species of this genus, being sometimes a little boat, sometimes a helical shell, sometimes – as in the case of the exceptionally rare dark-cinder gray orpheus Godunov—a replica of a tiny lyre. (Nabokov 1963, 124)

Interlingual puns are introduced early in Nabokov’s Russian work when they exemplify wanderings of a multilingual mind, and they clearly become an integral part of his style in English. In a letter to his mother, Fyodor describes how words grow unfamiliar in a transition from alertness to a lucid dream: “пoтoлoк, пa-тa-лoк, pas ta loque, пaтoлoг…”— “until it turns into something completely unfamiliar (лoкoтoп, пoкoтoл)” (Nabokov 1938, 524); “you know, like taking a simple word, say ‘ceiling’ and seeing it as ‘sealing’ or ‘sea-ling’ until it becomes completely strange and feral, something like ‘iceling’ or ‘inglice’” (Nabokov 1963, 361). The name of the moving company in The Gift is Max Lux. “чтo этo y тeбя, cкaзoчный oгopoдник? Maк-c.A тo? Лyк-c вaшa cвeтлocть” (Nabokov 1938, 215); “Max Lux. Mac’s luck” (Nabokov 1963, 41).

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Cognitive Frames (Conceptosphere): Soul as Another Sense In The Gift , Nabokov increasingly resorts to transferred epithets (hypallages) that dehumanize people and personify things. This particularity of his mature Russian style must have provoked numerous accusations of coldness, callousness, and detachment from human concerns12 : “Hoвopoждeнный peвoльвep, peвoльвep выpoc” (Nabokov 1938, 231)— the revolver “which had become by now quite burly and independent” (Nabokov 1963, 58). “oпyщeнныe pecницы cкpoмнoй цeны” (Nabokov 1938, 193)—“the lowered lashes of modest price, nobility of the discount” (Nabokov 1963, 17). “Зaпax вялeныx, кoпчeныx, гpoшeвыx дyш” (Nabokov 1938, 511)—“The smell of dried, smoked, potted souls a penny a piece” (Nabokov 1963, 348). “Coлнцe лизaлo мeня бoльшим, глaдким языкoм… Кaк coчинeниe пepeвoдитcя нa экзoтичecкoe нapeчиe, я был пepeвeдeн нa coлнцe” (Nabokov 1938, 508). “The sun licked me all over with its big, smooth tongue… as a book is translated into an exotic idiom, so was I translated into sun” (Nabokov 1963, 345). People and things are equated in a zeugma: “в пpиxoжeй былo пoлнo нapoдy и вeщeй”—“the hall was full of people and things” (Nabokov 1963, 359).

I believe that Nabokov’s lexicon and cognitive structures are difficult to separate, even for analytical purposes. Viewed together, they convey a very distinct, “un-Russian” point of view emphasized by Nabokov’s contemporaries and critics. Georgy Adamovich accused Nabokov of excessive playfulness and refusal to see the truth of life behind his writings, “a deeply un-Russian trait in Nabokov” (Adamovich 1955, 120). Curiously enough, even our contemporary Boris Paramonov echoed that view: “He is very un-Russian; he turned literature into some sort of beautiful cultural game. A Russian writer cannot be like that. As a cultural type, the Russian writer should be Dostoevsky-like, not Nabokov-like” (Paramonov 1997). Indeed, Fyodor is not concerned about saving anyone’s soul. He neither condemns humans nor calls for a change. Instead, when the local Germans become the butt of his scorn, Fyodor’s gaze completely dismembers them. We only see eloquent parts of the body, never a whole person:

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Cepыe, в нapocтax и вздyтыx жилax, cтapчecкиe нoги, кaкaя-нибyдь плocкaя cтyпня и янтapнaя, тyзeмнaя мoзoль, poзoвoe, кaк cвинья пyзo, […], глoбycы гpyдeй и тяжeлыe гyзнa, pыxлыe, в гoлyбыx пoдтeкax ляжки, гycинaя кoжa, пpыщaвыe лoпaтки кpивoнoгиx дeв, кpeпкиe шeи и ягoдицы мycкyлиcтыx xyлигaнoв, бeзнaдeжнaя, бeзбoжнaя тyпocть дoвoльныx лиц, вoзня, гoгoт, плecк – вce этo cливaлocь в aпoфeoз тoгo cлaвнoгo нeмeцкoгo дoбpoдyшия, кoтopoe в тaкoй ecтecтвeннoй лeгкocтью мoжeт в любyю минyтy oбepнyтьcя бeшeным yлюлюкaньeм. (Nabokov 1938, 511)

Old men’s gray legs covered with growths and swollen veins; flat feet; the tawny crust of corns; pink porcine paunches; […] the globes of breasts; voluminous posteriors; flabby thighs blueish varices; gooseflesh; the pimply shoulder blades of bandy-legged girls; the sturdy necks and buttocks of muscular hooligans; the hopeless, godless vacancy of satisfied faces; romps, guffaws, roisterous splashing—all this formed the apotheosis of that renowned German good-naturedness which can turn so easily at any moment into frenzied hooting (Nabokov 1963, 348). The concept of “soul”,13 a prized part of the Russian linguistic personality, deserves special attention. In The Gift , the soul can be exteriorized and described in sensory terms. Thus, Germans resting in Grünewalde are reduced to “the smell of dried, smoked, potted souls a penny a piece”— “Зaпax вялeныx, кoпчeныx, гpoшeвыx дyш” (Nabokov 1938, 511)… The potted souls are contrasted with an animate lake: “нo caмoe oзepo […] дepжaлocь c дocтoинcтвoм”— “but the lake […] bore itself with dignity” (Nabokov 1963, 348). Nabokov most frequently conjures the soul as a receptacle and as a part of the body that can experience physical sensations: “дyшa coннaя и зaжмypeннaя, дoвoльнaя cвoeй клeткoй” (Nabokov 1938, 488)—“soul […] lay there sleepy eyes shut, content with its cage” (Nabokov 1963, 314). Since such frames tend to play against cognitive expectations of Russian readers, the dissonance compels them to develop an additional, unique vision of one’s life—the only realistic lesson that proved so invaluable to generations of Soviet and post-Soviet readers, wary of easy recipes of salvation, “massive friendships, asinine affinities or the spirit of age” (Nabokov 1963, 353). When a political change can mean an imposed poetical vision of a megalomaniac, otherwordliness becomes not only a spiritual, but also a very tangible everyday concern: how do I read the rules of a new order?

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With whom do I ally myself? What does “I” mean in the new world? Victor Erofeev argues that by taking humans apart, depriving them of the automatic right to have a soul, Nabokov literally tests people. Those who fail the test are relegated to the status of things. Erofeev describes this move as affirming the primacy of “I,” disparaged both within Russian Orthodox and Soviet discourses, over the collective “we”: “Nabokov’s metaphysical doubt closed the upper level of the symbolic prose, i.e., not only did it make impossible the merging of his ‘I’ with the horizontal ‘we,’ but it also shut the way to the vertical plane—the possibility of merging with the world soul into a certain mystical ‘we’” (Erofeev 1990, 16). Fyodor becomes Nabokov’s spokesperson when he attempts to provide a glimpse into this unusual vision: an acute perception of both humans and things that endows objects with consciousness transforms all “the trash of life” into beauty. On his way to a language lesson, Fyodor deplores wasting his youth on teaching foreign languages while he should be teaching: […] that mysterious and refined thing which he alone—out of ten thousand, […] perhaps even a million men—knew how to teach: for example multi-level thinking: you look at a person and you see him as clearly as if he were fashioned of glass and you were the glass blower, while at the same time without in the least impinging upon that clarity you notice some trifle on the side—such as the similarity of the telephone receiver’s shadow to a huge, slightly crushed ant, and (all this simultaneously) the convergence is joined by a third thought—the memory of a sunny evening at a Russian small railway station […]. Or: a piercing pity—for the tin box in a waste patch, for the cigarette card from the series National Costumes trampled in the mud, for the poor stray word repeated by the kind-hearted, weak, loving creature who has just been scolded for nothing—for all the trash of life which by means of momentary alchemic distillation—the “royal experiment” —is turned into something valuable and eternal”. (Nabokov 1963, 176)

Intertextuality in the Gift: The Gift ’s Dialog with Russian Literature On one hand, as the analysis of Nabokov’s lexicon and conceptosphere shows, switching to English reinforced some of the already existing peculiarities of his style in Russian; on the other hand, it is impossible to deny that the major novel of the author who has been repeatedly labeled as

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the most detached, foreign and soulless of émigré writers, is steeped in the history and main concerns of Russian literature. Even the narratological riddles that will become prominent in Nabokov’s English works were not entirely without precedent in Russian literature. One of Nabokov’s devices used in the novel, “foreshadowing of the not-yet-written-work,” can also be observed in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Davydov 1995, 494).14 Dolinin divides major intertextual references in The Gift into three categories with different structural functions: (1) masterpieces of Russian poetry (Derzhvian, Pushkin, Blok, Gumelev, Khodasevich), to elucidate major themes; (2) nineteenth-century Russian prose is used for plotting and character development, and (3) contemporary literature is often discussed derisively and parodied. Although most of the writers and critics mercilessly derided in The Gift had several prototypes,15 Nabokov’s scathing parodies were not meant to be, in Zina’s words, “mass executions of good acquaintances” (Nabokov 1963, 364), but rather “a desire to show a certain order of literary ideas, typical at a given time,” as the author wrote to Mark Aldanov (Nabokov qtd. in Dolinin 2004, 149). The Nabokov scholar Alexandrov contends that Nabokov’s textual patterns and inclusion of fictional texts are not gratuitous; they imitate the interaction between man, nature, and otherworld: “the metaliterary is camouflage for and a model of the metaphysical” (Alexandrov 1995, 554). But the metaphysical in Nabokov’s world can only be communicated in language and through senses. For instance, a fictitious sage, Delalande, who also appears in Invitation to a Beheading , erases the distinction between the graspable, sensory realm of a conscious life and afterlife in his treatise Discours sur les ombres: Haибoлee дocтyпный для нaшиx дoмoceдныx чyвcтв oбpaз бyдyщeгo пocтижeния oкpecтнocти, дoлжeнcтвyющeй pacкpытьcя нaм пo pacпaдe тeлa, этo – ocвoбoждeниe дyxa из глaзниц плoти и пpeвpaщeниe нaшe в oднo cвoбoднoe cплoшнoe oкo, зapaз видящee вce cтopoны cвeтa, или, инaчe гoвopя: cвepxчyвcтвeннoe пpoзpeниe миpa пpи нaшeм внyтpeннeм yчacтии. (Nabokov 1938, 484) For our stay-at-home senses, the most accessible image of our future comprehension of those surroundings, which are due to be revealed to us with the disintegration of the body is the liberation of the soul from the eye-sockets of the flesh and our transformation into one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see in all directions, or to put

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it differently: a supersensory insight into the world accompanied by our inner participation. (Nabokov 1963, 322)

In a conversation with Delalande, dying Alexander Chernyshevsky discovers that another realm has always surrounded us and that the belief in ghosts, symbols, quest for God, and the traditional parade of the afterlife is cumbersome and disappointingly earthly (Nabokov 1963, 322–323). Even when Chernyshevsky believes that he finally reached lucidity before his death and announces: “Кaкиe глyпocти. Кoнeчнo, ничeгo пoтoм нeт. […] Этo тaк жe яcнo, кaк тo, чтo идeт дoждь” (Nabokov 1938, 486– 487)— “What nonsense. Of course, there is nothing afterwards […] it is as clear as the fact that it is raining” (Nabokov 1963, 324), it turns out that even then he was not immune to mistakes. Meanwhile, there was no rain; the sky was bright and cloudless, and the tenant from upstairs was watering the flowers on her balcony. Intertextual incursions in The Gift help define a philosophical position that Nabokov will develop in his subsequent novels: such surprises and mistaken intuitions are inevitable in the world that is intellectually above us all; therefore, neither senses nor beliefs make it fully intelligible.

Concluding Remarks It would be presumptuous to claim that Nabokov’s narrative techniques and cognitive models, unusual for Russian, are purely a result of the author’s multilingualism or his personal trajectory. Nabokov’s trilingual childhood and translations of other authors certainly inflected Nabokov’s cognitive and linguistic experience, even in his first literary language, which became an important site of cultural and stylistic innovation. However, Nabokov’s project consisted in developing a unique relationship with words and phenomenal reality in any language available to him. Similar to Fyodor, by rejecting all the irrelevant literary models that are unable to survive the test of exile, and positioning himself against bloglike human documents and popular eschatological theories of the time, he seeks to extend “the shadow of [his] world” not only beyond the confines of émigré literature, but also beyond the scope of national literature. Admittedly, the theory of linguistic personality has limited applicability in Nabokov’s case, but using some of its categories enabled me to contextualize Nabokov’s linguistic and narrative innovations. In addition to close reading, linguistic analysis and reliance on inevitably subjective

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judgment, such investigations would further benefit from computational statistical studies that would compare national corpora with the writer’s idiolect and would complement researchers’ analyses with automated conceptual mapping of Nabokov’s texts.

Notes 1. There is an array of terminological options for designating writing in more than one language or writing in L2. Some of the most commonly used terms are bilingual, polyglot, multilingual, or plurilingual writers. For instance, Steven Kellman in the Translingual Imagination suggests the term translingual and distinguishes between ambilingual (writing in 2 languages) and monolingual translinguals (writing only in L2); Aneta Pavlenko in The Bilingual Mind (Pavlenko 2014) recognizes the approximate nature of the terms and uses bilingual as an umbrella term that includes multilingual (xi). Likewise, I will use the terms translingual, bilingual writing and literary bilingualism interchangeably regardless of the number of languages involved in each particular case. 2. For instance, Adamovich acknowledged Nabokov’s talent, but found that the author’s characters were not fully human and lacked soul (Adamovich 1955, 209). Varshavsky praised Nabokov’s adaptability and technical mastery, but found his writing too sensual and lacking in depth. “Побеждает раса более мелкая, но более гибкая и живучая. Именно какое-то несколько даже утомительное изобилие физиологической жизненности поражает, прежде всего, в Сирине. Все чрезвычайно сочно и красочно, и как-то жирно. Но за этим […]—пустота, […] страшная именно отсутствием глубины.” “It is a smaller, but more adaptable race that ends up winning. The overwhelming amount of physiological vitality that is so impressive in Sirin is somewhat tiresome. Everything is extremely luscious and colourful and full, but there is emptiness underneath this […], and what makes it so frightening is complete lack of depth” (Varshavsky 1932, 236). Bunin was infuriated by the novel and in a letter to Aldanov compared Nabokov’s “monstrosities” with the moronic babble of Ipolit Kuragin in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Bunin qtd. in Dolinin 1995, 137). 3. For instance, Vildomec, in Multilingualism, ascertained that active multilingualism is a handicap for literary expression (Vildomec 1963, 32). André Martinet, probably guided by the preeminence of speech, states in his often-quoted preface to Uriel Weinreich’s Languages in Contact that “the clash, in the same individual, of two languages of comparable social and cultural value, both spoken by multitudes of monolinguals, maybe

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4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

psychologically most spectacular, but unless we have to do with a literary genius, the permanent linguistic traces of such a clash will be nil” (Martinet 1953, vii-viii). Anokhina (2015, 2017) and Anokhina and Sciarrino (2018). The last two categories are very loosely defined in Karaulov’s theory; for a productive critique of the applicability of those terms, see Karakutz-Borodina (2003). Most examples are provided from the Russian Dar and followed by the authorized translation by Scammell-Nabokov. Interestingly, in his critique of translations of Nabokov’s English work into Russian, Ivan Tolstoi encourages Russian translators to draw on the suffixes and epithets Nabokov himself used in his Russian prose (Tolstoi 2000). Jane Grayson points out that Nabokov carried over the metrical prose of his Russian writing into English and intensified it with “balanced pairs of words and phrases” or doublets, as Carl Proffer calls them in his study of Lolita (Grayson 1977, 208). Michael Scammell offered his manuscript to Grayson for comparing his version with Nabokov’s revised and published version. See Grayson (1977). For more on these colors in The Gift , also see Trufanova (2014). Lilac is sirenevy in Russian. See, for instance, comments by Zinaida Shakhovskaya (1991) and Georgy Adamovich (1932). Bunin, Varshavsky and Osorgin expressed similar views. For cognitive models of soul in Nabokov’s Russian works, see KarakutsBorodina (2003). For more on Pushkin’s subtext see Dolinin (1997), Davydov (1991, 1995), Johnson (1985), and Karlinsky (1963). Parodies of anti-western writing coming from new Soviet and émigré writers: Gorky, Mayakovsky, Severianin; a farcical symbolist drama (a play by Busch in ch. 1, Andrei Bely’s “cabbage hexameter” in ch. 3).

Bibliography Adamovich, Georgy. 1932. O literature v èmigratsii. Sovremennye zapiski. 50: 327–329. Paris. ———. 1955. Odinochestvo i svoboda. Literaturno-kriticheskii statii. Reprint, Saint-Petersburg: Aleteia, 2002. Alexandrov, V. 1995. Nature and Artifice. In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. V. Alexandrov, 553–556. New York: Garland Publishing Inc.

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Anokhina, O. 2015. Plurilinguisme et créativité littéraire / Multilinguismo e criação literária / Multilingualism and Literary Creation. Scriptorium 1: 75–83. ———. 2017. Vladimir Nabokov, un écrivain plurilingue. In Le proche et le lointain: enseigner, apprendre et partager des cultures étrangères, ed. E. Argaud, M. Al-Zaum, and E. da Silva Akborisova, 1–7. Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines. ———., and Emilio Sciarrino (eds.). 2018. Entre les langues, special issue of Genesis 46: 11–34. Berdjis, N.W. 1995. Imagery in Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Russian Novel (Dar), Its English Translation (The Gift), and Other Prose Works of the 1930s. Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang. Bozovic, M. 2016. Nabokov’s Canon from Onegin to Ada. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press. Castro, O., S. Mainer, and S. Skomorokhova (eds.). 2017. Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in Multilingual European Contexts. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Davydov, S. 1991. Pushkinskie vesy V. Nabokova. Iskusstvo Leningrada 6: 39–46. ———. 1995. Nabokov and Pushkin. In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. V. E. Alexandrov, 482–496. New York: Garland Publishing Inc. Dolinin, A. 1995. The Gift. In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. V.E. Alexandrov, 135–168. New York: Garland Publishing Inc. ———. 1997. Tri zametki o romane Vladimira Nabokova “Dar.” In Vladimir Nabokov: Pro et Contra. Saint-Petersburg: izdatelstvo RGCHI. ———. 2000. Primechaniia k romany V.V. Nabokova “Dar” Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda v pyati tomakh, vol. 4. Saint-Petersburg: Symposium. ———. 2004. Istinnaia zhizn’ pisatelia Sirina. Saint Petersburg: Academichesky Proekt. Erofeev, Victor. 1990. Russkaya prosa V. Nabokova. In Nabokov V. V. Sobranie sochineniy v 4 t., t. t. 1-3-32. Moskva: Pravda. Falceri, Giorgia, Eva Gentes, and Manterola Elizabete (eds.). 2017. Narrating the Self in Self-Translation. Ticontre 7. http://www.ticontre.org/ojs/index. php/t3/index. Accessed 5 June 2018. Ferraro, A., and R. Grutman (eds.). 2016. L’autotraduction littéraire: perspectives théoriques. Paris: Garnier. Grayson, J. 1977. Nabokov Translated. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, D.B. 1985. Worlds in Regression. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Karakutz-Borodina, L.A. 2003. Iazykovaia lichnost’ Vladimira Nabokova kak avtora khudozhestvennogo teksta. Ufa: Redaktsionno-izdatelskii otdel Bashkirskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, Ufa. Karaulov, I. 1987. Russkii iazyk i iazykovaia lichnost. Moscow: Nauka. Karlinsky, S. 1963. Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels as a Work of Literary Criticism: A Structural Analysis. Slavic and Eastern European Journal 7 (3): 284–296.

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Kellman, Steven. 2000. The Translingual Imagination. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Lagarde, Christian (ed.). 2015. L’autotraduction: une perspective sociolinguistique. Glottopol 25. http://glottopol.univ-rouen.fr/numero_25.html. Accessed 18 June 2018. Martinet, André. 1953. Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems, vol. 1, vii–viii. New York: Linguistic Circle of New York. Miłosz, Czesław. 1976. Notes on Exile. Books Abroad 50 (2) (Spring): 281–284. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1938. Dar. Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda v pyati tomakh, vol. 4. Reprint, Saint-Petersburg: Symposium, 2000. ———. 1963. The Gift. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Paramonov, Boris. 1997. Russkuiu zhin’ izurodovali khoroshie knigi. Literaturnaia gazeta, 28 May. Pavlenko, Aneta. 2014. The Bilingual Mind: And What It Tells Us About Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Puccini, Paola (ed.). 2015. Regards croisés autour de l’autotraduction. Interfrancophonies 6. http://www.interfrancophonies.org/index.php?option= com_content&view=category&id=24&Itemid=118. Accessed 10 June 2018. Shakhovskaya, Zinaida. 1991. V poiskakh Nabokova. Otrazheniya. Moscow: Kniga. Steiner, George. 1971. Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution. New York: Atheneum. Tammi, Pekka. 1985. Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics: A Narratological Analysis. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Tolstoi, I. 2000. Nabokov пo-pyccки. Revue Des études Slaves 72 (3–4): 513–519. Trufanova, I.V. 2014. Mif o Dionise v romane Nabokova Dar. European Social Science Journal 7 (46), v. 2. Moscow. Varshavsky, Vladimir. 1932. V. Sirin: Podvig. In Vladimir Nabokov: Pro et Contra. Reprint, Saint-Petersburg: izdatelstvo RGCHI, 1997. Vildomec, V. 1963. Multilingualism. Leiden: A. W. Sythoff.

PART II

Crossing Sensations and Languages: Multilingualism, Memory and Intermediality

CHAPTER 6

An Eden of Sensations: The Five Senses in Speak, Memory Damien Mollaret

That sinless Paradise, full of furtive pleasures, Is it farther off now than India and China? Can one call it back with plaintive cries, And animate it still with a silvery voice, That sinless Paradise full of furtive pleasures?1 (Charles Baudelaire “Moesta et Errabunda,” trans. William Aggeler)

In his lecture on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Professor Nabokov explains that “the literature of sensations,” which he considers as the true one, is much more interesting than “the literature of ideas.” He summarizes Proust’s masterpiece (seven books, several thousand pages) in one sentence: “The whole is a treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding place the past” (Nabokov 1980, 207). Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, can be considered as a treasure hunt as well, where the treasure would be his lost childhood and adolescence in his lost Russia. Sensations and memory are so profoundly linked in it that its title could have been “Speak, Sensations” as well. In Chapter I, Nabokov

D. Mollaret (B) University of Bordeaux Montaigne, Pessac, France © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_6

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explains that the recollection of his earliest sensations is a great source of pleasure: I may be inordinately fond of my earliest impressions, but then I have reason to be grateful to them. They led the way to a veritable Eden of visual and tactile sensations. […] Nothing is sweeter or stranger than to ponder those first thrills. (Nabokov 1966, 373)

How does writing on sensations allow Nabokov to bring back “That sinless Paradise, full of furtive pleasures,” to reconstitute the lost Eden of his childhood and adolescence in Russia? First, I will focus on the development of Nabokov’s childhood sensitiveness and how he learned at an early age to hoard all kinds of sensitive memories. Then, I will examine the links between sensations and memory. Like in Proust’s novels, sensations are necessary keys to explore the past and their precise expression always brightens up old memories. And finally, I will analyze how different sensations are combined or, on the contrary, voluntarily separated, in interesting exercises of style.

The Richness of Nabokov’s Sensations: Three Early Sensations Let us examine some of the earliest sensations Nabokov very carefully describes in Chapter 1. Here is the sensual description of a crystal egg the child used to play with: The recollection of my crib, with its lateral nets of fluffy cotton cords, brings back, too, the pleasure of handling a certain beautiful, delightfully solid, garnet-dark crystal egg left over from some unremembered Easter; I used to chew a corner of the bedsheet until it was thoroughly soaked and then wrap the egg in it tightly, so as to admire and re-lick the warm, ruddy glitter of the snugly enveloped facets that came seeping through with a miraculous completeness of glow and color. (Nabokov 1966, 373)

In comparison to this magic crystal egg that Nabokov could touch in his crib, the Fabergé eggs he saw through the Fabergé store window on his strolls with Mademoiselle have no value. They are even described as: “mineral monstrosities” (Nabokov 1966, 453). Another early sensation

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that profoundly marked the child is a handful of fabulous lights seen from a train at night: One night, during a trip abroad, in the fall of 1903, I recall kneeling on my (flattish) pillow at the window of a sleeping car […] and seeing with an inexplicable pang, a handful of fabulous lights that beckoned to me from a distant hillside, and then slipped into a pocket of black velvet: diamonds that I later gave away to my characters to alleviate the burden of my wealth. (Nabokov 1966, 373)

In fact, the writer, who often passes on memories of his own sensations to his characters, gave those “diamonds” to Martin Edelweiss, the main character of his novel Glory. And here is an auditory sensation: As I crawl over those rocks, I keep repeating, in a kind of zestful, copious, and deeply gratifying incantation, the English word “childhood”, which sounds mysterious and new, and becomes stranger and stranger as it get mixed up in my small, overstocked, hectic mind, with Robin Hood and Little Red Riding Hood, and the brown hoods of old hunch backed fairies. There are dimples in the rocks, full of tepid seawater, and my magic muttering accompanies certain spells I am weaving over the tiny sapphire of pools. (Nabokov 1966, 374)

This image can be seen as the anticipation of the magic act of writing about one’s childhood in a foreign language. Even if it has been a long time since childhood, something of its sweetness and strangeness seems to remain in the word itself: “childhood.” When Nabokov’s family went into exile after the Bolshevik Revolution, his mother managed to take away a handful of jewelry which helped them to live in Europe. The treasures he managed to save are his childhood sensations often described in terms of precious stones: “the crystal egg,” “the diamonds of lights” and “the sapphire of pools.” Asked about what he had lost in Russia, Nabokov (who had lost a huge fortune inherited from his uncle Ruka) would say that he had taken with him all he needed: the Russian language, the Russian literature, and his childhood, which constitute the real “burden of [his] wealth.” At the end of Speak, Memory, as if he wanted to close the circle, a new image of lost Eden echoes the first thrills of Chapter 1. The young father, who goes into raptures looking at his baby Dmitri, catches a glimpse of Eden in his little pupils:

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[…] that swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forest where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns […]. (Nabokov 1966, 617)

A Gift from His Mother Nabokov inherited from his father the desire to excel everywhere and a passion for literature. But his mother gave him something very precious as well. With a magic formula—“Vot zapomni” (now remember)—she taught him how to cultivate and memorize his sensations and she encouraged the general sensitiveness he had to visual stimulation: “Vot zapomni [now remember],” she would say in conspiratorial tones as she drew my attention to this or that loved thing in Vyra – a lark ascending the curds-and-whey sky of a dull spring day, heat lightning taking pictures of a distant line of trees in the night, the palette of maple leaves on brown sand, a small bird’s cuneate footprints on new snow. (Nabokov 1966, 387)

She painted aquarelles for him and at night, she would let him play different games and take his time going to bed. His favorite was climbing the stairs very slowly with his eyes shut, following the rhythm indicated by his mother pronouncing “step, step, step”: “This slow, somewhat somnambulistic ascension in self-engendered darkness held obvious delights. The keenest of them was not knowing when the last step would come” (Nabokov 1966, 426). Closing his eyes, the little boy could concentrate on other senses (hearing and touch in this case). Then, he would stay a long time sitting on the toilet, listening to the dripping faucet, echoing the recent “step, step, step.” He would press the middle of his brow against the smooth edge of the door left ajar, and roll his head, so that the door would move to and fro. And he would combine this rhythmic sound with visual patterns found in the linoleum. The pleasure of the whole process seems to be in the combination of hearing, touch and sight. Among other activities that his mother did, Nabokov describes her doing jigsaw puzzles: Under her expert hands, the thousand bits of a jigsaw puzzle gradually formed an English hunting scene; what had seemed to be the limb of a horse would turn out to belong to an elm and the hitherto unplaceable piece would snugly fill up a gap in the mottled background, affording one

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the delicate thrill of an abstract and yet tactile satisfaction. (Nabokov 1966, 389)

There is an interesting echo of this excerpt at the end of his autobiography, when he describes his own activity as a chess problem composer: There is a feeling of snugness (which goes back to one’s childhood, to play-planning in bed, with parts of toys fitting into corners of one’s brain); there is the nice way one piece is ambushed behind another, within the comfort and warmth of an out-of-the-way square; and there is the smooth motion of a well-oiled and polished machine that runs sweetly at the touch of two forked fingers lightly lifting and lightly lowering a piece. (Nabokov 1966, 610)

Nabokov rediscovers “the delicate thrill of an abstract and yet tactile satisfaction” that his mother felt when she did jigsaw puzzles. “The feeling of snugness” he experiences while placing the chess pieces on the board simultaneously echoes his own games in bed as a child, and his mother’s finding the appropriate place for a piece of her jigsaw puzzle: “the unplaceable piece would snugly fill up a gap.”

Sight as the Prince of Nabokov’s Senses In a BBC Television interview given in 1962, Nabokov expresses his love for colors: I think I was a born painter – really! – and up to my fourteenth year, perhaps, I used to spend most of the day drawing and painting and I was supposed to become a painter in due time. But I don’t think I had any real talent there. However, the sense of color, the love of color, I’ve had all my life. (Nabokov 1973, 17)

Thus, just like Rex (a character of his novel Laughter in the Dark) Nabokov certainly considered sight as “the prince of all our senses” (Nabokov 1938, 158). As a matter of fact, he occasionally substitutes visual descriptions for the expectable auditive ones. For example, describing the operas, he often attended in his childhood, he neglects the sounds in order to focus on his “visual torments”:

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Despite the number of operas I was exposed to every winter (I must have attended Ruslan and Pikovaya Dama at least a dozen times in the course of half as many years), my weak responsiveness to music was completely overrun by the visual torment of not being able to read over Pimen’s shoulder or of trying in vain to imagine the hawkmoths in the dim bloom of Juliet’s garden. (Nabokov 1966, 382)

In the same way, while Mademoiselle was reading French books to him on the veranda, he would concentrate on the expression of her face or on what was happening in the surroundings, looking at the colorful garden through the harlequin pattern of colored panes. Almost nothing is said about the stories she was reading. Actually, instead of letting his imagination travel to the worlds of fiction, he was looking intensely at the real world around him. But the melodious and rhythmical flow of words played an important role. They helped him to observe minute details more accurately: Presently my attention would wander still farther, and it was then, perhaps, that the rare purity of her rhythmic voice accomplished its true purpose. I looked at a tree and the stir of its leaves borrowed that rhythm. […] Coming from nowhere, a Comma butterfly settled on the threshold, basked in the sun with its angular fulvous wings spread, suddenly closed them just to show the tiny initial chalked on their dark underside, and as suddenly darted away. (Nabokov 1966, 449)

The French novelist Romain Gary once explained that in order to precisely remember a beautiful landscape one should “eat it,” that is, eat something good (he would choose Russian pickles) while watching it (Gary 1958, 44–47). Mademoiselle’s voice played the same role for Nabokov as Russian pickles did for Romain Gary. Combined with other sensations such as hearing or taste, it seems that images gain intensity and remain longer in one’s memory.

Sensations as Bridges Between Past and Present: Nabokov’s Madeleines In his novel In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust shows how a sensation, like the famous taste of a madeleine soaked into linden blossom tea, can trigger an unintentional memory and bring back whole sections of the past that seemed forgotten. Nabokov explains it in his lecture on Proust:

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To recreate the past something other than the operation of memory must happen: there must be a combination of a present sensation (especially taste, smell, touch, sound) with a recollection, a remembrance, of the sensuous past. (Nabokov 1980, 249)

Thus, different present sensations such as the taste of a madeleine, the feeling of uneven cobbles, the tingle of a spoon or the stiffness of a napkin will suddenly remind the narrator of similar sensations from the past and remind him clearly of some period of his life. Proust himself really liked another illustration of the involuntary memory, found in Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: Yesterday evening I was walking alone. […] I was roused from my reflections by the warbling of a thrush perched on the highest branch of a birch. This magic sound brought my father’s land back before my eyes in an instant. I forgot the disasters I had only recently witnessed and, abruptly transported into the past, I saw again those fields where I so often heard the thrushes whistling. (de Chateaubriand 2018, 92)2

The process of involuntary memory is well described in an excerpt from Glory, a novel Nabokov first wrote in Russian in 1932, with the title Podvig: When Martin deliberately visited in Berlin that intersection, that square, which he had seen as a child, there was nothing that gave him the least shiver of excitement, but on the other hand, a chance whiff of coal or automobile exhaust, a certain special pale hue of the sky seen through a lace curtain, or the shudder of the windowpanes awakened by a passing truck, instantly brought back the essence of city, hotel, and drab morning, part of an image that Berlin had once impressed upon him. (Nabokov 1971, 109–110)

The voluntary memory is unable to recreate the image of Berlin Martin had, but chance sensations (here smell, sight or sound) instantly bring back memories of the Berlin as he knew it formerly. Experiences of involuntary memory are also described in Speak, Memory. Here is an example where the memory is triggered—not by the taste of a madeleine or the sound of a thrush—but by the (wonderful!) smell of ether:

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Soon after the wardrobe affair I found a spectacular moth, marooned in a corner of a vestibule window, and my mother dispatched it with ether. In later years, I used many killing agents, but the least contact with the initial stuff would always cause the porch of the past to light up and attract that blundering beauty. Once, as a grown man, I was under ether during appendectomy, and with the vividness of a decalcomania picture I saw my own self in a sailor suit mounting a freshly emerged Emperor moth under the guidance of a Chinese lady who I knew was my mother. (Nabokov 1966, 460)

Thanks to this particular smell, as a grown-up, Nabokov forgets the unpleasant present of his appendectomy and flies back into his past. He visualizes very precisely the whole operation of his mounting a butterfly with the help of his mother. The metaphor (“to light up the porch of the past”) transforms the smelling sensation in something visual, which introduces the recollection of a happy scene of his childhood.

Sensations Contained in Old Books In 1905, Marcel Proust published an essay called Sur la lecture (On Reading ) as a preface of his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies: There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book. […] if we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and the ponds which no longer exist. (Proust 1971)3

In Time Found Again (the seventh part of In Search of Lost Time), Proust rediscovers François le Champi, a novel by George Sand in Guermantes’s library. He realizes that a key moment of his childhood had been locked up in this book. We experience the same link in Speak, Memory with two books: War and Peace by Tolstoy and Les Malheurs de Sophie by Madame de Ségur. [Iouri] had just discovered War and Peace which I had read for the first time when I was eleven (in Berlin, on a Turkish sofa, in our somberly rococo Privatstrasse flat giving on a dark, damp back garden with larches

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and gnomes that have remained in that book, like an old postcard, forever). (Nabokov 1966, 528)

For Nabokov, instead of containing images of Petersburg, Moscow, or Bonaparte’s campaigns in the beginning of nineteenth century, War and Peace contains the image of “a dark, damp back garden with larches and gnomes” in the Berlin of 1910, which corresponds to his first reading of this book. In Chapter 3, Nabokov comes upon some volumes of the “Bibliothèque Rose” in a nursery. It reminds him not only of his childhood (when he was reading those books) but of a particular day when his uncle Ruka found in Les Malheurs de Sophie an excerpt that he had loved in his own childhood. What we have here is a recollection of a recollection. It is as if this book contained two postcards at the same time: one from Nabokov’s childhood and one from uncle Ruka’s childhood. In my own case, when I come over Sophie’s troubles again—her lack of eyebrows and love of thick cream—I not only go through the same agony and delight that my uncle did, but have to cope with an additional burden – the recollection I have of him, reliving his childhood with the help of those very books. I see again my school room in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die. (Nabokov 1966, 421–422)

When opening Les Malheurs de Sophie, Nabokov enters a kind of Eden (“a sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth”). Old impressions imprisoned in this book are suddenly delivered: the sight of the blue roses of the wallpaper, the sound of a bumblebee bumping against the ceiling. Thus, thanks to a chance sensation (the sight of an old book), time seems to freeze, just as in some ecstatic experiences like butterfly hunting or the composition of chess problems.

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The Joy of Recalling Sensations As in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, some sensations of the present (the smell of ether, the sight of an old book) allow Nabokov to travel into the past and to go through pleasant memories again. But Nabokov also often emphasizes the effort of voluntary memory. Eagerly looking into his past, the writer tries to remember all its details and bring old sensations back into the present. Let us take some examples: With a sharp and merry blast from the whistle that was part of my first sailor suit, my childhood calls me back into that distant past to have me shake hands again with my delightful teacher. (Nabokov 1966, 376) And now a delightful thing happens. The process of recreating that penholder and the microcosm in its eyelet stimulates my memory to a last effort. I try to recall the name of Colette’s dog – and, triumphantly, along those remote beaches, over the glossy evening sands of the past, where each footprint slowly fills up with sunset water, here it comes, here it comes, echoing and vibrating: Floss, Floss, Floss! (Nabokov 1966, 488)

In each of those two excerpts, a particular sound (the blast from a whistle; Colette’s voice calling her dog) seems to come from the past and resonate into the present of writing. In those triumphant and delightful experiences, some sensations, playing the role of bridges between the past and the present, suppress the passage of time. In Chapter 2, Nabokov describes a particular movement of his mother pouting her lips: I watched, too, the familiar pouting movement she made to distend the network of her close-fitting veil drawn too tight over her face, and as I write this, the touch of reticulated tenderness that my lips used to feel when I kissed her veiled cheek comes back to me – flies back to me with a shout of joy out of the snow-blue, blue-windowed (the curtains are not yet drawn) past. (Nabokov 1966, 384)

Starting from a visual memory, he suddenly remembers a tactile sensation (the kiss of his mother’s veiled cheek) which is immediately associated with hearing (“a shout of joy”) and sight (“snow-blue, blue windowed past”). Again, recalling very precise sensations brings joy. This description of different kinds of sensations echoing each other is again very Proustian. Moreover, at the beginning of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator also

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describes at length the sensation of his mother’s cheek against his lips, that he felt when giving her a goodnight kiss (Proust 1922, 31).

Writing the Combinations of Sensations: Synesthesia In Nabokov’s novel, The Gift, the young poet Fyodor has an elaborate audition colorée. Nabokov like Fyodor was also a synesthete, and he appreciated French writers who had the same gift such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Proust. In Chapter 2 of Speak, Memory, he explains that since his childhood he has naturally associated a color to each letter of alphabet. This color depends on both its form and pronunciation: “the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of [his] orally forming a given letter while [he] imagine its outline” (Nabokov 1966, 381). And, as he was also a gifted polyglot (like his character Fyodor), he would see the same letter in different colors in accordance with each language: “For instance, the various and numerous “a’s” of the four languages which I speak differ for me in tinge, going from lacquered-black to splintery-grey—like different sorts of wood” (Nabokov 1963, 72). Thus, his “confessions of a synesthete” changes quite a lot in the Russian version of his autobiography. As Russian sounds are different, their colors differ as well. For instance, Nabokov’s words for rainbow are KZSPYGV in English and BEPCKZ in Russian. We can notice that in the English version, Nabokov begins with the violet (k) and finishes with the red (v) (that is, he sees the rainbow from inside to outside), whereas in the Russian version, he begins with the red (B) and finishes with the violet (Z). Moreover, in Speak, Memory certain nouns or names may be given a special color as in Proust’s prose. In the Russian version of his autobiography, the word soomerki, which means “dusk,” has a “languorous and purple sound”: “‘cymepki’ —kako to tomny cipenevy zvyk!” (But this synesthetic description disappears in the English version: “Summer soomerki – the lovely Russian word for dusk” (Nabokov 1966, 424). Describing his first Russian love, Nabokov gives his girlfriend, whose real name was Valentina, but who he knew as Lyussya (Boyd 1990, 112), another name, Tamara, “concolorous with the real one” (Nabokov 1966, 554). Finally, synesthetic images can also be created by metaphors or similes, as in this example: “In fact, I was working at my elegy very hard, taking endless trouble over every line, choosing and rejecting, rolling the words on my tongue with the glazed-eyed solemnity of a tea-taster […]”

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(Nabokov 1966, 548). Here, thanks to the metaphor, the sense of hearing that the poet is trying to describe is replaced by the sense of taste.

Cosmic Synchronization In Chapter 11, Nabokov describes the birth of his verse-making numb fury at the age of fifteen. Completely distracted, the young poet never knows where he is nor how he got there. But he also discovers a new ability to feel a huge number of different sensations at the same time. An imaginary philosophical friend of the author, Vivian Bloodmark (we can recognize Vladimir Nabokov under the mask of this anagram) used to say that: “while the scientist sees everything that happens in on point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time” (Nabokov 1966, 544). The young poet experiences what this philosopher would call “cosmic synchronization”: While politely discussing with him my father’s sudden journey to town, I registered simultaneously and with equal clarity not only his wilting flowers, his flowing tie and the blackheads on the fleshy volutes of his nostrils, but also the dull little voice of a cuckoo from afar, and the flash of a Queen of Spain settling on the road, and the remembered impression of pictures (enlarged agricultural pests and bearded Russian writers) in the well-aerated classrooms of the village school which I had once or twice visited; and—to continue a compilation that hardly does justice to the ethereal simplicity of the whole process—the throb of some utterly irrelevant recollection (a pedometer I had lost) was released from a neighboring brain cell, and the savor of the grass stalk I was chewing mingled with the cuckoo’s note and the fritillary’s takeoff, and all the while I was richly, serenely aware of my own manifold awareness. (Nabokov 1966, 544–545)

Several sensations of different nature mingle: taste (“the savor of the grass”), hearing (“the cuckoo’s note”) and sight (“the flash” of the butterfly). The difficulty here is to express simultaneous sensations in a linear paragraph. In this huge sentence Nabokov describes a mindfulness experience (highly recommended by Buddhism), that is to bring one’s attention to one’s sensations in the present moment. It reminds us of similar descriptions in The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, who is certainly, with Proust and Nabokov, one of the best writers of sensations. Bernardo Soares (alias Pessoa) often experiences this kind of “cosmic synchronization,” exploring his own sensations like large unknown countries: “we

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hunch over the book of sensations like scrupulous scholars of feeling4 ” (Pessoa 2011, 12).

Nabokov with Eyes (Wide) Shut Sight is the prince of Nabokov’s senses and, even if the five senses are represented, visual sensations are the most abundant in Speak, Memory. But in some excerpts, Nabokov enjoys “the luxury of closing his eyes” in order to focus on other senses, just as in the “staircase game” he played going to bed when he was a child. Let us take two examples: a birthday banquet in Vyra and a soccer game in Cambridge. At the end of Chapter 8, there is a wonderful description of a birthday feast in the park of Nabokov’s summer house. Here, he tries to separate clearly the visual and the auditive sensations. Firstly, he describes the whole scene with all its visual details, without any sound, as if it were a silent film. “Through a tremulous prism, I distinguish the features of relatives and familiars, mute lips serenely moving in forgotten speech” (Nabokov 1966, 506–507). And then, closing his eyes and pressing the magic sound button, he starts the same description again with all the auditive details corresponding to the visual ones already presented: And then, suddenly, just when the colors and outlines settle at last to their various duties – smiling, frivolous duties – some knob is touched and a torrent of sounds comes to life: voices speaking all together, a walnut cracked, the click of a nutcracker carelessly passed, thirty human hearts drowning mine with their regular beats; the sough and sigh of a thousand trees, the local concord of loud summer birds, and, beyond the river, behind the rhythmic trees, the confused and enthusiastic hullabaloo of bathing young villagers, like a background of wild applause. (Nabokov 1966, 507)

This is an interesting exercise of style, which consists of describing a scene isolating a single sensation. The second example comes from Chapter 13. During his studies in Cambridge, Nabokov played soccer as a goalkeeper. Here is a description of a game: The far, blurred sounds, a cry, a whistle, the thud of a kick, all that was perfectly unimportant and had no connection with me. I was less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret. As with folded arms I leant my back against the left goalpost, I enjoyed the luxury of closing my eyes, and thus I would listen to my heart knocking and feel the blind drizzle on

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my face and hear, in the distance, the broken sounds of a game, and think of myself as of a fabulous exotic being in an English footballer’s disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. Small wonder I was not very popular with my teammates. (Nabokov 1966, 589)

As the action takes place on the other side of the soccer field, the distracted goalkeeper forgets all about the game. He closes his eyes and focuses on both tactile sensations (“the blind drizzle,” “the left goalpost”) and auditive ones (“a cry, a whistle, the thud of a kick,” “[his] heart knocking,” “the broken sounds of a game”). Those descriptions with his eyes shut remind us of the second part of Laughter in the Dark. The main character, Albinus, has suddenly lost his sight in a car accident. Just as in the “staircase game” of his childhood, or in the “soccer game” of his youth, the author tries to listen and to feel as a blind man. Albinus’s specialty had been a passion for art; his most brilliant discovery had been Margot. But now, all that was left of her was a voice, a rustle, and a perfume; it was as if she had returned to the darkness of the little cinema from which he had once withdrawn her. (Nabokov 1938, 165)

Writing on sensations probably helped Nabokov to develop his own sensitiveness, especially when he focuses on senses other than sight. His dream was to become an erudite of sensations, as he explains in this confession: I would like to remember every small park we visited. I would like to have the ability Professor Jack, of Harvard and the Arnold Arboretum, told his students he had of identifying twigs with his eyes shut, merely from the sound of their swish through the air (“Hornbeam, honeysuckle, Lombardy poplar. Ah – a folded Transcript ”). (Nabokov 1966, 622)

Conclusion The Italian novelist Italo Calvino—a great admirer of Nabokov’s work— intended to write a book about the five senses, which would have been constituted of five short stories, each focusing on one of the senses. This book, titled Under the Jaguar Sun, is unfortunately not finished, with only three stories written, one on smell, one on taste and one on hearing. Here is a quotation from a conference Calvino did as he was writing it:

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Writing it, I have the problem that my sense of smell is not very sharp, I lack really keen hearing, I am not a gourmet, my sense of touch is unrefined, and I am nearsighted. For each one of the five senses, I have to make an effort in order to master a range of sensations and nuances. I don’t know if I shall succeed, but my efforts, in this case as in the others, are not merely aimed at making a book but also at changing myself, the goal of all human endeavor. (Calvino 1983, 39)5

Unlike Italo Calvino, or at least unlike what the Italian writer pretends, Nabokov had very sharp senses, that he kept developing from his early childhood. Even if he claims to have no responsiveness to music, he wonderfully describes little sounds and noises. As an entomologist interested in drawing, he had of course a very sharp visual sense, but he was also attentive to the sounds of butterflies and even to their subtle perfume: “a perfume which varies with the species – vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define” (Nabokov 1966, 479). As a composer of chess problems, he would not only focus on the visual aspect of problems, but also on the tactile and auditive impressions linked to chess. As a professor of literature, he would repeat to his students: “In reading one should notice and fondle details” (Nabokov 1980, 1). And as a writer, he was a genius at describing little sensations (smells, sounds, tactile feelings, lights and shadows, etc.) Reading Nabokov’s autobiography—and Nabokov’s novels in general, just like those of Proust—is a very good exercise to develop one’s own sensitiveness in order to break “l’influence anesthésiante de l’habitude” (Proust 1922, 18) or its equivalent under Nabokov’s pen, “some laziness of the routine-drugged human soul” (Nabokov 1966, 583). It can help us to achieve Calvino’s dream, that is, “to master a range of sensations and nuances” for each one of the five senses. To conclude, I would like to quote two excerpts, which describe something very precise, that is, the falling of a petal. In the first one—an auditory description—Nabokov is a child waiting for his English teacher, Mr. Burness, in winter, in his house in Saint Petersburg: “In the stillness, the dry sound of a chrysanthemum petal falling upon the marble of a table made one’s nerves twang” (Nabokov 1966, 433). In the second one—a visual description—Nabokov is a young man rowing a punt on the Cam in Cambridge:

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Now and then, shed by a blossoming tree, a petal would come down, down, down, and with the odd feeling of seeing something neither worshipper nor casual spectator ought to see, one would manage to glimpse its reflection which swiftly—more swiftly than the petal fell—rose to meet it; and, for the fraction of a second, one feared that the trick would not work, that the blessed oil would not catch fire, but every time the delicate union did take place, with the magic precision of a poet’s word meeting halfway his, or the reader’s, recollection. (Nabokov 1966, 591)

Like Proust, Nabokov excels in transforming sensations “into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver” (Nabokov 1966, 541). Thanks to his magic precision combined with an extraordinary sensitiveness and artistic sense, his autobiography itself has become an Eden of sensations, now accessible for the reader.

Notes 1. “L’innocent paradis plein de plaisirs furtifs, Est-il déjà plus loin que l’Inde ou que la Chine? Peut-on le rappeler avec des cris plaintifs, Et l’animer encor d’une voix argentine, L’innocent paradis plein de plaisirs furtifs ” (Baudelaire 1857, 113–114). 2. “Hier au soir je me promenais seul […] Je fus tiré de mes réflexions par le gazouillement d’une grive perchée sur la plus haute branche d’un bouleau. À l’instant, ce son magique fit reparaître à mes yeux le domaine paternel. J’oubliai les catastrophes dont je venais d’être le témoin, et, transporté subitement dans le passé, je revis ces campagnes où j’entendis si souvent siffler la grive” (de Chateaubriand 1849, 76). 3. “Il n’y a peut-être pas de jours de notre enfance que nous ayons si pleinement vécus que ceux que nous avons cru laisser sans les vivre, ceux que nous avons passés avec un livre préféré. […] s’il nous arrive encore aujourd’hui de feuilleter ces livres d’autrefois, ce n’est plus que comme les seuls calendriers que nous ayons gardés des jours enfuis, et avec l’espoir de voir reflétés sur leurs pages les demeures et les étangs qui n’existent plus ” (Proust 2011, 23–25). 4. “[…] curvamo-nos sobre o livro das sensações com um grande escrúpulo de erudição sentida” (Pessoa 2010, 41). 5. “Il mio problema scrivendo questo libro è che il mio olfatto non è sviluppato, manco d’attenzione auditiva, non sono un buongustaio, la mia sensibilità tattile è approssimativa, e sono miope. Per ognuno dei sensi devo fare uno sforzo che mi permetta di padroneggiare una gamma di sensazioni e sfumature. Non so se ci riuscirò, ma in questo caso come negli altri il mio scopo non

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è tanto quello di fare un libro quanto quello di cambiare me stesso, scopo che penso dovrebbe essere quello di ogni impresa umana” (Calvino 2001, 1874).

Bibliography Baudelaire, Charles. 1857. Les Fleurs du Mal. Reprint, Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1999. ———. 1954. The Flowers of Evil, trans. William Aggeler. Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild. Boyd, Brian. 1990. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. London: Chatto & Windus. Calvino, Italo. 1983. The Written and the Unwritten World. New York: The New York Review of Books. ———. 2001. Saggi 1945–1985. Milano: Mondadori. de Chateaubriand, François-René. 1849. Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Reprint, Paris: Gallimard “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, 1951. ———. 2018. Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768–1800, trans. Alex Andriesse. New York: New York Review Books. Gary, Romain. 1958. La Paz: The Man Who Ate the Landscape. Holiday 24 (November): 44–47. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1938. Laughter in the Dark. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1998. ———. 1963. The Gift, trans. from the Russian by Michael Scammel and Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2000. ———. 1966. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Reprint, Novels and Memoirs 1941–1951, ed. Brian Boyd. New York: The Library of America. ———. 1971. Glory, trans. from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. Reprint, London: Penguins Books, 2006. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill. ———. 1980. Lectures on literature. New York: Harcourt. Pessoa, Fernando. 2010. Livro do Desassossego. São Paulo: Companhia de Bolso. ———. 2011. The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. Proust, Marcel. 1922. À la recherche du temps perdu. Reprint, Paris: Gallimard, 1999. ———. 1971. On Reading, trans. Jean Autret. New York: Macmillan. ———. 2011. Sur la lecture. Reprint, Paris: Editions Sillage.

CHAPTER 7

A Look at the Spectropoetics of Photography in Nabokov’s Fiction Yannicke Chupin

When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida A few photographers moved among the crowd as indifferent to it as specters doing their spectral job. Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura

The invention of photography in the nineteenth century along with the technical innovations that followed in the twentieth century renewed writers’ interest in visual arts. Inventions like Photochrom, touched-up postcards and color photography and the latter’s democratization by way of automatic cameras find their way into Nabokov’s fiction. Photographic references are of many kinds in Nabokov’s narratives. Yet, in intention and effect, they are not to be compared with the numerous references to paintings. Photography may even appear as the degenerate version of pictorial art. In The Original of Laura, the narrator confides his nostalgia

Y. Chupin (B) CY Cergy Paris University, Cergy, France © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_7

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for the bucolic Russian landscapes of forgotten painter Lev Linde while the painter’s son has become a “fashionable photographer” grotesquely interested in “trick photography” who terminates life and career shooting automatic pictures of his own suicide (Nabokov 2009, 50–51). In “Time and Ebb,” the narrator deplores that the old photographs of the first flying machines “lack the life which only art could have been capable of retaining” (Nabokov 1996, 581) and photographic enthusiasts, such as Clare Quilty in Lolita or Pierre in Invitation to a Beheading are hardly recommendable characters.1 Except for the mention of one “real” photograph by Gertrude Käsebier in Pnin (1957, 95),2 photographs in Nabokov’s fiction are part of the diegetic world and belong in the category of family portraits and scenes or instant pictures, as many moments stolen from the temporal flow of the story. In other words, they conform to a twentieth-century democratic and amateur version of that visual art. Instant clichés such as Charlotte Haze captured with “an eyebrow up” in the Ramsdale gazette or the beloved Annabel Leigh who does not “come out well” in the only photograph of hers owned by Humbert (Nabokov 1955, 75, 13) confirm the mundane status of that visual medium and enhance the absence of artistic control. Yet references to photographs are far from anecdotical narrative. What may strike the reader is their persistent association to death. Characters photographed appear to be petrified by the transposition of their figures and faces onto silver paper. Characters confronted to photographs are themselves haunted by the sight of them and would rather get rid of them. Dedicated to the sensorial experience of viewing a photograph, this article is concerned with the lethal power of photographs in Nabokov’s fiction: how photographs are described as performing a form of violence against the subject, how the viewing of photographs sensorially affect the characters who behold them, and how that viewing may interfere with the cherished memory of a departed relative. Borrowing from Derrida’s coinage in Spectres de Marx [Specters of Marx]3 and relying on Roland Barthes’ reflections on photography, this article seeks to examine the “spectropoetics” of photographic references in Nabokov’s fiction. It aims first to show how they disseminate their mortiferous function in the surrounding text through their silent conversation with surrounding words. That preliminary analysis of the different steps of the process will then be used to try and understand the stake of the “photogenic” presence of Humbert’s mother in Lolita.

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Photography and Death Whether it is about the flash and photographic detonator associated with murderous lightning, photographers as death stalkers, voyeuristic desires to witness executions, or nebulous portraits of lost people and deathsentenced characters,4 photography often seems to precipitate the deaths of its subjects rather than immortalize them. This position goes against the common sense one that sees photography’s primary function as a means to fix and preserve an instant of life. In “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” André Bazin regards the photographic medium as the contemporary and elaborate continuation of ancient Egyptian techniques that provided “a defense against the passage of time” (Bazin 1960, 5). Those techniques included mummification but also many other substitutes—such as “statuettes that might replace the bodies if they were destroyed” therefore ensuring “the preservation of life by a representation of life” (Bazin 1960, 5). Nowadays, Bazin explains, the evolution of art and civilization have substituted images for those primitive means of preservation and they help us “to remember the subject and preserve him from a second spiritual death” (Bazin 1960, 6). Photography, Bazin contends, feeds our desire for illusion much more effectively than painting through its ultra-realistic and objective character.5 Such a concept seems to be the polar opposite of Nabokov’s if we look at the uses of photography in his fiction. Many references to that medium in his novels suggest that the capturing of a human being’s image in a photograph amounts to some form of death. Even voyeuristic Humbert ultimately burns his snapshots of Lolita (Nabokov 1955, 232) as he understands that her immortality depends on the “durable pigments of art” rather than photographic clichés (Nabokov 1955, 309). Nabokov’s conception is echoed in the theories formulated in the late 1970s in Susan Sontag’s and Roland Barthes’ analyses. Photographs are a powerful reminder of our mortal condition. Sontag writes with irony about the predatory nature of photography and on the extravagantly metaphorical terminology that associates this art with crime and murder (“loading,” “aiming,” “shooting,” “target”). “But the camera/gun does not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems to be all bluff,” Sontag adds (1973, 14). However, if photography is not lethal and if the language is abusively metaphorical, photographs of human beings nonetheless eerily remind us of our mortal condition. Writing from the photographer’s perspective, Sontag argues that “[t]o take a photograph, is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability,

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mutability, precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentlessness” (Sontag 1973, 15). In Camera Lucida, the essay on photography that he wrote in the wake of his mother’s death, Roland Barthes echoes this argument and pinpoints the transformation of the subject in the photographic process: “the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object” (Barthes 1980, 8). Barthes names that referent the “Spectrum of the Photography” for “this word retains, through its root, a relation to ‘spectacle’ and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead” (Barthes 1980, 9). Both meanings of the word Spectrum—spectacle and specters —are notions that Nabokov conjures as concomitant to photography in many instances. The transformation of a subject into an object/spectrum or a human being into a spectral shadow of himself is the topic of a poem that Nabokov wrote as early as 1927. Simply entitled “The Snapshot,” it centers on a family photograph taken at the seaside by the family father that the poet himself, a promeneur solitaire on that beach, incidentally becomes part of. The poem delineates all the steps pertaining to the photographic process: a moment snatched from the flow of time, its transformation into a printed image and the ensuing sense of alienation that seizes the poet when he imagines his figure pasted into the family album of perfect strangers. The vocabulary of possession associated with photography in this poem (“I in the background have been also taken”; “my shade they stole” (Nabokov 1970, 40) and its English title “The snapshot” convey the sense of disruption created by the photographic act. “The Snapshot” announces the motifs to be found later in photographic references in Nabokov’s fiction: the disruptive capture operated by the camera, the absence of the artistic mediation and control of that means of representation, the tension between absence and presence from which photography acquires its spectral dimension.

The Capture There are numerous cases in Nabokov’s work when the photographic capture of a human being foreshadows their mournful fate, or when the text, working through the aesthetics of “indirection” (Wood 1998, 59, 63) weaves some oblique association between a photograph and the resulting death—real or metaphorical—of a character. A case in point is the scene in Lolita when Humbert is about to retrieve Dolores from Camp Q after

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her mother’s death. The narrator announces his intention to preserve the memory of that long-awaited instant: “Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and fateful detail” (Nabokov 1955, 110). Humbert then describes what he sees on the wall of the office where he stands waiting: “photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall” (Nabokov 1955, 110). No more is said about the photographs. But the presence of that insect lying nearby, in the text as well as in the referential space of the novel, is enough to betray the fatality of that day for the new orphan. Pinned to the wall, the insect, a victim of predatory desire, has been seized in a flight and now struggles for its life. It is a “nature study,” the caption says, ignoring that a study that removes its subject from its environment cannot be natural. In the light of that spatial juxtaposition, the photographs of those girl-children read as a prefiguration of their metaphorical embalming. Even though Lolita is presumably not in that picture, she is the girl-child we are concerned with as she is about to be transported from a camp for children her age to orphanhood and Humbert’s care. What the picture reveals is not direct. It relies on the textual perimeter of the referred photograph, more precisely in the “fateful detail” to which Humbert draws our attention: the photograph’s somber meaning is “revealed” by the pinned butterfly next to it. The form of death that awaits Dolores Haze in this case is metaphorical, but photographic references may also point to the physical death of a character as is the case in Transparent Things with the death of Hugh Person’s father. Before giving an account of his death, the narrator pauses on an incidental scene taking place a few feet away: a young lady in mourning is having her picture taken in a photo booth. The narrator draws attention to the synchronization of the “thunder of a nonstop train” crashing by and the “magnesium lightning flash[ing] from the booth” (Nabokov 1972, 14). The next moment, the “blonde in black” coming out of the booth “far from being electrocuted, came out closing her handbag” (Nabokov 1972, 14). While feigning to refute the analogy between photography and death (“far from being electrocuted”), Nabokov does instill the idea that photographic capture and a fatal strike are connected through the simultaneous “thunder” and “magnesium lightning.” The next sentence extends the link between photography and death: “Whatever funeral she had wished to commemorate with the image of fair beauty craped for the occasion, it had nothing to do with a third simultaneous event next door.” The connection is oblique but obvious as the narrator

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resorts to apophasis to activate the photographic reference’s implications. That impossible connection (“it had nothing to do with”) is paradoxically what weaves the text closer to the account of Person’s death. Putting on narrow trousers in the fitting room, the old man feels redness fill his head and dies of a heart attack. His sudden death in a fitting room is turned into a grotesque event stripped of pathos and violence. However, the pathos and violence of Person’s death, even though they are not directly revealed, reside in the close vicinity of the narrative, in the narrated event of that lady in mourning having the magnesium lightning fix her image for eternity and transform her into a specter—the somber image of death itself. Both extracts—Lolita’s and Transparent Things ’—rely on the petrifying nature of the photographic act to create a web of associations that foreshadow a mournful ending. In both cases, it is in the surrounding text that photography reveals its companionship to death. What the photographic reference suggests is some form of lethal transformation that transcribes either the reality or the violence of some forthcoming death. Such a transformation is what Barthes regards as the main role of photographic capture, “that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject, nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death […]: I am truly becoming a specter” (Barthes 1980, 15). Let us add that the magnesium lightning in the photo booth of Transparent Things is all the more brutal as it is entirely automatic: it is not the human eye but a machine that targets the subject. “The Photomat always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by the police,” Barthes argues opposing the cold mechanics of a photomat to the eye of a loving photographer that can erase the weight of the image (Barthes 1980, 12). Susan Sontag remarks that automation of photography intensifies the common analogy with murder: “The old-fashioned camera was clumsier and harder to reload than a brown Bess musket. The modern camera is trying to be a ray gun” and taking a picture has become as easy as “pulling a trigger” (Sontag 1973, 14). Well aware of that common analogy, Nabokov does not spare his characters from the automatic shooting connotations. This is exemplified by the singular suicide of Adam Lind in The Original of Laura; Lind sets up a device to capture the images of his suicide (Nabokov 2009, 49). Nabokov’s web of deathly images related to photography culminate in this extravagant narrative that synchronizes the physical death of Adam and his metaphorical experience of death shot from different angles.

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Photography, or the Presence of Absence Connected to the disruptive capture that transforms a subject into a specter is the fixing of the subject’s image onto print film. Photographic portraits in Nabokov’s fiction are most of the time portraits of dead or missing persons that silently cry their absence out in the life of the narrator or characters who look at them. The snapshot of Humbert’s early love comes to mind, so does the harrowingly cruel film of Adam Krug’s son in Bend Sinister. Photographs then seem to disclose the subject’s blatant absence to the world. Nabokov offers a literalization of that problematic absence in a page of Lolita when Humbert and Dolores, standing in line at the post office, while away the time by studying the mug shots of wanted criminals exhibited on the wall. Next to those wanted posters is the cliché of a young girl: “a smudgy snapshot of a Missing Girl, age fourteen, wearing brown shoes when last seen, rhymes” (Nabokov 1955, 222). The photograph is “smudgy” as one would expect the spectral shadow of a missing person to be. The capital M and G and the rhymes reify further that “Missing Person” who is now no more than a blurry picture on a dirty wall. Her closeness to dangerous criminals is easy enough to interpret as another “fateful detail” pointing to Lolita’s lot and her future disappearance; but the photograph of the missing girl and the caption also read as an allegory of absence: the only thing that remains of that girl is the visual simulacrum, the specter or the “eidôlon.” That photograph becomes the literal expression of the dialectic of presence and absence generated by photography. The same irreducible tension is to be found in other photographic references in Lolita where photographs take on their spectral dimension. Charlotte has framed a picture of her lost son on the wall of her bedroom: “the blurred, blond male baby whose photograph to the exclusion of all others adorned our bleak bedroom” (Nabokov 1955, 80). A perfect memento mori, this picture daily reactivates the visual presence of the departed son. As any display of dead relatives’ portraits, it betrays some unconscious refusal of death for the phantasmatic scenario that characterizes every photograph—the return of the dead—relentlessly haunts its spectator. This is confirmed a few lines later when the narrator describes Charlotte’s prediction “that the dead infant’s soul would return to earth in the form of the child she would bear in her present wedlock” (Nabokov 1955, 80). The Kasbeam barber scene is another take on the haunting paradox generated by dead people’s portraits. As the barber rambles about the baseball glories of his dead son,

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Humbert fails to understand that the son is no more. It is not until his attention is directed to a picture of him exhibited on some improvised sepulcher that Humbert understands his absence: “so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years” (Nabokov 1955, 213). Unlike the Barber’s babble, the pedestalled photograph in the room cannot be denied: it is “exorbitant ” to borrow from Barthes again. “The Photograph is violent not because it shows violent things,” Barthes explains, “but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused” (Barthes 1980, 91).

Specters As evidenced by Humbert’s reaction, the shock is not emotional— Humbert has never met the barber’s son—but it strikes his rational mind. The bewildering tension between presence and absence is precisely what makes photography “exorbitant” and possibly painful. Another set of photographs in Pale Fire illustrates the haunting tension connected to photographic portraiture and their spectral power. A tenant in a house rented from Judge Hugh Goldsworth, Kinbote is tormented by the portraits of the Judge’s family that ornate every room of the house: “Family photographs met me in the hallway and pursued me from room to room” (Nabokov 1962, 83). The photos and the subjects posing in them are motionless but Kinbote feels nonetheless “pursued” by those pictures (Nabokov 1962, 83). Haunted by the portraits as he would be by ghosts Kinbote decides to remove them from his sight. In an article tackling the role of visual arts in Pale Fire, Conall Cash shows how the photographs in the house differ from the paintings as by nature they manifest their intricate relationship with time. If they make Kinbote anxious, Conall Cash argues, it is because of the “impermanence” they manifest as photographs. Kinbote is all the more sensitive to time’s transience, Cash writes, because as an exile, he suffers from his inability “to overcome geographical and politico-sexual exile” (Cash 2010, 132). Those pictures of absent-present people are indeed a constant reminder of Time as an agent of death. Like all photographs, they submit their subjects to spectral transformation and manifest “the return of the dead” even though in this particular case those family members are not dead. The metaphor Kinbote uses to describe their new location in the house betrays his hidden desire:

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“I finally gathered them one by one and dumped them all in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophane-shrouded winter clothes” (Nabokov 1962, 83). The imagery of death (“gallows,” “shroud”) is used by Kinbote to terminate the haunting presence and send the specters to some definitely invisible locus. The choice of words manifests Kinbote’s desire to bury once and for all those ever-returning ghostly portraits. If the immobility of photography evokes death, the material presence of a photograph in Kinbote’s environment is what stands against the ultimate burial that traditionally hides the dead from the living.

“My very photogenic mother” My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. (Nabokov 1955, 10)

In the light of the poetics of specters established in the previous parts of this analysis, this part and the following aim to discuss the photographic presence of Humbert’s mother in the first chapter of Lolita. The elliptic parenthesis in the first sentence has become for many readers the deepest locus of the sentence. It is frequently cited in literary criticism as an example of powerful stylistic compression: here, economy of words and juxtaposition can paradoxically convey both the violent nature of the accident as well as its emotional consequences on the life of a young boy. It is so powerful that in his introduction to the American edition of Camera Lucida, Geoff Dyer compares it with a parenthesis in Roland Barthes’s essay to account for the French philosopher’s own compression in style in the later years of his life after he lost his own mother. Nabokov’s “(picnic, lightning),” Dyer explains, is “the most famous parenthesis in postwar literature”: It’s proof, in spectacular miniature, of Nabokov’s exuberant facility. But that moment when Barthes, remembering his dead mother’s ivory powder box, adds, almost inaudibly, “(I loved the sound of its lid)” is intensely

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moving and just as expressive of the subtle intimacy of its lid. (Dyer 2010, xv)

The irony here is that in a book devoted to photography G. Dyer does not comment on the photographic presence in Nabokov’s sentence (“very photogenic”) nor does he connect the sound that Barthes cherishes—the sound of the lid—to the click of the photographic shutter. Dyer’s silence on the word “photogenic” is proof enough that Nabokov’s parenthesis is so remarkable that readers tend to ignore the words that come before and after. Yet those words modify the reader’s reading of the parenthesis. First of all, as in the example of Hugh Person’s death in Transparent Things , the vicinity of “photogenic” and “lightning” may conjure the magnesium flash of the camera itself in the reader’s mind. In the fragment taken from Lolita, the parenthesis also reads as the textual equivalent of the photographic act as it extracts two unconnected words (picnic, lightning) from the narrative continuum of a fully formed sentence in the same manner as the shutter’s click extracts an instant from the temporal thread in the life of a subject. As in the excerpt from Transparent Things , the closeness in the text of elements that are not connected might wrongly generate a false causal relation. The possible confusion indeed results here from the concomitant references to photography and death (first, a mother’s picture taken by a photographer, followed by a mother taken by a bolt of lightning). Now, the phrase “very photogenic mother” first suggests a graceful figure but that same figure is immediately submitted to the reality of the next word (“died”): the printed representation of a graceful mother is no sooner imagined by the reader than it is lacerated the next instant by the mention of her death. Therefore, the word “photogenic” completes the impact of the words in terse parenthesis and adds to the brutality of the loss even though no emotion is directly expressed in the text. But how could it be? How is Humbert to account for that traumatic event unless by submitting it to the logic of trauma, that is to the logic of a shock that cannot be fully processed? If that shock is not to be verbally expressed, can it be revealed—in the photographic and chemical sense of the term— through the unconscious relationship that words weave when set close to one another? The word “photogenic” painfully betrays the notion of absence. Critics have remarked that it could easily be replaced by “beautiful” or “graceful”6 but the choice for “photogenic” emphasizes the lack of

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a real referent for that figure in Humbert’s memory. Another young orphan in Nabokov’s fiction cannot remember his father other than from a photograph: Similarly, the King, who also was not quite three when his father, King Alfin, died, was unable to recall his face, although oddly he did remember perfectly well the little monoplane of chocolate that he, a chubby babe, happened to be holding in that very last photograph (Christmas 1918) of the melancholy, riding-breeched aviator in whose lap he reluctantly and uncomfortably sprawled. (Nabokov 1962, 101)

The “melancholy” that shows in the photograph of a departed father sends us back to what Barthes sees as the essence of photographic portraits—“the melancholy of Photography itself” (Barthes 1980, 79); for “whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe” (Barthes 1980, 96). To exemplify the “catastrophe” inherent to every photograph, Barthes resorts to the distinct “studium” and “punctum” present in the portrait of Lewis Payne—a young man sentenced to death for attempting to assassinate Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward: The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future in which death is the stake. (Barthes 1980, 96)

The same feeling befalls Humbert or Kinbote when confronting the portrait of their departed parent. The photograph of Madame Humbert shows a graceful woman but it points to her future death. Nabokov expands and almost comically caricatures that problematic tension when describing the photos that precede King Alfin’s death by a few seconds through the lens of an 8-year-old Kinbote: The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by the eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and learthern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the whiteblurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph and reassurance. (Nabokov 1962, 104)

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The discrepancy between the forthcoming catastrophe and the triumphant figure of this father is difficult to fathom for the young Charles and for any spectator. The series unfolds views of a glorious moment while “pointing” at the same time to the defeat of life—its punctum. Submitted to such photographic capture, both King Alfin and Madame Humbert are embalmed from the start and even more so when fixed in pictures and submitted to the gaze of their orphaned children: both parents are full of life but they are going to die.

“Beyond the limit of iconographic memory” (Nabokov 1995, “Time and Ebb,” 575) The word “photogenic” along with the web of associations that connect it to “lightning” painfully foregrounds the absence of a reliable and trustworthy memory of a mother. But is there none? The absence is nuanced in the next fragment where Humbert excepts “that pocket of warmth in the darkest past.” When Barthes mentions the “that has been [ça a été]” of every photograph, he resorts to Freud saying of the maternal body “that there is no other place of which one can say with so much certainty that one has already been there” (Freud cited by Barthes 1980, 40). In the quotation from Lolita, the “pocket of warmth in the darkest past” is a sensorial evocation of the maternal womb where Humbert “has been.” The cold, inessential and frozen picture of Madame Humbert is replaced by the elusive but warm memory of a departed mother. The next movement of the sentence displays a flight of subjective memory about the end of childhood viewed through the bucolic metaphor of a rural picnic. Besides the fixed portrait, a sensorial trace of Humbert’s mother persists that liberates poetic imagination from the photographic freeze and conjures “the furry warmth, the golden midges.”7 If “photogenic” has helped the narrator to build the seismic violence of that accidental death, the cold reality of photographic memory is overcome through the resources of subjective memory. As Laurence Petit has shown in her analysis of the real photographs in Speak Memory, “only mental photographs can trigger the flow of memories and help re-create the magic of childhood” (Petit 2009, 5). Thus, the memory of Mrs. Humbert joins the beloved Annabel Leigh of whom one “snapshot” was taken four months before she died and from which Humbert remembers “the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded” (Nabokov 1955, 13). The description of the photographic act and of the resulting picture comes just before the mention of her

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death and seem to precipitate it as well. But the reader soon learns that the actual photograph is no more. Humbert admits losing it among other treasures during the wanderings of his first adult years. That loss is salutary for the absence of Annabel is no longer counterbalanced by the repeated exposure of her cold photographic presence and does not submit the narrator to the “return of the dead.” The only specter that relentlessly haunts Humbert’s posthumous manuscript is Lolita, “the little ghost in natural colors” of whom Humbert can remember the face “with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of [his] eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors” (Nabokov 1955, 11). Taking many different forms, photographic presence in Nabokov’s fiction is often an escort to death: the multifarious references to photography gravitate around the notion of mourning and loss—and many times loss suffered in childhood. Any reader of Nabokov knows that the pain in his fiction is never exposed to glaring lyricism. What cannot be said must be left unsaid, Wittengstein wrote. But what cannot be said can also be revealed through a close-knit of signs and symbols. Photographic reference is one of Nabokov’s privileged ways to transcribe accident, catastrophe or loss without yet naming nor even describing the ensuing emotional catastrophe. Nabokov seems to build what could be called his “textual punctum” through that tight network of images that finally reveal—in the chemical and mysterious sense of the word—the accident and the resulting pain.

Notes 1. We have to signal here the notable exception of Mira Belochkin and “the passion she had for photography” (Nabokov 1957, 133). 2. The photograph “‘Mother and Child’ (1897) with the wistful, angelic infant looking up and away (at what?)” ornates the walls of Victor’s art teacher in Pnin (Nabokov 1957, 95). See also Alfred Appel (1974, 309– 310) on the presence of art photography in Nabokov’s fiction. 3. In his essay on Marx, Jacques Derrida reflects on the overwhelming presence of specters and ghosts in Marx’s Communist Manifesto and coins the word “spectropoetics” to reflect on that haunting presence. 4. The light flash associated to death is to be found as early as 1928 in the poem “The Execution” and the present article focuses on two other examples (Transparent Things and Lolita). Death-stalkers photographers capture Linskaya’s death in The Original of Laura while her husband has himself

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captured his own death (2009, 101, 49). In Speak Memory, Nabokov extensively describes a German student morbidly interested in photographing executions (1966, 278) and Quilty, himself a dedicated photographer offers Humbert to witness the capital punishment as a treat (Lolita, 302). Judge Goldsworth in Pale Fire collects portraits of the people he condemns in an album (83–84) and Pierre, the executioner in Invitation to a Beheading is another photograph enthusiast and the inventor of the “photohoroscope” that chronicles Emmie’s life until she dies. 5. See also Pierre Bourdieu’s Photography, A Middle-Brow Art (1965), on the social function of photography as a means of immortalizing important events in collective life. 6. See for instance: Anna Morlan (2010). 7. “Time and Ebb” offers a compressed version of that sensorial memory extending the poor power of photographs: “My mother died when I was still an in infant, so that I can only recall her as a vague patch of delicious lachrymal warmth just beyond the limit of iconographic memory” (Nabokov 1995, 578).

Bibliography Appel Jr., Alfred. 1974. Nabokov’s Dark Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1980. Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography. Translated R. Howard. London: Vintage Books, 2000. Bazin, André. 1960. The Ontology of the Photographic Image. Film Quarterly 13 (4): 4–9. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1965. Photography, a Middle-Brow Art. Translated Shaun Whiteside. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Cash, Connall. 2010. Picturing Memory, Puncturing Vision: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. In The Goalkeeper: Nabokov Almanac, ed. Y. Leving, 124–152. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilée. Dyer, Geoff. 2010. Foreword. In Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography, ed. Roland Barthes, ix–xix. New York: Hill & Wang. Morlan, Anna. 2010. A ‘Safely Solipsized’ Life: Lolita as Autobiography Revisited. Miranda 3. http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/1673. Accessed 21 December 2018. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1947. Bend Sinister. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1990. ———. 1955. Lolita. In The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel Jr. Revised and Updated, New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. 1957. Pnin. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989.

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———. 1962. Pale Fire. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1966. Speak Memory. New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1970. Poems and Problems. New York: McGraw Hill. ———. 1972. Transparent Things. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1995. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. ———. 2008. The Original of Laura. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Petit, Laurence. 2009. Speak, Photographs? Visual Transparency and Verbal Opacity in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Nabokov Online Journal III. http:// journals.openedition.org/polysemes/368. Accessed 1 March 2019. Sontag, Susan. 1973. On Photography. Reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. Wood, Michael. 1998. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Visual Agnosia in Nabokov: When One of the Senses Can’t Make Sense Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

Vladimir Nabokov’s narration is peculiarly effective because of his keen awareness of memory, perception, and thought, and his ability to represent their most subtle nuances in words.1 He draws on sensory imagery, for example, to evoke the experience of remembering—from a deft recreation of the “tip-of the-tongue” phenomenon when he retrieves the name of Colette’s dog in Speak, Memory (Nabokov 1966, 151–152),2 to an intuitive understanding of the holistic nature of facial recognition when Humbert pictures Dolores’s face in Lolita (Jajdelska 2016, 204–205). But Nabokov also describes how the mind misinterprets sensory information. Consider his accounts of synesthesia,3 his reenactments of misheard speech,4 or the moment in Glory when Martin shows Irina how to deceive her tactile sense by crossing her “second and third fingers so that [she] could touch a single small pellet of bread but feel two” (Nabokov 1972, 189). He seems particularly fascinated by distortions in visual perception,5 ranging from trompe-l’oeil, in which a painted image is so lifelike that it fools the eye,6 to eidetic imagery, in which a sight vividly persists in the memory,7 to autoscopic hallucinations, or seeing the projected image of

S. E. Sweeney (B) College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_8

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one’s body,8 to hypnagogic hallucinations at the edge of sleep, as in the persistent glimpse of “some coarse-featured dwarf with a swelling nostril or ear” that he recalls in Speak, Memory (Nabokov 1966, 34).9 In addition to such visions, Nabokov often evokes the phenomenon of visual agnosia: an unusual neurological disorder, strikingly described in the title essay of Oliver Sacks’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which involves the failure to recognize objects as either familiar or coherent visual shapes. Instead of imagining something that isn’t there, people with visual agnosia are unable to perceive what they are looking at. Although their eyes see it, their brains cannot accurately interpret the information. Generally, if they cannot recognize an object as familiar, they suffer from associative agnosia; if they cannot recognize it as a coherent visual shape, from apperceptive agnosia. When people with visual agnosia fail to identify an object accurately, they may speculate or fabulate about what it is—yet they are misinterpreting an image, not hallucinating one. The condition usually results from a stroke, head injury, or other trauma to various regions of the brain’s occipital or temporal lobes. The paintings of German artist Anton Räderscheidt, for example, show how a 1967 stroke drastically affected his perception.10 Because the disorder originates in different parts of the brain, it manifests in disparate ways, including difficulties with comprehending faces, or colors, or relationships among objects, or objects that are partially obscured, or words as objects.11 Nabokov skillfully evokes these particular forms of visual agnosia in his fiction, especially in Laughter in the Dark, The Enchanter, and Lolita.12 In each case, he not only illustrates a protagonist’s misperception but also prompts readers to engage in a series of responses to it: first, accepting the protagonist’s distorted sensory information as accurate; next, questioning it because it contradicts other textual evidence; then, reinterpreting or correcting it in light of such evidence; and finally, perceiving what the protagonist himself does not see. The process of deciphering a single passage in this way encapsulates the experience of reading the entire novel, an experience in which one both identifies with and distances oneself from the protagonist’s perspective. None of Nabokov’s characters, presumably, has suffered the neurological damage that would produce such symptoms. Instead, as Dmitri Nabokov observes in his essay on The Enchanter, Nabokov evokes “visual aberrations[s]” to convey, through ingenious narration, experiences in which “a character’s perception of reality is momentarily distorted by a state of being” (Nabokov 1986, 121). Each instance

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of visual agnosia exemplifies the protagonist’s flawed thinking and his mistaken conceptions of others.

Mistaking Faces, Colors, Parts, and Traces Early in Lolita, Humbert claims that he can reproduce Dolores’s image in his mind with remarkable accuracy as “the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors” (Nabokov 1955, 11). The first time he sees her, however, he not only mistakes her for Annabel but also imagines that she is Annabel’s incarnation. Although Humbert claims that his perception of Dolores is utterly reliable, evidence suggests that he may have a mild case of prosopagnosia, or face blindness.13 Like some of Nabokov’s other protagonists, he has difficulty either recognizing a face or distinguishing among similar faces.14 He seems determined to verify features he has trouble remembering, a common trait in people with prosopagnosia. Consider the remarkable portraits and self-portraits by Chuck Close, an American artist who compensates for an inability to perceive faces—including his own—by painting them obsessively and dividing them into tiny abstract images.15 Several chapters later, when Humbert arrives at Camp Q to fetch Dolores after her mother’s death, he finds that her face is quite different from the image in his mind. He explains, “for a second it seemed to me that her face was less pretty than the mental imprint I had cherished for more than a month: her cheeks looked hollowed and too much lentigo camouflaged her rosy rustic features” (Nabokov 1955, 111). The quantitative terms “less pretty” and “too much lentigo” imitate the cognitive process by which he compares Dolores’s face to his image of it. The contrasting temporal units—“a second,” “more than a month”—hint at his skewed sense of time and his resistance to the idea of Dolores growing up. The face before him seems strangely older, with its hollowed cheeks, its dark circles under the eyes, and its “lentigo”—a word that usually refers to old age spots, not freckles—dotting the skin, including the delicate skin near the eyelids which is already marked by “plumbaceous umbrae.”16 Perhaps noticing such minute details prevents him at first from apprehending her face as a whole, since prosopagnosia involves perceiving a face as a series of “discrete objects” (Coslett 2011, 218). Humbert speculates, in fact, that the child’s freckles might serve as “camouflage,” as a variegated visual pattern which disguises her identity and protects her from a predator’s glance (Nabokov 1955, 111).

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That he momentarily fails to recognize Dolores as “Lolita” is ironic, of course, because she is no more Lolita than she is Annabel.17 Humbert has already acknowledged that his image of her as Lolita seems “more real” to him than she does, as if it were a simulacrum which transcends her actual being (Nabokov 1955, 62). Now, for an instant, he sees Dolores as she is. During most of the novel, however, his inability to perceive her as herself, combined with his claims that she is “a nymphet,” “a demon child,” “the little deadly demon among the wholesome children,” and so forth (Nabokov 1955, 17, 20, 21), almost makes it seem as if he suffers from Capgras delusion—an extreme form of prosopagnosia, sometimes resulting from schizophrenia, in which the individual perceives a loved one as an impostor, an uncanny replica that has somehow replaced the real person (Blom 2009, 84–85). During the brief moment when he does not recognize Dolores as “Lolita,” Humbert feels that all he needs to do is give her “a sound education, a healthy and happy girlhood, a clean home, nice girl-friends. …” Almost immediately, however, he manages once more to impose his preferred mental image on the visage before him: “But ‘in a wink,’ as the Germans say, the angelic line of conduct was erased … and she was my Lolita again—in fact, more of my Lolita than ever” (Nabokov 1955, 111). The phrases “more of” and “than ever” echo Humbert’s earlier quantitative comparisons—which assessed Dolores’s attractiveness, her age, and the extent of sun damage to her skin—just as his latest claim, that she now belongs to him more than she did before, breezily dismisses those concerns as no longer relevant. Meanwhile, his allusion to the German expression “in einem Augenblick” implies that any contradictory visual information is transient and unreliable. Nabokov’s protagonists also experience other distorted perceptions, evoking other forms of visual agnosia. When another little girl shows her pet to the title character of The Enchanter, what he seems to see, in a “crossed-out corner” of his visual field, is “some black salad devouring a green rabbit” (Nabokov 1986, 25). This description suggests that the Enchanter suffers from color agnosia—an inability to name colors or distinguish among them, which differs from colorblindness—because he transposes the colors of the two things before him, the black rabbit and the green lettuce. But he misconstrues their relationship, too, grotesquely confusing which thing is sentient and which is not, as well as which thing is consumed by the other, in a way that suggests he might also suffer from simultagnosia, or an inability to perceive how objects in a scene

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are connected. Even the word “salad”—which means a prepared dish for human consumption rather than animal fodder, thus confirming the Enchanter’s misunderstanding of what he sees—implies an arbitrary mixture of things. Similarly, people with simultagnosia have trouble grasping how visual objects relate to each other.18 They find it difficult to see individual units as parts of a whole, as shown by a diagnostic test in which patients are asked to sketch a human figure: someone with simultagnosia will draw isolated facial features and disconnected appendages that do not cohere into a contiguous representation of the body.19 In Nabokov’s novella, of course, the Enchanter’s inability to perceive how the rabbit relates to the lettuce indicates that he is too distracted by the little girl’s physical nearness to notice anything else. On another occasion, after his plans to be alone with another child are thwarted, he glances at a newspaper dated “the 32nd” of the month (Nabokov 1986, 50). As Dmitri Nabokov explains, the protagonist’s conflicting feelings of desire and disappointment “have imparted a moist blur to his vision and made him see an absurd date” (Nabokov 1986, 123). These instances of color agnosia and simultagnosia convey the Enchanter’s excitement, even as they allow readers to separate themselves from his erotic response to a child by correcting incongruous details in the narration and seeing what he himself does not notice.20 At the same time, the distortion in perception epitomizes the Enchanter’s inability to grasp that other beings— especially the little girl—have their own existence beyond his desires and fears. In Laughter in the Dark, Albinus also misperceives something at the margin of his visual field. Entering his study one afternoon, he finds that “there, in a corner between the shelves, just behind a revolving bookstand, the edge of a bright red frock was showing” (Nabokov 1938, 64). The series of prepositional phrases, the emphasis on proximity—“there,” “in a corner between,” “just behind,” “the edge of”—the allusion to a rotating bookstand,21 and the odd verbal construction, in which an inanimate object is “showing” itself to Albinus, all emphasize his difficulty with making sense of what he sees. Even so, he immediately identifies the object as a dress belonging to his lover. Nabokov’s readers may recognize it, too, because of previous references to Margot’s “short red frock,” her “old red frock,” and the “short red frock with bare arms” she wore when she visited him earlier that day (Nabokov 1938, 26, 32, 60). Albinus realizes that she must be hiding in the corner, waiting until his family goes to bed.

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At the first opportunity, he tiptoes into the study, “feverishly” whispering, “Margot, you mad little thing.” Yet he finds neither Margot nor her dress, but “only a scarlet silk cushion which he himself had brought there a few days ago, to crouch on while consulting Nonnenmacher’s History of Art —ten volumes, folio” (Nabokov 1938, 67). Because Albinus misreads what he sees—a bit of red fabric—it seems ironic that it turns out to be something he put there himself, and indeed something he put there to help him peruse a lengthy text about the history of manmade images. The fact that he does not recognize the cushion when he sees a portion of it suggests that he might suffer from visual object agnosia, in which items that are seen only in part cannot be accurately identified. People with this disorder are unable to extrapolate the shape of the whole object from an incomplete or unaccustomed view of it. In Laughter in the Dark, Nabokov evokes the phenomenon by prompting readers to draw the same erroneous conclusion from a glimpse of red fabric as Albinus himself does. Nabokov often devises implicit sequences, incomplete patterns, and unfinished pictures that readers must fill in, either rightly or wrongly. In this case, as in Vertigo—where, after Madeleine Elstir (played by Kim Novak) disappears from the film, viewers expect to see her whenever the camera shows a woman wearing a grey suit, a red dress, a black coat and white gloves, or a blond chignon—the narrative induces readers to share the protagonist’s obsessive, voyeuristic, fetishizing gaze (Hitchcock 1958). Nabokov repeats this motif later in the novel, after Albinus’s wife discovers his affair with Margot and leaves him. Albinus agrees to finance a film in which Margot, an aspiring actress, has a small role and then tries to steal glimpses of her practicing her part, “assuming dramatic poses in front of the cheval glass.” When he tiptoes close enough to spy on her and her reflection, however, “a creaking floor board [gives] him away, she hurl[s] a red cushion at him and he ha[s] to swear he had seen nothing” (Nabokov 1938, 124). It seems likely, given Albinus’s figurative, cognitive, or literal blindness throughout the novel, that he has indeed seen nothing. Here his clumsy attempt at voyeurism suggests not visual agnosia as much as scopophilia, or the tendency to find sexual pleasure in looking. At the same time, it shows how his obsession with Margot’s image—emphasized in her poses, her narcissistic gaze, and his desire to see her reflection—leads to his downfall. The passage echoes earlier scenes in which Albinus watched Margot “smil[e] into the mirror” and then saw himself there as well, “a pale grave gentleman walking beside a schoolgirl” in the familiar red frock (Nabokov 1938, 60). It also

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reprises the scene in the study—where he tiptoed into the room to attain a private glimpse of Margot, but found only the same red cushion—and thus reminds readers of his flawed perceptions. Albinus’s declaration, that “he had seen nothing,” foreshadows his loss of sight in the novel’s ending, when he desperately tries to match his mental images with the invisible world around him. Even before he loses his eyesight, however, Albinus’s figurative blindness—he is always in the dark, unable to see the situation in which he is enmeshed—evokes another aspect of simultagnosia. People with this disorder not only fail to recognize how parts relate to a whole; they also have trouble combining visual elements into a coherent narrative. Consider the “Boston Cookie Theft” picture, a diagnostic illustration used to test patients for simultagnosia and other disorders, in which two children laugh as one mounts a teetering chair to steal cookies from a jar on a high shelf, while their mother, washing dishes with her back to them, seems unaware of their actions and of water overflowing from the kitchen sink. Someone with simultagnosia who is shown this image cannot comprehend the connection between the oblivious mother, on the one hand, and the children stealing cookies, on the other (let alone the implications of the tilting chair, the jar at the edge of the shelf, or the water pouring onto the floor).22 As it turns out, the essence of this narrative—two laughing children whose naughtiness is unseen by a third character—echoes the plot, the imagery, and even the title of Laughter in the Dark. In Lolita, Humbert’s unreliable perceptions evoke still other aspects of visual agnosia. Early in the novel, he recalls how in Paris, before emigrating to America, he sometimes glimpsed from his balcony “a lighted window across the street and what looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror” (Nabokov 1955, 20). The phrase “looked like a nymphet” suggests, at first, that Humbert is trying to determine whether the girl is a nymphet, according to the visual criteria that he mentions a few pages earlier: “the feline outline of a cheekbone,” “the slenderness of a downy limb,” and other signs that he refuses to identify (Nabokov 1955, 17). Indeed, the helpful mirror might be about to reveal those further indications as the girl undresses before his eyes. Like Albinus, Humbert finds erotic pleasure in looking at a girl who is looking at herself and unaware of him. He explains that the double framing of this vision—“[t]hus isolated, thus removed” from his gaze by the window and the mirror—gives it “an especially keen charm” as he races toward his “lone gratification” (Nabokov 1955, 19).

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What Humbert perceives, however, is another illusion. Like someone with simultagnosia, he misconstrues the relationship among objects in a scene; yet instead of perceiving the individual items but not understanding their connection, as the Enchanter does, he completely misinterprets the pattern of light and dark shapes, imagining a female body standing before a mirror. (Humbert’s error recalls the broader category of apperceptive visual agnosia, in which patients cannot identify objects as coherent visual forms.) A few sentences later, Nabokov reveals what Humbert is actually looking at. As his vision clears, that bewitching image—“the tender pattern of nudity he adored”— becomes instead “the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper” (Nabokov 1955, 20). The transformation seems to occur “abruptly, fiendishly,” with that second adverb perhaps evoking, for the first time in Lolita, the imaginary devil continually thwarting Humbert’s plans whom he later dubs Aubrey McFate (Nabokov 1955, 56). In this case, the actual object of his gaze is especially ironic. Humbert has indeed noticed someone who is partly nude, wearing undergarments, and visible in a lighted window—but it turns out to be a man like himself, a person whose age and gender he finds “disgusting” (Nabokov 1955, 20). What looked like a nymphet was, after all, only what looked like a nymphet. This vision of a young girl framed in a window reappears toward the end of Humbert’s confession. Its recurrence suggests an eidetic image, as when the Enchanter recalls treasured glimpses of little girls or Albinus dwells on his initial view of Margot, an usherette, drawing back a velvet curtain at the cinema. In all three cases, the vision, real or imagined, becomes a potent emblem of erotic possibility, like the “final picture” of Dolores’s unconscious body, produced “by stacking layer upon layer of translucent vision,” that Humbert fantasizes about finding in their room at The Enchanted Hunters (Nabokov 1955, 125). But because Humbert is a first-person narrator—unlike Albinus or the Enchanter—he himself has chosen to deploy the illusory image of a girl in the window when constructing his tale. He cites the image twice, at the beginning and end of his confession, to provide a context for other experiences that he recalls. He describes it as a stylized emblem—a picture of a picture within a picture—even while using it to frame his narrative. Near the end of Lolita, then, Humbert recalls those voyeuristic experiences for the second time: “I would be misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my lurking eye, the ever-alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in

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the act of combing her Alice-in-Wonderland hair” (Nabokov 1955, 264). Humbert’s growing self-awareness, which led to his description of identifying Charlotte with her daughter as “tom-peep[ing] across the hedges of years, through wan little windows” (Nabokov 1955, 76), now allows him to reflect on his own looking. By describing his eye as an “ever-alert periscope”—that is, an upright tube that protrudes from below a surface, allowing for a stealthy view of something above it—he combines phallic imagery with scopophilia. What his eye enables him to “make out from afar,” a phrase that emphasizes the process of interpreting an indistinct image, is another “half-naked nymphet.” This time, however, the girl seems to have been stopped in the process of disrobing and combing her hair, as if she were frozen by Humbert’s glance or transformed into a two-dimensional picture, like one of Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass.23 As Humbert recalls the vision’s aphrodisiac effect on him, he shifts to tactile imagery: “I would crowd all the demons of my desire against the railing of a throbbing balcony” (Nabokov 1955, 264). Indeed, he describes the balcony as if it were an extension of his body, an instance of tactile agnosia that signals his approaching sexual release. At that very moment, however, reality abruptly intrudes: “whereupon the lighted image would move and Eve would revert to a rib, and there would be nothing in the window but an obese partly clad man reading the paper” (Nabokov 1955, 264). In other words, as soon as the “stilled” image shifts, Humbert realizes what he is looking at. (Such is not the case for most patients suffering from visual agnosia, who find moving objects more difficult to identify than stationary ones.) Nabokov’s wordplay cleverly duplicates this perceptual transformation, as “Eve”—a palindromic name that encapsulates the tempting reflection in the assumed mirror— retreats inside the verb “revert,” and the imagined female figure turns back into Adam’s “rib,” that is, into a man’s torso framed in the window. Nabokov represents this visual double-take with the same compound sentence structure, leading to a sense of anticlimax and comic deflation, as in the two passages from Laughter in the Dark cited above and the earlier account of Humbert’s voyeurism from Lolita. In each case, the male protagonist perceives a desirable young girl—but what he is looking at turns out to be “only a scarlet silk cushion,” or it becomes “nothing” (Nabokov 1938, 67, 124), or it is “transformed into the disgusting lamplit bare arm of a man in his underclothes,” or, once again, “there would be nothing in the window but an obese partly clad man” (Nabokov 1955, 20, 264).

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Misreading Pages, Letters, and Words Nabokov also turns evocations of visual agnosia into metaphors for reading. In most of these passages, the young girl perceived by the protagonist transforms, in one way or another, into the figure of a male reader. In Laughter in the Dark, the image of Margot in her red dress, hiding in Albinus’s study, shifts into that of Albinus, crouching on a scarlet cushion to consult a book of art history; in The Enchanter, the protagonist’s anticipated interaction with a little girl is replaced with the experience of glancing at a newspaper by himself; and in Lolita, rapturous visions of girls undressing before convenient mirrors become, in actuality, the prosaic sight of other men reading the paper. This last reversal not only undermines Humbert’s fantasy but also mocks the assumed expectations of a heteronormative male reader,24 supplanting the glimpse of a young girl’s body with an image of the voyeur himself as dull, slovenly, and repulsively fleshy. Strikingly, many of these passages contrast the protagonist’s erotic fantasies with the mundane experience of perusing a newspaper. Although Albinus’s reading of art history seems to be the exception, notice that his ten-volume reference work appears in “folio” (Nabokov 1938, 67)—a word which denotes not only a kind of paper used in publishing but also books printed on the largest sheets of paper available, more or less the size of a newspaper (which is why Albinus must spread the volumes over the floor of his study to examine them). In each instance, Nabokov alludes to reading a large printed page, as if to correlate the characters’ efforts to comprehend what they are looking at with the experience of his actual readers, staring at this page of the novel. In The Enchanter, for example, the protagonist’s attempt to read a newspaper explicitly illustrates his distorted perceptions. The Enchanter not only misreads the date above the masthead as “the 32nd,” but cannot make out anything else because he is “unable to distinguish the lines” of print (Nabokov 1986, 50). His momentary inability to perceive printed words evokes another form of visual agnosia: alexia, or word blindness. People with alexia have no trouble processing or understanding language, as is the case with dyslexia; they simply cannot recognize words as visual objects (Coslett 2011, 218). They may even compensate for the disorder by spelling out letters with the tongue against the palate, or with a forefinger against the palm of the hand, so that, like a blind person reading Braille, they apprehend words through touch rather than sight (Sacks 2008, 155–157).

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In Lolita, Humbert’s second description of his voyeuristic experiences in Paris further develops these connections among a protagonist’s distorted perceptions, an author’s misleading narration, a reader’s vicarious experience of visual agnosia, a fictional character’s perusal of texts, the interpretation of a novel, and the act of rapidly skimming printed letters on a page. The same passage in which Humbert recounts again his earlier experience—seeing a nymphet’s doubly framed image turn into the sight of a man reading a newspaper—now uses that episode as a metaphor for his own literal and figurative rereading. Humbert explains that even several years after Dolores’s disappearance, when he is living with Rita in a New York apartment, he still imagines that the addresses on envelopes in his letterbox, “the type that allows one to glimpse something of its contents through a glassed slit,” were written by her: “Several times already, a trick of harlequin light that fell through the glass onto an alien handwriting had twisted it into a semblance of Lolita’s script” (Nabokov 1955, 263, 264). The “trick of harlequin light,” which induces Humbert to misconstrue these handwritten (rather than typeset) characters, recalls other masked, spangled harlequins in Nabokov’s work and might be read as the author’s hidden signature (Sweeney 2002, 73–75). Meanwhile, the letterbox’s illuminated window echoes the lighted windows into which Humbert peered in the past. The “semblance” of Dolores’s “lovely, loopy, childish scrawl” even becomes “horribly transformed”—just like his perception of a girl in the window—into the mundane sight of what is actually there: not a man’s bare arm this time, but the “dull hand” of some other correspondent, presumably yet another figure for the male reader (Nabokov 1955, 264). Humbert explains that whenever he realizes his mistake, he will recall, “with anguished amusement, the times in [his] trustful, pre-dolorian past when [he] would be misled by a jewel-bright window”—thus introducing those earlier voyeuristic episodes by relating them to the illusory glimpses of Dolores’s handwriting through the glass of the letterbox. As this passage continues, Humbert notes that one morning, “late in September 1952,” when he picks up his mail while coping with complaints from the building’s janitor, it doesn’t even occur to him that the addresses on any of the envelopes might resemble her script (Nabokov 1955, 264). He “ha[s] the impression that one of the two letters” is from Rita’s mother, a frequent and tiresomely ingratiating correspondent, so he ignores it; instead, he opens and “scan[s] rapidly” the other letter, from Charlotte’s lawyer, John Farlow, which puzzles him because Farlow no longer sounds

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like the “dull, sedate, and reliable person” Humbert believed him to be (Nabokov 1955, 265). But now comes the punchline, Nabokov’s joke on readers who think they have learned to navigate the text’s deceptions. Just as Humbert is distracted by his encounters with the janitor and Farlow’s letter, so too readers have been hoodwinked—by those incidents, by Humbert’s mistaken impression of the first envelope, and even by a lengthy aside in which he muses that we often misread other people because we expect them to behave “with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind”—into forgetting the other letter (Nabokov 1955, 265). Such sleight-of-hand demonstrates what one early critic called “the honesty of Nabokovian deception” (Rowe 1974), especially because it turns out that on this occasion, the girl was indeed inside that “jewelbright window” (Nabokov 1955, 264). Although Humbert never glanced at the handwritten address through the glass or looked carefully at the envelope once he held it in his hand, the letterbox did contain a letter from Dolores in which, for the first time in Lolita, she herself narrates her story “in a small matter-of-fact voice” (Nabokov 1955, 266). That Humbert receives the letter he has often imagined getting, and is able to read it, somewhat belies the established pattern—in Lolita as well as Laughter in the Dark and The Enchanter—of obtuse or blind protagonists. He even presents the letter verbatim, without editorial commentary or paraphrase or interpretation, so that readers can read it with their impressions of Dolores, at long last, not distorted by his perceptions. Humbert himself may finally be able to recognize what he was unable to see. In each of these novels, Nabokov prompts readers to encounter several “visual aberration[s],” in Dmitri Nabokov’s phrase (1986, 121). By compelling readers to experience, vicariously, the forms of visual agnosia evoked in a novel’s narration, Nabokov leads them to become more conscious of their own perceptions, assumptions, expectations, and discernments. He reminds them, as well, that all these subtle and intricate mental experiences are called forth by the almost automatic act of rapidly scanning tiny characters printed in ink onto a flimsy sheet of paper—or now, perhaps, displayed upon a fragile plastic screen. As Kinbote muses in Pale Fire, “We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing.… What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?” (Nabokov 1962, 289). By forcing us to imagine what it would mean not to see, not

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to read, not to recognize what we were looking at, Nabokov induces us to acknowledge the dazzling complexity of the world around us as well as our responsibility to make sense of it.

Notes 1. On Nabokov’s awareness of neurological phenomena, see Quin (1993); for examples of cognitive approaches to his work, see Boyd (2009) and Sweeney (2016). 2. William James was the first writer to describe the mental effort to recall a forgotten word (1890, 251–252); for a survey of subsequent investigations of this phenomenon, see Schwartz (2002). 3. For an overview of synesthesia, see Blom (2009, 493–495). Nabokov describes his own audition colorée in Speak Memory (Nabokov 1966, 34– 35); its effect on his writing was first explored in Johnson (1974). 4. See, for example, the overheard bedtime story in The Enchanter (Nabokov 1986, 93) and Humbert’s conversation with Quilty in Lolita (Nabokov 1955, 26–27). 5. For a discussion of various forms of visual distortion in Nabokov’s work, see Ciancio (1999). 6. On Nabokov’s allusions to trompe-l’oeil, see Ciancio (1999, 263–264) and De Vries and Johnson (2006, 68). 7. For a discussion of eidetic imagery, see Blom (2009, 169–170); on its significance in Nabokov’s writing, see Dann (1998). 8. On autoscopic hallucinations, see Blom (2009, 52–54); on such hallucinations as a recurring theme in Nabokov, see Olson (2017). 9. Herman often experiences this phenomenon in Despair (Nabokov 1937); on Nabokov and hypnogogia, see Schwenger (1999, 37–40). 10. To compare Anton Räderscheidt’s paintings before and after his stroke, see P. Räderscheidt (n.d.). 11. For an overview of the scientific literature on forms of visual agnosia discussed in this chapter, see Coslett (2011, 209–234). 12. Another form of visual agnosia—topographical agnosia, or the inability to recognize and apprehend landscapes—appears in Nabokov’s works as a metaphor for geographical displacement. This rich topic deserves a separate study. 13. Jajdelska contrasts Humbert’s descriptions of Annabel and Dolores to demonstrate Nabokov’s intuitive understanding of facial recognition, but she does not consider whether Humbert might suffer from prosopagnosia (Jajdelska 2016, 205). 14. Other protagonists imagine resemblances where there are none, like Herman in Despair (Nabokov 1937), or they cannot distinguish between

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acquaintances by sight, like the title character of Pnin (Nabokov 1957), or they find that other people often seem to resemble each other, like Kinbote in Pale Fire (Nabokov 1962). For an example of Chuck Close’s remarkable self-portraits, see Close (2015); to observe the process by which he paints a portrait, see Close (n.d.). Elsewhere in this passage from Lolita, Humbert describes Dolores as an “orphan aux yeux battus ” (Nabokov 1955, 111). On the distinction between Dolores and “Lolita,” see Sweeney (2010). For a visual demonstration of dorsal simultagnosia, see Hoberman and Hoffmann (2007). For such a drawing of the human body, presumably made by a patient with simultagnosia, see Kean (2016). In a similar fashion, Nabokov deftly deploys sensory imagery in Lolita so that readers can perceive Humbert’s arousal without sharing it themselves (Jajdelska 2016, 205–210). Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and an inventor of ingenious devices, “designed a rotating bookstand that made up to five books instantly readable” (Crowley 2003, 199). The presence of such a bookstand in Albinus’s study not only underscores his pedantry but also hints at his difficulty in isolating visual objects in space. This widely used diagnostic illustration appears in the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (2000). Discussing female dress and nudity in Nabokov’s work, Bouchet notes that in descriptions of girls undressing, “the striptease stops before reaching its conclusion, leaving gazers and readers in a state of suspension” (Bouchet 2017, 102). I do not have space here to discuss the female reader’s position vis-à-vis Nabokov’s novels; on that subject, however, see Herbold (1998).

Bibliography Blom, Jan Dirk. 2009. A Dictionary of Hallucinations. New York: Springer. Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination. 2000. 3rd ed. New York: Pearson. Bouchet, Marie. 2017. The Text(ure) of Desire: The Garments and Ornaments of Nabokov’s Maidens. In Nabokov’s Women: The Silent Sisterhood of Textual Nomads, ed. E. Sommers, 93–115. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Boyd, Brian. 2009. Literature, Pattern, Lolita: Or, Art, Literature, Science. In Transitional Nabokov, ed. W. Norman and D. White, 31–45. London: Peter Lang.

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Ciancio, Ralph A. 1999. Nabokov’s Painted Parchments. In Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries, ed. L. Zunshine, 235–269. New York: Garland. Close, Chuck. 2015. Self-Portrait. https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artwork/ 16095/Chuck-Close-Self-Portrait. Accessed 7 October 2018. ———. n.d. Studio Interview. https://whitecube.com/channel/channel/ chuck_close_in_the_studio. Accessed 7 October 2018. Coslett, H. Branch. 2011. Sensory Agnosias. In Neurobiology of Sensation and Reward, ed. J. A. Gottfreid, 209–234. Baca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Crowley, John E. 2003. The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Dann, Kevin T. 1998. Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. De Vries, Gerard, and D. Barton Johnson. 2006. Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Herbold, Sarah. 1998. “(I have camouflaged everything, my love)”: Lolita and the Woman Reader. Nabokov Studies 5: 71–98. Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1958. Vertigo. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures. Hoberman, Perry, and Donald Hoffmann. 2007. Malperception. Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular 2 (2). https://vectors. usc.edu/issues/4/malperception/simultanagnosia.html. Accessed 7 October 2018. Jajdelska, Elspeth. 2016. “Obnoxious Preoccupation with Sex Organs”: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Representing Sex. In Nabokov and the Question of Morality: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction, ed. M. Rodgers and S.E. Sweeney, 197–212. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. London: Macmillan. Johnson, D. Barton. 1974. Synesthesia, Polychromatism, and Nabokov. In A Book of Things About Vladimir Nabokov, ed. C. Proffer, 84–103. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Kean, Mary Louise. 2016. Broca’s and Wernicke’s Aphasia. https://gawron. sdsu.edu/intro/course_core/lectures/aphasia_cases_slides.html. Accessed 7 October 2018. Nabokov, Dmitri. 1986. On a Book Entitled The Enchanter. In The Enchanter, ed. V. Nabokov, 81–109. New York: Putnam. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1937. Despair. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. 1938. Laughter in the Dark. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1955. Lolita. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1957. Pnin. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1962. Pale Fire. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989.

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———. 1966. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1972. Glory. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. 1986. The Enchanter. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Putnam. Olson, Naomi. 2017. Doubled Vision: Autoscopic Phenomena in Nabokov’s Fiction. In Nabokov Upside Down, ed. B. Boyd and M. Bozovic, 99–115. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Quin, J.D. 1993. Nabokov’s Neurology. Cycnos 10 (1): 113–122. Räderscheidt, Pascal. n.d. Anton Räderscheidt, 1892–1970. https://www. raederscheidt.com. Accessed 7 October 2018. Rowe, W.W. 1974. On the Honesty of Nabokovian Deception. In A Book of Things About Vladimir Nabokov, ed. C. Proffer, 171–181. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Sacks, Oliver. 1998. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales. New York: Touchstone. ———. 2008. Afterword. T he Man Who Forgot How to Read: A Memoir, by Howard Engel, 149–157. New York: HarperCollins. Schwartz, Bennett L. 2002. Tip-of-the-Tongue States: Phenomenology, Mechanism, and Lexical Retrieval. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Ehrlbaum Associates. Schwenger, Peter. 1999. Fantasm and Fiction: Textual Envisioning. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. 2002. Looking at Harlequins: Nabokov, the World of Art, and the Ballets Russes. In Reading Nabokov, ed. J. Grayson, A. McMillin, and P. Meyer, 73–95. London: Palgrave. ———. 2010. Lolita, I Presume: On a Character Entitled “Lolita.” Miranda 3. https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/1479. Accessed 7 October 2018. ———. 2016. Backwards, Contrariwise, Downside Up: Thinking in Different Directions in Nabokov. In Nabokov Upside Down, ed. B. Boyd and M. Bozovic, 37–55. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

CHAPTER 9

Translating Taste and Switching Tongues Julie Loison-Charles

For multilingual author Vladimir Nabokov, the translation of taste goes hand in hand with the other senses and with the other languages he mastered. Just as the senses are often intertwined or connected in Nabokov’s novels, his practices of writing and translation are indissociable. Indeed, Nabokov translated his own work on several occasions, thus turning some of his Russian works into English, some English works into Russian, or taking an active part in the French translation of his oeuvre. Moreover, Nabokov’s novels and autobiography in English bear traces of his other languages since he often resorts to foreign words, or xenisms,1 —mainly French and Russian—which he inserts into his English sentences while also giving their English translations, thus including self-translation on a small scale in the bigger framework of his writing. This chapter will concentrate on food references in the three books that Nabokov first wrote in English and then self-translated: Ada (Nabokov 1969), Lolita (Nabokov 1955), and his autobiography. These selftranslations were done completely by Nabokov, from English into Russian in the case of Lolita (Nabokov 1967) or that of his autobiography Speak, Memory (Nabokov 1947), which he translated into Russian (Nabokov 1954) and then back into English in 1967 after he revised the

J. Loison-Charles (B) University of Lille, Lille, France © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_9

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text (Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited). Other self-translations, into French, were partial self-translations as they can be considered cases of collaborative translation with the author2 : thus, Nabokov closely followed, supervised and revised the French translation of his novels Lolita (Nabokov 1959) and Ada (Nabokov 1975). Eric Kahane worked closely with Nabokov on the French translation of Lolita, but the French translation of Ada proved a tremendous challenge3 : Gilles Chahine suffered a nervous breakdown because of it, Nabokov was appalled by the howlers he found in the French text, and a third translator was called in for help, Jean-Bernard Blandenier (Boyd 1991, 646).

1. Translating Foreign Food in the Anglophone books: Inserted Translation as a mise en abyme of Self-Translation Nabokov often uses foreign words in his novels written in English, and these instances of code-switching insert translation into the English prose, thus placing translation on a stage: is the foreign word a translation of an original English word, or is it the original that should be translated for the English-speaking reader? Does translation have to be only linguistic, or can another type of translation be envisaged? Indeed, foreign words carry along with them a strongly sensory dimension, which appears in their transcription. Far from deploying the elitist practices he was often accused of, Nabokov wrote Russian words in the Latin alphabet, not the original Cyrillic, in order not to exclude monolingual readers, as in the following example: “some small Russian-type ‘hamburgers’ called bitochki” (Nabokov 1969, 125). This means that the word is accessible through sight (it can be deciphered) and hearing (it can be pronounced and heard with its Russian musicality). Moreover, its foreign origin is perceptible in the typography, in the use of italics, which are a convention for foreign words and have an impact on its visual perception: they literally slant the words so they become visible from afar, thus attracting the eye of the person skimming the text. Italics also inscribe a relief onto the text, stopping the eye of the reader and forcing them to slow down to decipher the word. This relief is like a slight suture in the text, a small seam, as French linguist Jacqueline Authier-Revuz described italics.4 Another sign that Nabokov’s writing was not necessarily elitist is that his foreign words are often translated, using different strategies. The

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most common technique is the juxtaposition of the translation next to its original, usually in brackets, as in the following example: “‘Slivok (some cream)? I hope you speak Russian?’ Marina asked Van, as she poured him a cup of tea” (Nabokov 1969, 35). Here, the original language of the foreign word is referred to in the context (“I hope you speak Russian?”) and the translation is straightforward (“some cream”). But in other cases, the translation is more convoluted, as in the next example, where the brackets encompass some of the servants who work in multilingual Ardis: “This routine Russian feast consisted in the Ardis household of prostokvasha (translated by English governesses as curds-and-whey, and by Mlle Larivière as lait caillé, ‘curdled milk’)” (Nabokov 1969, 42). A translation is given first into English, then into French, and the French expression gives way to its translation back into English, “curdled milk,” which emphasizes how outlandish a literal translation can be, especially in a culinary context, since “curdle” has rather negative connotations in English (“blood-curdling” for example). The content of the brackets insists on the translating process (“translated by”), and this is the second strategy which is often used to introduce translations, namely, resorting to an introductory verb and mentioning the foreign language. One last strategy implies giving the translation of the foreign word in a remote context, in compensation, as in this excerpt: (When I kiss you here, he said to her years later, I always remember that blue morning on the balcony when you were eating a tartine au miel; so much better in French.) The classical beauty of clover honey, smooth, pale, translucent, freely flowing from the spoon and soaking my love’s bread and butter in liquid brass. (Nabokov 1969, 63, my emphasis)

The translation is delayed and does not announce itself as a translation of the French xenism; therefore, the monolingual reader can feel that the foreign word floats freely, unaccompanied by its English translation, as is often the case in Nabokov’s works. Translation in Disguise: Clarification References to foreign food are not always translated. However, on many occasions, a more expansive rendering is given instead: it works like a

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footnote, but its content is inserted into the text (this is what Michel Ballard, following Claude and Jean Demanuelli, calls incrémentialisation).5 In Nabokov’s novels, French words can go untranslated or unexplained, while this is hardly ever the case for Russian. In the following example, the narrator of Ada describes the different dishes that Ada and Van are planning to enjoy with their parents: zelyonïya shchi, a velvety green sorrel-and-spinach soup, containing slippery hard-boiled eggs and served with finger-burning, irresistibly soft, meat-filled or carrot-filled or cabbage-filled pirozhki — peer-rush-KEY, thus pronounced, thus celebrated here, for ever and ever. After that, she had decided, there would be bread-crumbed sander (sudak) with boiled potatoes, hazel-hen (ryabchiki) and that special asparagus (bezukhanka). (Nabokov 1969, 202)

All the senses besides one are conjured up in these descriptions. Taste (with the various ingredients), sight (“green”), hearing (the pronunciation of “pirozhki” made English, “peer-rush-KEY”), and touch (“velvety,” “slippery,” “finger-burning”) are all present. Sensory details verge on the sensual, especially when “finger-burning” lies so close to the adverb “irresistibly,” thus hinting at the erotic tension that exists between brother and sister, but also between their respective parents, who used to be lovers. The word “pirozhki” is not translated per se, as only its contents are revealed, but the ternary repetition of “filled” makes it clear that it is a stuffed delicacy, and therefore implies something like a dumpling or doughnut (more precisely, it is a bread-roll with filling). The explanations are sometimes very wordy, such as for “zelonïya shchi” which requires twelve words, but, on other occasions, the reader seems to be given a straightforward translation (for example, “hazel-hen (ryabchiki)”). But this alternation between one-word translation and long periphrasis casts doubt on the translations that are apparently given: in the case of “bread-crumbed sander (sudak),” is sudak the name of a fish, sander, or that of a dish, bread-crumbed sander? When Translation Goes Missing: Looking for Clues In some cases, the foreign word is neither translated nor explained, so the reader can only rely on the context. In the following example taken

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from Speak, Memory, Nabokov remembers vendors on the French beach of Biarritz: Additional movement and sound were provided by venders hawking cacahuètes, sugared violets, pistachio ice cream of a heavenly green, cachou pellets, and huge convex pieces of dry, gritty, waferlike stuff that came from a red barrel. (Nabokov 1947, 99)

Here, the presence of various sweet snacks can help the reader infer that “cacahuètes ” is just another type of candy, and it does indeed mean “peanuts” (probably in its sugared version). In another example, taken from Lolita, the reader cannot guess the meaning of the French expression “pot-au-feu”: “Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin, what really attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl” (Nabokov 1955, 22). However, the same expression is used two paragraphs later and the context makes it clear that pot-au-feu is a French dish: “As to cooking, we tacitly dismissed the pot-au-feu and had most of our meals at a crowded place in rue Bonaparte where there were wine stains on the table cloth and a good deal of foreign babble” (Nabokov 1955, 23). The French expression is surrounded by “cooking” and “meals,” but also followed by references to some elements one can find in a restaurant (“wine stains on the table cloth”). Translation as a Second Thought: Translating from the Margins More often than not, Nabokov included context or an inserted translation that could help monolingual readers understand the xenisms encountered in Speak, Memory and Lolita. However, in Ada, the number of foreign words is very high and they often go unexplained. Not only can this be a problem for readers, but it can make the job of translating the novel into foreign languages cumbersome. Therefore, Nabokov’s German publisher and friend Ledig Rowohlt encouraged him to prepare notes for the translators in 1969,6 which were subsequently added at the end of the novel. Most of these notes are translations of the various foreign words, as in the following example: “up to a dozen people of different size and sex slept on one blin-like mattress” (Nabokov 1969, 109); “blin: Russ., pancake” (Nabokov 1969, 474).

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The question of translating foreign food becomes indeed trickier when it comes to (self-)translating Nabokov’s books into foreign languages. In many cases, the foreign reference remains foreign (Russian food is as foreign to English-speaking readers as it is to Francophones), but sometimes, the foreign culture in the source text is the same as the target culture: how does one translate French food into French? Conversely, what was familiar in the original English text becomes foreign in translation and it may become necessary to translate English or American dishes. Therefore, when Nabokov translated Ada, Lolita, or his autobiography into Russian or French, he often had to rewrite his text to adapt to his new audience.

2. Self-Translating Foreign Food: Translating Foreign Food into Another Foreign Language When it came to translating foreign references into a language in which the references would remain foreign for the new target reader (i.e., Russian words into French or French words into Russian), Nabokov (and his collaborators for the French translations of Lolita and Ada) often resorted to the same techniques he used for foreign words in his novels. Thus, when a foreign word was accompanied by a translation in the source text, translating usually implied keeping the foreign language and translating its accompanying translation into the target language: ‘Slivok (some cream)? I hope you speak Russian?’ Marina asked Van, as she poured him a cup of tea. (Nabokov 1969, 35)

“ Slivok (un peu de crème)?” demanda Marina en servant à son neveu une tasse de thé. “Tu parles le russe‚ j’espère!” (Nabokov 1975‚ 32)

One can notice that the translation is rather close to the original, even if “Van” is replaced by “son neveu,” thus making the relationship between the characters clearer. This tendency to make the French translation more explicit can often be observed, especially since the French reader did not have access to Vivian Darkbloom’s notes in the 1975 edition. Thus, in the following example, sudak is preceded, in the translation, by the mention that it is a fish: That’s not real sudak, papa, though it’s tops, I assure you. (Nabokov 1969, 204)

C’est délicieux, ce poisson, papa, mais ce n’est pas du vrai soudak. (Nabokov 1975, 214)

Therefore, the translation makes something explicit that is not clarified in the English.

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When Nabokov self-translated Lolita into Russian, French words were usually kept as such, literally: Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu. (Nabokov 1955, 22) we tacitly dismissed the pot-au-feu. (Nabokov 1955, 23)

Hot  govoril sebe, qto mne vsego lix nuno sublimirovannoe pot-au-feu. (Nabokov 1967, 23) my bez slov otstavili pot-au-feu. (Nabokov 1967, 25)

In the Russian translation, the words written in the Latin alphabet are “reported,” or carried over,7 directly into the middle of words in Cyrillic letters; Michel Ballard defined “report ” as carrying a word over directly from the original text into the translation: Le report est un acte de traduction consistant à reporter dans le texte d’arrivée un élément du texte de départ pour des raisons de nécessité (trou lexical) ou par désir de préserver la spécificité d’un élément du TD [texte de départ] ou de créer de la couleur locale: la non-traduction des anthroponymes d’individus qui ne sont pas des personnages historiques relève du report. (Ballard 2003, 154)

In the Russian self-translation of Lolita, the difference between the two typographies makes the use of italics for foreign words redundant and therefore they are not used. Lastly, one needs to mention that, on some rare occasions, the references to foreign food are omitted altogether: up to a dozen people of different size and sex slept on one blin-like mattress. (Nabokov 1969, 109)

jusqu’à douze personnes de tailles et de sexes différents dormaient sur la même paillasse. (Nabokov 1975, 115)

This passage serves to point out people’s promiscuity and so the foreign word can be considered on some level superfluous since the Russian pancake is mentioned not so much as food but rather for its inadequate thickness. A particularly interesting case is when food which was foreign in the original is translated into its home language, such as when French words and dishes are transported back to France, or Russian meals back to Russia.

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When the Foreign Becomes Familiar in Translation Changing languages through the process of translation implies that notions of foreign and familiar get shuffled around and that certain changes get implemented, as in the following example in which Nabokov’s three main languages are used to refer to food: This routine Russian feast consisted in the Ardis household of prostokvasha (translated by English governesses as curds-and-whey, and by Mlle Larivière as lait caillé, ‘curdled milk’). (Nabokov 1969, 42)

Le plat principal de ce festin traditionnel et tout russe était la prostokvacha (les gouvernantes anglaises traduisaient curds-and-whey – et Melle Larivière, lait caillé). (Nabokov 1975, 40)

As mentioned above, the Russian language is not problematic since it is foreign for English-speaking readers as well as French-speaking ones. Thus, in the original as well as in the translation, the Russian reference is kept as such and written in italics; the only difference lies in the transcription of the final syllable, which differs between English (prostokvasha) and French (prostokvacha). The English expression “curds-andwhey” becomes foreign in the French text, and is therefore printed in italics. Conversely, “lait caillé” is foreign in English but loses its italics in French. As for the literal translation of “lait caillé” (“curdled milk”), it is no longer needed in the French version and is simply omitted. Another passage mentioning “lait caillé” shows that French heterogeneity generally disappears in the French translation of Ada, be it for short references to French food or longer dialogs in French, as here between Ada and her French governess: ‘Tant pis,’ repeated Ada, and with invincible appetite started to smear butter all over the yolk-tinted rough surface and rich incrustations — raisins, angelica, candied cherry, cedrat — of a thick slice of cake. Mlle Larivière, who was following Ada’s movements with awe and disgust, said: ‘Je rêve. Il n’est pas possible qu’on mette du beurre par-dessus toute cette pâte britannique, masse indigeste et immonde.’ ‘Et ce n’est que la première tranche,’ said Ada. ‘Do you want a sprinkle of cinnamon on your lait caillé?’ asked Marina. (Nabokov 1969, 126)

‘Tant pis’, répéta Ada, et avec un invincible appétit elle entreprit aussitôt d’enduire largement de beurre la surface couleur jaune d’œuf du gâteau et ses riches incrustations de raisins, de cerises, d’angélique et de cédrat. Mlle Larivière observait la manœuvre avec stupeur et dégoût: ‘Je rêve, dit-elle. Il n’est pas possible qu’on mette du beurre par-dessus toute cette pâte britannique, masse indigeste et immonde’? - Et ce n’est que la première tranche’, dit Ada. ‘Une pincée de cannelle dans ton lait caillé?’ demanda Marina. (Nabokov 1975, 131)

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Due to all these omissions, the French Ada seems much less multilingual than the original text. A similar conclusion can be drawn about the translation of Russian food in Nabokov’s Drugie Berega, as in the chapter dedicated to Nabokov’s mother: One of her greatest pleasures in summer was the very Russian sport of hodit’ po gribï [looking for mushrooms]. Fried in butter and thickened with sour cream, her delicious finds appeared regularly on the dinner table. (Nabokov 1947, 22)

The very Russian tradition of looking for mushrooms is followed by examples of Russian ways of preparing mushrooms. In the self-translation, Nabokov makes an aside to his now-Russian reader to explain what he had to do to adapt to his then-English-speaking readers: Lbimeixim ee letnim udovolstviem bylo hodenie po griby. V originale to knigi mne prixlos podqerknut samo sabo pontnoe dl russkogo qitatel otsutstvie gastronomiqeskogo znaqeni v tom dele.8 (Nabokov 1954, 159) (In the summer her favorite pleasure was to go mushroom-hunting. In the original of this book, I had to underline the absence of any gastronomic interest, which would be clear to the Russian reader.)

In the translation, the typographical heterogeneity of “hodit’ po gribï ” disappears: there are no italics and Nabokov does not use Latin letters as he did in the case of French words in the Russian translation of Lolita since the original spelling of the Russian expression is in Cyrillic letters. However, typography is a device that Nabokov often uses when it comes to French words in the French translation of Lolita since he inserts an asterisk after French words in italics, as in this example where Humbert Humbert describes a photograph of Annabel he treasures: Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat glacé. (Nabokov 1955, 10)

Les traits d’Annabelle étaient flous, car l’objectif l’avait saisie au moment où elle se penchait sur son chocolat glacé*. (Nabokov 1959, 17)

On the first occurrence of italics followed with an asterisk in the novel, a note explains the strategy as follows: “Les mots en italique et suivis d’un astérisque (*) sont en français dans le texte (N. du T.)” (Nabokov 1955, 15).

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However, not all French words are kept as such, as one can observe in the French translation of “pot-au-feu”: Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu. (Nabokov 1955, 22) we tacitly dismissed the pot-au-feu. (Nabokov 1955, 23)

J’avais beau me dire que je ne voulais à mes côtés qu’une présence lénitive, un pot-au-feu* sublimé. (Nabokov 1959, 32) Nous avions tacitement éliminé le pot-au-feu. (Nabokov 1959, 33)

Therefore, only one of the two occurrences maintains the typographical marker, thus toning down the French quality of the original text in its translation. Thus Nabokov’s multilingualism threatens to disappear in translation and a bilingual text such as Lolita tends to become more monolingual; likewise, trilingual Ada becomes more bilingual in French. What happens in the process of translation is not so much the loss of code-switching, but more specifically the disappearance of one of Nabokov’s three languages, namely, English. Therefore, one of the strategies to preserve multilingualism in translation is to insert English. Keeping Heterogeneity in Translation by Inserting English In a previous example, Van complained that sudak was not the real thing, and the text then provided a confirmation of his intuition: “(Marina, having failed to obtain the European product in time for the dinner, had chosen the nearest thing, wall-eyed pike, or ‘dory,’ with Tartar sauce and boiled young potatoes)” (Nabokov 1969, 204). In the French translation, no less than three references to English are inserted: (Marina, n’ayant pu se procurer à temps ce produit de l’Europe, l’avait remplacé par ce qu’elle avait trouvé de plus ressemblant, le walleyed pike, sandre américaine, servie avec une sauce tartare et des pommes de terre nouvelles à l’anglaise). (Nabokov 1975, 214)

The most striking change is the inclusion of English words in English: “walleyed pike.” More specifically, the French text does not translate the original “wall-eyed pike” but carries it over directly into the French, with only a slight adjustment in its morphology (“walleyed” in one word) and typography (use of the italics). The two other inclusions are more lexical than typographical: what was called “dory” in the original version is called

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“sandre” (sander, as seen previously) and branded as American. Likewise, “boiled young potatoes” are qualified as being English or, rather, cooked English-style9 (“à l’anglaise”). This use of English words in the French translation has the advantage of inserting a new, third language in Ada and thus keeps the text multilingual. The heterogeneity of English also arises when British or American food has to be translated into French or Russian, and, very often, Nabokov resorts to the techniques he uses when he translates French or Russian dishes into English in the original. Thus, we saw earlier that his most common technique as a writer was to juxtapose the translation or clarification next to the original, foreign word. This is what Nabokov resorts to when, in his autobiography, he translates into Russian the very English childhood he had described in Speak, Memory: At breakfast, Golden Syrup imported from London would entwist with its glowing coils the revolving spoon from which enough of it had slithered onto a piece of Russian bread-and-butter. (Nabokov 1947, 45)

za brekfastom rki patoqny sirop, golden syrup, namatyvals blestwimi kolcami na loku, a ottuda spolzal zmee na derevenskim maslom namazanny russki qerny hleb. (Nabokov 1954, 174)

(At breakfast a bright treacle syrup, golden syrup, entwisted its bright rings on the spoon and from there slid like a snake onto Russian black bread with countryside butter spread on it.)

In the original text, the Englishness of Nabokov’s breakfast was conveyed by indicating the origin of Golden Syrup (“imported from London”). In the Russian self-translation, Nabokov uses the expression “golden syrup” and leaves it in Latin letters, but he precedes it with an incrémentialisation: “rki patoqny sirop.” Moreover, he paves the way for the irruption of this English xenism in his Russian autobiography by transcribing the word “breakfast” into Russian, “brekfast[om].” In his novel Lolita, several references to food can prove difficult to translate into a non-English context, such as “cottage cheese” in the following example: “restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads” (Nabokov 1955, 138). In both translations, Nabokov resorted to an equivalence in the target culture: les salades huppées de fromage blanc. (Nabokov 1959, 171)

salaty, uvenqannye tvorogom. (Nabokov 1967, 161)

(Salads, crowned with tvorog )

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In Russian, “tvorog” is quite similar to cottage cheese, but purists will say that fromage blanc is not an equivalent as it is quite like yoghurt. Since it is rather liquidy and, more importantly, used as a sweet dessert, the translation seems peculiar to a French reader especially as, in the novel, it is placed on salad. In the novel, Lolita particularly relishes sundaes, which are referred to no less than four times. Interestingly enough, different strategies were used depending on the context, and they are quite consistent across languages (in the French or Russian translations of Lolita). In two cases, sundaes are mentioned in passing, without much impact on the context or on the representation of characters, even though they help paint a certain image of America: Bill’s wife had worshipped him from afar long before they ever met: in fact, she used to secretly admire the famous young actor as he ate sundaes in Schwab’s drugstore. (Nabokov 1955, 130, my emphasis) We passed and re-passed through the whole gamut of American roadside restaurants, from the lowly Eat with its deer head (dark trace of long tear at inner canthus), “humorous” picture post cards of the posterior “Kurort” type, impaled guest checks, life savers, sunglasses, adman visions of celestial sundaes, one half of a chocolate cake under glass, and several horribly experienced flies zigzagging over the sticky sugar-pour on the ignoble counter. (Nabokov 1955, 144, my emphasis)

Consequently, Nabokov usually uses an equivalence in the target language: he ate sundaes in Schwab’s drugstore. (Nabokov 1955, 130) adman visions of celestial sundaes. (Nabokov 1955, 144)

une glace tous-fruits. (Nabokov 1959, 161)

moroenoe. (Nabokov 1967, 152) (ice-cream)

glaces tutti-frutti. (Nabokov 1959, 178)

moroenoe. (Nabokov 1967, 169) (ice-cream).

In Russian, the generic term “moroenoe” (ice-cream) is used, and in French, reference to ice-cream (“glace”) is complemented with a reference to several flavors and varies slightly (“tous-fruits ” versus “tutti frutti”). When sundaes are a way of connoting Humbert’s representation of America, the translations lose their generic dimension of ice-cream and

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underline the presence of syrup or fudge. In the following example, Humbert wants Lolita to stop eating sundaes as they may spoil her beauty: Sundaes cause acne. (Nabokov 1955, 37)

Glaces et confiseries sont sources d’acné. (Nabokov 1959, 50)

moroenoe s siropom vyzyvaet syp. (Nabokov 1967, 41) (ice-cream with syrup provokes a rash).

In both translations, the ice-cream is accompanied by another very sweet food (candy in French, syrup in Russian) underlining its harmful impact on the skin of Humbert’s nymphet. The fourth case is extremely interesting as it pictures a Lolita who seems very superficial to Humbert: Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth — these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. (Nabokov 1955, 137, my emphasis)

In Russian, the translation of the passage is rather literal, especially when it comes to fudge: “moroenoe pod xokoladno-tnuqkovym sousom” (Nabokov 1967, 160) (ice-cream under a chocolate-caramel sauce). It reveals Nabokov’s refusal to choose between two different conceptions of fudge. The French translation, however, rewrites the description of Lolita’s favorite things to present her conventionality as typically American to Humbert: “Le jazz hot dans sa forme la plus sirupeuse, les square dances à la mode des cow-boys, la mélasse hétéroclite et gluante des ice-creams américaines, les films de music-hall, les magazines de Hollywood” (Nabokov 1959, 170, my emphasis). In this translation, the presence of English words is overwhelming, whether they are completely foreign and thus in italics (“hot,” “square dances,” “ice-creams”), or assimilated in French and therefore without italics (“cow-boys ”). Moreover, references to America and American locations are added (“américaines,” “Hollywood”) for even more emphasis on how American Lolita’s hobbies appear to Humbert, while nothing in the original text demands this: “sundaes” were not localized anywhere in particular and “Hollywood” replaces “movie” in “movie magazines.” As far as translation strategies are concerned, foreign words are not simply carried over into the translation, as is the case for “hot.” Rather, the translation uses English words in a form that is more accessible to

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French readers: “square dancing” loses its final -ing form, thus enabling a French person to recognize the word “dances” in its proximity to the French “danses.” Similarly, “sundaes” is apparently translated by “icecreams,” but it is harder to determine if “hétéroclite” is supposed to be part of the translation of “sundaes” (since, elsewhere, “tutti-frutti” or “tous-fruits ” were used to describe the heteroclite composition of sundaes) or if “mélasse” (treacle) is an accurate translation for “fudge”; it was probably picked because the negative connotations of “mélasse” were a way to insist on Humbert’s disgust, expressed also in the word “gooey” (“gluante”). Fudge seems to have been spread all over the text, as “sweet” in “sweet hot jazz” is translated by “sirupeuse” (syrupy). Inserting English heterogeneity in the French translations of Lolita and Ada is a very creative translation strategy on the part of Nabokov and his collaborators. Another example of creative translation is when Nabokov turns the loss of code-switching into a gain in sensory translation.

3. Synesthetic Translation As mentioned earlier, translating French into French proves difficult, and code-switching is often lost in the process, as in the example with “tartine au miel ”: I always remember that blue morning on the balcony when you were eating a tartine au miel; so much better in French. (Nabokov 1969, 63)

Je me rappelle toujours ce matin bleu où tu mangeais “une tartine au miel” sur ton balcon. Cela sonne en français tellement mieux que “ bread and honey”. (Nabokov 1975, 64)

The loss of French heterogeneity in the French translation is compensated by the insertion of an English expression, “bread and honey,” but also by two references to the senses. First, the inverted commas insist visually on the expression “une tartine au miel,” and then, more importantly, the translation insists on the pleasure that the sound of the French expression brings to the narrator. This echoes Nabokov’s answer when he was asked which of his three languages he preferred: “My head says English, my heart, Russian, my ear, French” (Nabokov 1973, 49). This association of acoustic pleasure with French can also be found in the following example describing the Russian meal in Chapter 38 of Ada:

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served with finger-burning, irresistibly soft, meat-filled or carrot-filled or cabbage-filled pirozhki — peer-rush-KEY, thus pronounced, thus celebrated here, for ever and ever. (Nabokov 1969, 202)

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servie avec des pirojki chauds à se brûler les doigts, tendres irrésistiblement et fourrés de viande, de carotte, ou de chou (des PIRACHKI, c’est ainsi qu’à Ardis on prononce, on célèbre ce nom, depuis toujours et à tout jamais). (Nabokov 1975, 213)

The description in English contains a reference to touch which is not problematic to render in French, but the pun on “pirozhki” and “peerrush-KEY” is untranslatable with an equivalent French pun which would encompass the ideas of “peer,” “rush” and “key,” three terms that evoke the love affair between the main characters. Instead, the French translation insists on the pronunciation of the French transcription: indeed, the word is no longer transcribed with its Russian morphology, pirojki, but emphasis is put on the transformation of the French “j ” (in English, [zh]) which is devoiced and therefore pronounced as a French “ch” (in English, [sh]). But synesthetic translation becomes most striking in Chapter 7 of Nabokov’s autobiography which focusses on his childhood memories in the French seaside resort of Biarritz. The chapter starts by describing Nabokov’s train journey and its unfortunate impact on his stomach: “until the little witness of mixed velocities was made to disgorge his portion of omelette aux confitures de fraises ” (Nabokov 1947, 96). In the Russian self-translation, Nabokov did not resort to code-switching but rather conjured up the sense of touch: poka vs ta mexanina skoroste ne zastavlla molodogo nabldatel vernut tolko qto poglowenny im omlet s gorqim varenem. (Nabokov 1954, 216) (until all this jumble of velocities made the young witness disgorge the omelet with hot jam he had just gobbled up)

In the same chapter, Nabokov describes his memories of swimming in Biarritz with vivid, sensual details: “Additional movement and sound were provided by venders hawking cacahuètes, sugared violets, pistachio ice cream of a heavenly green, cachou pellets, and huge convex pieces of dry, gritty, waferlike stuff that came from a red barrel” (Nabokov 1947, 99). The passage is filled with references to the senses: hearing, since “sound” is mentioned explicitly but also because the verb “hawking” gives the French word “cacahuètes ” the status of a quote, as if one could hear what

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the young Vladimir heard at the time; taste and smell, with all the food, and adjectives like “sugared”; sight, with several colors (“heavenly green,” “red barrel,” and even “violets”); and also touch (“dry, gritty”). In the translation, the French word cacahuètes goes missing but is replaced with an insistence on taste: “orexkov qut slawe mor” (Nabokov 1954, 219) (peanuts slightly sweeter than the sea). There is a mention of the taste of the sea in the previous paragraph in the English version (“The breeze salted one’s lips”) and it seems that, in Russian, Nabokov expands this reference to taste in the allusion to peanuts. It is also worth noting that Nabokov insists on this intratextual link in the Russian text by making one paragraph out of the two original ones, which goes to show that translating had an impact on Nabokov’s creative writing, especially when it came to senses.

Conclusion In his autobiography, Nabokov underlines the links he experiences between sight and hearing and how the different languages he spoke were affected by his synesthesia: On top of all this I present a fine case of colored hearing. Perhaps “hearing” is not quite accurate, since the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. (Nabokov 1947, 381)

The inscription of foreign food and Nabokov’s self-translation of it show that his multilingualism not only affected his sight and hearing but also his other senses, especially taste. The tongue is the locus of both taste and language, and one could almost take the idea of translation as switching tongues in a literal way.

Notes 1. This is the term that linguist Louis Deroy uses to differenciate foreign words and loanwords (emprunts ): “On peut distinguer deux catégories: les pérégrinismes ou xénismes, c’est-à-dire les mots sentis comme étrangers et en quelque sorte cités […] et les emprunts proprement dits ou mots tout à fait naturalisés ” (Deroy 1956, 224).

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2. Nabokov was used to considering that translations prepared by others and then revised by him were then his own, new original texts, for example when it came to the English translations of his Russian novels: “Once he had polished the English translation to his satisfaction, he would then arrange for subsequent translations into other languages to be made from the English rather than the Russian text, not only because there were far more translators available from English than from Russian, but also because Nabokov regarded the English-language versions with their minor glosses as textually definitive for non-Russian readers” (Boyd 1991, 484). On Nabokov and the collaborative translation of his Russian novels, see Anokhina (2016). Nabokov’s part in the translation of his American novels into French corresponds to three types of collaborative translation in the typology of Hersant (2016): “revision” (Hersant 2016, 93), “close collaboration” (“a particular form of mediated self-translation”) (Hersant 2016, 95) and “authorial appropriation” (Hersant 2016, 101). The different shades of collaborative translation in Nabokov’s practice will be discussed in forthcoming articles. 3. Translating Lolita into French also was a difficult experience: see Edel-Roy (2017). 4. “[ils] apparaissent à la surface du dire comme autant de ‘coutures apparentes’, exhibant, dans un geste de ‘reprise’, au sens couturier du terme, à la fois une coupure et sa suture” (Authier-Revuz 2002, 150). 5. “l’ incrémentialisation, qui est l’insertion de la note ou d’une forme de commentaire dans le texte” (Ballard 1998). 6. “At his friend’s request Nabokov reluctantly prepared a preliminary series of notes to the novel” (Boyd 1991, 569). I would like to thank Brian Boyd for clarifying the chronology and quoting in a personal email the following letter, dated June 29, 1971, from Rowohlt to Vera Nabokov: “You will remember that I pushed him to do them and that he then kindly forwarded a copy to me.” Boyd also mentioned another letter, dated June 2, 1969, in which Vladimir Nabokov suggested he had already prepared a first version of the notes: “When we meet at Lugano on June 21st at 4 o’clock, I shall ask you to check a few pages together with me.” 7. Michel Ballard’s terminology has not been translated into English so far, which explains why I use inverted commas around “reported.” I then use the translation “carry over.” 8. All the translations between brackets are mine, be they from the Russian or the French; those from the Russian were revised by Lyudmila Razumova. 9. This technique implies placing the potatoes in cold water and bringing them to a boil instead of plunging them directly into boiling water.

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Bibliography Anokhina, Olga. 2016. Vladimir Nabokov and His Translators: Collaboration or Translating Under Duress? In Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age, ed. Anthony Cordingley and Céline Frigau Manning, 113– 131. London: Bloomsbury. Authier-Revuz, Jacqueline. 2002. Du dire ‘en plus’: dédoublement réflexif et ajout sur la chaîne. In Figures d’ajout: phrase, texte, écriture, ed. Jacqueline Authier-Revuz and Marie-Christine Lala. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle. Ballard, Michel. 1998. La traduction du nom propre comme négociation. Palimpsestes 11. http://journals.openedition.org/palimpsestes/1542. Accessed 3 February 2019. ———. 2003. Versus: la version réfléchie anglais-français. Paris: Ophrys. Boyd, Brian. 1991. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Deroy, Louis. 1956. L’Emprunt linguistique. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Edel-Roy, Agnès. 2017. Lolita, le livre ‘impossible’? Miranda 15. http:// journals.openedition.org/miranda/11265. Accessed 3 February 2019. Genette, Gérard. 1987. Seuils. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Hersant, Patrick. 2016. Author-Translator Collaborations: A Typological Survey. In Collaborative Translation: from the Renaissance to the Digital Age, ed. Anthony Cordingley and Céline Frigau Manning, 91–110. London: Bloomsbury. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1947. Speak, Memory: A Memoir. Reprint, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1960. ———. 1954. Drugie Berega. Reprint, in Sobranie soˇcinenij v cˇetyrex tomax, IV, ed. Viktor Erofeev. Moscow: Pravda, 1990. ———. 1955. Lolita. Reprint, in Novels, 1955–1962, ed. Brian Boyd, 1–298. New York: Library of America, 1996. ———. 1959. Lolita. Translated by Eric H. Kahane, Revised by Vladimir Nabokov. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1967. Lolita. Translated by Vladimir Nabokov. Reprint, Moscow: AST, 2006. ———. 1969. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Reprint, in Novels, 1969–1974, ed. Brian Boyd, 1–485. New York: Library of America, 1996. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1990. ———. 1975. Ada ou l’Ardeur. Translated by Gilles Chahine with the collaboration of Jean-Bernard Blandenier, Revised by Vladimir Nabokov. Paris: Fayard.

CHAPTER 10

Translation as Craft and Heroic Deed: On the Political Stakes of a Multilingual Sensoriality Isabelle Poulin

Not speaking one’s mother tongue. Living with resonances and reasoning that are cut off from the body’s nocturnal memory, from the bittersweet slumber of childhood. Bearing within oneself like a secret vault, or like a handicapped child – cherished and useless – that language of the past withers without ever leaving you. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (trans. Leon S. Roudiez) One cannot help being irritated by certain peculiarities of Nabokov’s manner, […] by his general tendency to dabble in esoteric sensations […] Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

Do the senses make sense in the multilingual work of a synesthete forced into exile? This chapter will concentrate on what is pointed to here in the very framing of the question, i.e., that Vladimir Nabokov’s primary, permanent activity was translation. In turn this will raise ethical issues insofar as “Translation is ‘a putting in touch with’, or it is nothing,” to quote French translation theorist Antoine Berman (Berman 1992, 4,

I. Poulin (B) University Bordeaux Montaigne, Bordeaux, France © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_10

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words in bold are his). Both the neurological phenomena Nabokov experienced from childhood, and his art of writing, far removed from Russia and in between tongues, may be defined as a means of coupling the bodily senses. The aesthetic stakes are obvious here (aesthetic: “derived from the Greek aisth¯etikós, f. aisth¯eta things perceptible by the senses”).1 Yet the celebrated statement made by the author of Lolita on what art is reminds us that aesthetics go hand in hand with politics within the context of exile: the “sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being” (Nabokov 1955, 315). This is what Nabokov referred to as “aesthetic bliss” (Nabokov 1955, 315), indeed implying a multilingual sensoriality whose existence even the artist himself distrusted at the time of Lolita’s publication: “None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus” (Nabokov 1955, 316). Time has passed. However, I will argue that part of the answer to the initial question lies in the understanding of the supra or extra national “translation zone” (Apter 2006, 1) in which Nabokov never ceased to attempt to settle his readers.

The Art of Writing of a “Reformed Man” Recalling his native country in his autobiography, Nabokov evokes an “Eden of sensations” (see Mollaret, p. 160 of the present volume) relating to his multilingual childhood, but whose existence was threatened by his departure from Russia. The portrait of a young Nabokov in Cambridge sitting up “far into the night, surrounded by an almost Quixotic accumulation of unwieldy [Russian] volumes” (Nabokov 1967, 204) is well known: My fear of losing or corrupting, through alien influence, the only thing I had salvaged from Russia – her language – became positively morbid and considerably more harassing than the fear I was to experience two decades later of my never being able to bring my English prose anywhere close to the level of my Russian. (Nabokov 1967, 204)

This “morbid” feeling makes it clear that “a language is a live physical thing which cannot be so easily dismissed,” so aptly put by the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight , Nabokov’s first novel written in English (Nabokov 1941, 84).

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Julia Kristeva refers to this novel in Étrangers à Nous-Mêmes, an essay in which the Bulgarian-French literary critic explores the notion of the stranger (the foreigner, outsider or alien), a quotation from which has been chosen as the epigraph to this chapter. Kristeva, who left Bulgaria and moved to France when she was 24, knew that losing one’s mother tongue was akin to being the victim of some kind of accidental bodily injury. Nabokov said, for his part, that switching from Russian to English was like “learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion” (Nabokov 1973, 54). In a section entitled “Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner,” Kristeva most sensitively chronicles the difficult task of shifting to a new language in exile, focusing on auditory perceptions just as Nabokov did in Pnin, a novel whose eponymous hero has been bestowed with elements from his creator’s experience: You have the feeling that the new language is a resurrection: new skin, new sex. But the illusion bursts when you hear, upon listening to a recording, for instance, that the melody of your voice comes back to you as a particular sound, out of nowhere, closer to the old spluttering than to today’s code. (Kristeva 1991, 15) If his Russian was music, his English was murder. He had enormous difficulty (‘dzeefeecooltsee’ in Pninian English) with depalatization, never managing to remove the extra Russian moisture from t’s and d’s before the vowels he so quaintly softened. (Nabokov 1957, 55) Your awkwardness has its charm, they say, it is even erotic, according to womanizers, not to be outdone. (Kristeva 1991, 15) Our friend [Pnin] employs a nomenclature all his own. His verbal vagaries add a new thrill to life. His mispronunciations are mythopeic. His slips of the tongue are oracular. (Nabokov 1957, 138)

Most of these foreigners’ lives end in silence, Kristeva argues (“One nevertheless lets you know that it is irritating just the same” [Kristeva 1991, 15]), including Pnin’s, the character being driven away at the end of the story “where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen” (Nabokov 1957, 160, words in bold are mine). Of course, the latter is deprived of any sense of humor, i.e., of the ability to withstand the mismatches that Kristeva encourages by jointly exploring the notion of “the stranger” and that of strangeness within the self. In her opinion, this constitutes the supreme value of Nabokov’s creative work in between tongues—she refers to Sebastian Knight in terms of “Ironic Wandering” and “Polymorphous Memory” (Kristeva 1991, 33). However, while Pnin

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does not inherit his creator’s artistic gifts, he goes through the same adventure of having all his teeth pulled out upon arriving in America, before having them replaced with “an amphitheatre of translucid plastics” (Nabokov 1957, 33). The story of what is called “a firm mouthful of efficient, alabastrine, humane America” (Nabokov 1957, 32) sheds light on what Nabokov himself may have felt when becoming a writer in a new language, particularly in terms of the aesthetic dimension of metamorphosis: […] during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger. (Nabokov 1957, 32)

The expression used by the character who feels like “a reformed man” (Nabokov 1957, 33) can be applied to the writer himself whose mother tongue (both the soft piece of flesh and the system of signs) gets lost in sensations. One learns in exile that language is rooted in the body. The plates thrust into Pnin’s mouth echo Jacques Derrida’s autobiographical account of his relationship with the French language entitled Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin (1998), in which the philosopher confronts the problem of language as a legacy through the prism of his experiences during the Second World War (as an Algerian Jew he was stripped of his French nationality by the Vichy Regime): what does it mean to “have” a language—when we believe that a language belongs to us, that it is ours? It means, Nabokov would answer, that you cannot be expropriated from the “Eden of sensations.” He indeed tried to avoid this happening when switching to a new language. That language was not, his detractors would say, common English, irritated as they were by “his general tendency to dabble in esoteric sensations” (Nabokov 1967, 250) but rather “Nabokovese,” as the reviewers of his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin were quick to point out: “It is too much a transposition into Nabokovese, rather than a translation into English. It gives the

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impression of a foreigner who has not quite learnt the language with the extreme perfection required” (Conquest 1982, 172). Undoubtedly the artist never had to face such criticism; on the contrary, he was said to be both dexterous and powerful. Yet the art of writing in a “reformed man” can be compared to the art of the translator, and the latter is not considered to “have” a language, but rather to steal or betray it, as the Italian saying traduttore-traditore (translator-traitor) reminds us. Besides, Nabokov was not recognized worldwide as a multilingual writer, but as an American one. Sensations seem “esoteric” in his work and he ironically points this out himself in the fictitious commentary he adds to his autobiography. This may at times seem frightening and unbearable, as illustrated by the violent clashes which occurred between Pushkin’s translator and his old friend Edmund Wilson, relating to forms and colors, smells, sounds, tastes, or tactile sensations in a poem. It seems that multilingual sensoriality exacerbates what French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “the politics of literature,” which “is not the same thing as the politics of the writers” and does not concern the latters’ personal engagements, but “implies that literature does politics simply by being literature” (Rancière 2011, 3). To spell out the terms of this more explicitly, Rancière indicates that “politics” does not refer here to that with which it is “often confused,” i.e., “the exercise of power and the struggle for power” but to “the construction of a specific sphere of experience” which is not “a fixed given resting on an anthropological invariable” (Rancière 2011, 3). On the contrary, it is exposed to the permanent distribution and redistribution “of space and time, place and identity, speech and noise, the visible and the invisible,” to what he refers to as “the distribution of the perceptible” (Rancière 2011, 4): Political activity reconfigures the distribution of the perceptible. It introduces new objects and subjects onto the common stage. It makes visible what was invisible, it makes audible as speaking beings those who were previously heard only as noisy animals. The expression ‘politics of literature’ thereby implies that literature intervenes as literature in this carving up of space and time, the visible and the invisible, speech and noise. It intervenes in the relationship between practices and forms of visibility and modes of saying that carves up one or more common worlds. (Rancière 2011, 4)

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As a Russian exile Nabokov was “invisible”; he had to make himself “audible” along with all the “speaking beings” of his native country who were not heard during the Cold War; as a writer he intervened in “the relationship between practices and forms of visibility”; he did so as a bilingual writer. I will now focus on the double dimension/nature, both crafted and epic, of the translation maneuvers at work in his writing, as a means to shedding light on the ongoing process of bodily coupling of the individual and the collective, of strangers and natives. Exploring the craft of the translator will enable us to understand how the subject invents itself through deploying language in a close relationship with its original environment. These investigations will further explore the heroic craft of translating, as a means to clarifying how Nabokov gives a voice to real and imagined “common worlds.”

Translation as a Deed of Crafting: The Politics of Landscape In the part of her essay concerning exiles, Kristeva refers to a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. It should be remembered that Nabokov knew the French poet well and did indeed quote his poetry on several occasions in his work.2 Yet our attention will focus here on how Mallarmé invites us to consider a body so painful as that of an exile, through his method of extreme condensation. Indeed, the line quoted by Kristeva confronts difficulties in translating that will help us understand the most controversial positions adopted by the translator Nabokov and their links with multilingual sensoriality. The line belongs to a poem devoted to Saint John and his beheading3 —an emblematic form of physical suffering about which Nabokov composed a whole dystopian novel (Invitation to a Beheading , originally published in Russian in 1935–1936). In this line, the French language allows Mallarmé to condense bodily senses and thoughts so as to suggest that both linguistic and physical entities are out of joint at the moment of the beheading. Kristeva uses the line to make it clear that a speaker in exile feels as if he or she has been separated from his or her own body, that meaning is intertwined with the senses. The whole network of sensations evoked in the poem and commentary cannot be translated, as the English words have no sonorous links (out of tune/disagreement/body),

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while the French ones do (désaccordé/désaccord/corps ). The associations are lost in translation, as illustrated below: “…les anciens désaccords avec le corps” (Mallarmé) Ne pas être d’accord. Constamment, sur rien, avec personne. Prendre cela avec étonnement et curiosité, comme un explorateur, un ethnologue. S’en lasser, s’emmurer dans son désaccord terni, neutralisé, faute d’avoir le droit de dire. Ne plus savoir ce qu’on pense au juste, sinon que “ce n’est pas ça”: que les mots, les sourires, les rages, les jugements, les goûts de l’indigène sont exagérés, défaillants, ou seulement injustes et faux, et qu’il ne se doute pas –fier d’être sur son sol- qu’on puisse dire, penser, faire autrement. […] Non. Ceux qui n’ont jamais perdu la moindre racine vous paraissent ne pouvoir entendre aucune parole susceptible de relativiser leur point de vue. Alors, quand on est soi-même déraciné, à quoi bon parler à ceux qui croient avoir leurs propres pieds sur leur propre terre? L’oreille ne s’ouvre au désaccord que si le corps perd pied. (Kristeva 1988, 29–30, words in bold are mine) “The Former Separations from the Body” (Mallarmé, ‘Cantique de Saint Jean’) To disagree. Constantly, about nothing, with no one. Coping with that with astonishment and curiosity, like an explorer, an ethnologist. Becoming weary of it and walled up in one’s tarnished, neutralized disagreement, through lack of having the right to state it. No longer knowing what one truly thinks, except that ‘this is not it’: that the words, the smiles, the manias, the judgments, the tastes of the native are excessive, faltering, or simply unjust and false, and he cannot imagine – proud as he is of being on his own ground – that one might speak, think, or act differently. […] No. Those who have never lost the slightest root seem to you unable to understand any word liable to temper their point of view. So, when one is oneself uprooted, what is the point of talking to those who think they have their own soil? The ear is receptive to conflicts only if the body loses its footing. (Kristeva 1991, 17, words in bold are mine to signal the correspondence with the French terms)

In French the experience appears to be much more physical (exile is about feeling different from people having their own foot on their own land, not being on their “own ground” in an abstract manner), but most of all, this example demonstrates how much the senses make sense and how complex a process it is to couple bodily senses in a multilingual context.

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More often than not, translators choose to preserve the meaning as Kristeva’s own translator does, and therefore modify or erase the senses. On the contrary, Nabokov mostly tried to make translating a synesthetic process (see Loison-Charles, p. 163 of the present volume). Of course, when translating others, he was then accused of producing unreadable texts, an accusation which I will not discuss here. I would argue, though, that in doing so he tried to make ears receptive to uprooted bodies—and therefore to make those who “never lost the slightest root” (Kristeva 1991, 17) realize that they may ignore what language is all about. Earlier I mentioned the violent clashes between Nabokov the translator and the American reviewers of his English version of Eugene Onegin. The disagreements (i.e., désaccords avec le corps ) very often concerned sensorial details, most of them pertaining to lost Russia. Nabokov insisted on this in his commentary on “Problems of Flora” which I will take here as an illustration of his craftsmanship. As French specialist in aesthetics, Jean-Christophe Bailly made the following remark, while traveling outside his native country and discovering a plant he did not know and thus could not name: “La langue flotte comme un gaz sur le paysage” (2000, 103) [Language floats like gas over landscape]. The relationship between languages and the environments that gave birth to them is most of the time invisible. Being uprooted but still firmly attached to a specific natural area, Nabokov found it very important to translate what he called the “sensuous meaning” of words (Nabokov 1959, 103). His famously strong opinions on “literal translation” have an ecological dimension that must be understood both in its role of preserving linguistic biodiversity and in opening up horizons onto distant territories. His definition is quite clear on these points: Literal translation implies adherence not only to the direct sense of a word or sentence, but to its implied sense; it is a semantically exact interpretation, and not necessarily a lexical one (pertaining to the meaning of a word out of context) or a constructional one (conforming to the grammatical order of words in the text). In other words, a translation may be, and often, is, both lexical and constructional, but it is then literal when it is contextually correct, and when the precise nuance and intonation of the text are rendered. (Nabokov 1964, Part 2, 185, words in bold are mine)

Translation can be considered as an act of crafting insofar as the solution is not to be found in a dictionary or grammar book, but rather in the

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patient reconstitution of a context fashioned from cultural and natural elements, all intertwined. This is demonstrated by the way Nabokov organized his remarks in an article entitled “The Servile Path,” in which he reported that translating Pushkin confronted him, on the one hand, with the reality of multilingualism in literature—several sections of the article are dedicated to this point: “The French middleman”; “Pichotism” (Amédée Pichot was a French translator who supplied Pushkin with French versions of Lord Byron according to Nabokov); “French formulas”; “Translation of translations”—and, on the other hand, with “Problems of Flora,” as the last section of the article is entitled (Nabokov 1959). It is well known that Nabokov spent a long time trying to translate names of trees. He explained why in the following terms: We all know that the popular name of a plant may strike the imagination differently in different languages; its stress may be on colour in one country, and on structure in another; it may have beautiful classical connotations; it may be redolent of unbelievable Floridas; it may contain a honey drop as a residue of the cumulative romantic sense bestowed upon it by generations of elegiasts; it may be, in floral disguise, a plaque commemorating (like the dahlia) the name of an old botanist or (like the camellia) that of a roving Jesuit back from Luzon. (Nabokov 1964, Part 2, 10–11)

Taking specific cultural contexts into account means practicing translation through the prism of sensoriality, i.e., the physical aspect of language. As Nabokov put it in another commentary, he “ruthlessly sacrificed manner to matter” (Nabokov 1960, 17, words in bold are mine). The translator refused “to take the name of a plant at face value (sticking to his dictionary, which says that akatsiya is ‘acacia’)” and tried instead “to find out what the word really mean[t], in its contextual habitat, within the terms of a certain imagined place and in the light of a certain literary device” (Nabokov 1964, Part 2, 12). Here is one specific result of this method being applied to cheryomuha, “a common and popular woodland plant in Russia”: At one time I followed the usually reliable Dahl’s Dictionary in calling the tree ‘mahaleb’, which proves to be, however, another plant altogether. Later I coined the term ‘musk cherry’, which renders rather well the sound of cheryomuha and the fragrance of its bloom, but unfortunately evokes a taste that is characteristic of its small, grainy, black fruit. I now formally introduce the simple and euphonious ‘racemosa’ used as a noun

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[it is an adjective in Latin nomenclature: Padus racemosa] and rhyming with ‘mimosa’. (Nabokov 1964, Part 2, 12)

It has been said many times that the English text resulting from following such a complex mental path is in no way perceptible through the senses. Nabokov’s commentary sounds like a tragedy reflecting his own—that of being stranded in a foreign language. Conveying, say, “esoteric sensations,” was much more irritating for the translator than the artist (who manages to transform this tragedy into masterpieces by fashioning both language and style from the same cloth), simply because the latter belongs to a much freer land, without frontiers, where everything is brand new: “The writer is the first man to map and to name the natural objects” contained in his work, Nabokov used to tell his American students (Nabokov 1980, 2). It seems, though, that what I would call the translator’s politics of landscape, his “carving up space and time, the visible and the invisible,” sheds light on the very concrete way literature intervenes so as to construct “a specific sphere of experience.” The “distribution of the perceptible” (what Nabokov refers to as “problems of flora”) creates the sensation of the result being unreadable; thus, it invites us to wonder what “readable” or reading actually means. In his most multilingual novel, Ada, or Ardor Nabokov settled its readers in “Amerussia,” a wonderland I would not qualify as utopian but rather multitopian, so as to underline how it is shaped from the intertwining of very concrete layers of lands (of languages). The story told by polyglot narrators is difficult to read, if not unreadable. The constant references they make to botany, using very specific terms in several languages, seem unnecessarily pedantic. Yet these references are far from being mere manifestations of pure erudition. Their function is to contribute to the weaving of a new web of sensations able to finally catch, in between tongues, the “real life” that seemed out of reach when set at the threshold of the first novel written in English. Pure erudition is to be found, rather, in the academic partition of the perceptible that Nabokov mocks through a portrait of the professor as an unwelcoming landscape—this portrait takes place in the chapter dedicated to the party Pnin holds just before being fired by the university for which he works, a party to which he has invited literary specialists who are described as follows:

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Outwardly, Roy was an obvious figure. If you drew a pair of old brown loafers, two beige elbow eyebrows, the rest was easy to fill out. Somewhere in the middle distance hung an obscure liver ailment, and somewhere in the background there was Eighteenth-Century Poetry, Roy’s particular field, an overgrazed pasture, with the trickle of a brook and a clump of initialled trees; a barbed-wire arrangement on either side of this field separated it from Professor Stowe’s domain, the preceding century, where the lambs were whiter, the turf softer, the rill purlier, and from Dr Shapiro’s early nineteenth century, with its glen mists, sea fogs, and imported grapes. (Nabokov 1957, 131)

The whole earth is parted then by “barbed-wire arrangements” and has been recently ravaged by great barbarian crimes with which landscapes are laden for years—Mira, Pnin’s great love of his youth who died in a concentration camp, “was selected to die and was cremated only a few days after her arrival in Buchenwald, in the beautiful wooded Grosser Ettersberg, as the region is resoundingly called” the narrator writes (Nabokov 1957, 113). Nabokov will go on coupling bodily senses, connecting them to lands full of stories and history, so as to promote what South-African novelist J. M. Coetzee calls “sympathetic imagination” (Coetzee 2003, 79). The formulation is used in Elizabeth Costello, a fiction whose eponymous heroine is a writer confronting her art with reality and particularly, at this point in the story, with the very abstract way killers in the extermination camps treated their victims, like animals, unable to “think themselves into [their] place” (Coetzee 2003, 79). “Sympathetic imagination” is what Nabokov tried to develop while pointing out “problems of flora”—a form of imagination which consists in “a putting in touch with,” such as an “inner compass” (Arendt 1953, 391) enabling one to find one’s way through the wood of language. Let me end here by spelling out that the latter formulation sounds like a metaphor, but is in fact not one—or only to non-German ears, as the narrator of Pnin insists, doing his best to remind us that the most famous extermination camp was given the name of a plant (Buchenwald meaning “beech forest”).

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Translation as a Heroic Deed: The Imagination of the Woods The “bois de la langue” (“the wood of language”) is a formulation borrowed from French literary critic and translator Henri Meschonnic (2008) who uses it to identify the risk run by language users who are unaware of the senses at play in a language they do not fully master, therefore exposing themselves to the dangers of what is called “langue de bois ” in French (a language, dull or dead, like the sound of wood being struck, put to the service of an ideology—the language of totalitarianism). “Problems of Flora” echoes the very first story told by the young Nabokov in exile, a story of real and imaginary beautiful wooded lands ravaged by the violence of history and entitled “The Wood-Sprite” (originally published in Russian in 1921), in which a forest elf visits a Russian writer and tells the latter that he has fled his revolutionary homeland, horror-struck by what he has seen (Nabokov 1995, 3–5). The imagination of the woods is at work in all of Nabokov’s translated texts: it is to be found in the translator’s craftsmanship as described above, but also in the link between the experience of being lost deep in the woods (a heritage from childhood stories) and that of being lost in a new language—in the bois de la langue—which he relates in his autobiography and works of fiction. The “only contribution” Van Veen, the narrator in Ada, makes to “Anglo-American poetry” is a “dactylic trimeter” emblematic of this interlinking: “Ada, our ardors, and arbors” (Nabokov 1969, 74). Also emblematic of this is the trilingual poem well known in Amerussia (French language being part of lost Russia), which contributes to the preservation of international forests—both real and literary, as pointed out by the “chêne” (oak) mentioned in the following excerpt (originating in a poem by Chateaubriand): Sestra moya, tï pomnish’ goru, I dub vïsokiy, I Ladora? My sister, you remember still The spreading oak tree and my hill? Oh! qui me rendra mon Aline Et le grand chêne et ma colline? (Nabokov 1969, 138)

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To quote Pnin once again, in which the experience of the eponymous hero “showed the Russian sensibility confronting the American language” (Weil 1970, 272) just as Humbert “showed the American language confronting the foreign-trained sensibility” according to Irwin Weil (1970, 272), people speaking the same language can understand each other “by means of a few rapid passwords – allusions, intonations impossible to render in a foreign language” (Nabokov 1957, 105). Nabokov the artist made this possible by undergoing a vast “Odyssey,” the “Odyssey of a translator” as Irwin Weil put it (Weil 1970, 266). He gave a voice not only to the real community of Russian exiles but also to an imagined community born from multilingual sensoriality. He was able to do so because literature has always functioned as a welcoming “translation zone” for strangers (see Poulin 2017a). Emily Apter identifies the term “zone” as “a theoretical mainstay” in a book “shaped by the traumatic experience of September 11, 2001,” in which she analyzes “the urgent, political need for skilled translators” (Apter 2006, 3) and tries to imagine “a broad intellectual topography” that could take into account “diasporic language communities”—one could no longer say, as Irwin Weil did in 1970, that “Nabokov is among the very few authors and critics whose own artistic works deal with problems of translation” (Weil 1970, 270, words in bold are mine). “Zone” will refer from now to the numerous sites that are “in-translation” in a globalized world: Cast as an act of love, and as an act of disruption, translation becomes a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history; a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of denaturalizing citizens, taking them out of the comfort zone of national space, daily ritual, and pre-given domestic arrangements (Apter 2006, 6).

This new casting of translation’s net enables us to answer that, yes, the senses make sense in the “in-translation” work of Nabokov. Understanding how seems more than ever to be a matter of peace, rather than war.

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Notes 1. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. C.T. Onions ed. Oxford: University Press, 1985. 2. See Poulin (2017b). 3. The whole poem reads as follows: “Le soleil que sa halte / Surnaturelle exalte / Aussitôt redescend / incandescent // Je sens comme aux vertèbres / s’éployer des ténèbres / Toutes dans un frisson / à l’unisson // Et ma tête surgie / Solitaire vigie / Dans les vols triomphaux / De cette faux // Comme rupture franche / Plutôt refoule ou tranche / les anciens désaccords / Avec le corps // Qu’elle de jeûnes ivre / S’opiniâtre à suivre / En quelque bond hagard / Son pur regard // Là-haut où la froidure / Éternelle n’endure / Que vous le surpassiez / Tous ô glaciers // Mais selon un baptême / Illuminée au même / Principe qui m’élut / Penche un salut” (Mallarmé 1869, words in bold are mine).

Bibliography Apter, Emily. 2006. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1953. Understanding and Politics. Partisan Review 20–4: 377– 392. Bailly, Jean-Christophe. 2000. La Pierre que la Russie a jetée en moi. In Panoramiques. Paris: Christian Bourgois. Berman, Antoine. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany [L’Épreuve de l’étranger, 1984], trans. S. Heyvaert. New York: State University of NY Press. Coetzee, John-Maxwell. 2003. Elizabeth Costello. Reprint, London: Vintage Books, 2004. Conquest, Robert. 1982. [in Poetry, June 1965] in V. Nabokov. The Critical Heritage. Norman Page ed. London and New York: Routledge and K. Paul. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin [Le Monolinguisme de l’Autre, 1996], trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1988. Étrangers à Nous-Mêmes. Reprint, Paris: Gallimard, Folio essais, 1991. ———. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Mallarmé, Stéphane. 1869. Cantique de Saint-Jean. Reprint, in Poésies, 56–57. Paris: Poésie/Gallimard, 1983. Meschonnic, Henri. 2008. Dans le Bois de la Langue. Paris: Editions Laurence Teper.

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Nabokov, Vladimir. 1921. The Wood-Sprite. First Published in Russian. Reprint, in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, 3–5. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. ———. 1936. Invitation to a Beheading. First published in Russian. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov & Vladimir Nabokov. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1941. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Reprint, New York: New Directions, 1959. ———. 1955. The Annotated Lolita. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1991. ———. 1957. Pnin. Reprint, London: Penguin Modern Classics, 1988. ———. 1959. The Servile Path. Reprint, in On Translation, ed. Reuben A. Brower, 97–110. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. ———. 1960. The Song of Igor’s Campaign. Trans. From Old Russian by V. Nabokov. New York: Vintage. ———. 1964. Eugene Onegin. A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin Translated from The Russian, with a Commentary by V. Nabokov. Reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. ———. 1967. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 2000. ———. 1969. Ada, or Ardor, A Family Chronicle. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1990. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1997. ———. 1980. Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers. San Diego, NY and London: Bruccoli Clark, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Poulin, Isabelle. 2017a. Le Transport Romanesque. Le Roman Comme Espace de la Traduction, de Nabokov à Rabelais. Paris: Garnier Classiques. Poulin, Isabelle. 2017b. Le Vol de la Mémoire. Vladimir Nabokov lecteur de Rimbaud et Mallarmé. In Vladimir Nabokov et la France, ed. Y. Chupin, A. Edel-Roy, M. Manolescu, and L. Delage-Toriel, 89–98. Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg. Rancière, Jacques. 2011. The Politics of Literature [La Politique de la Littérature, 2007], trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Weil, Irwin. 1970. Odyssey of a Translator. In Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations and Tributes, ed. Alfred Appel Jr. and Charles Newman, 266– 283. Evanston: Northern University Press.

PART III

Senses and the Body: From Pleasure to Displeasure

CHAPTER 11

Sensuality and the Senses in Nabokov Maurice Couturier

Despite the fact that Nabokov’s popularity owes much to Lolita and its sexual content, the specialists of this author have devoted comparatively little attention to the erotic dimension of his works. Some of Nabokov’s emphatic declarations like the following probably discouraged them from approaching this difficult subject: “Sex as an institution, sex as a general notion, sex as a problem, sex as a platitude – all this is something I find too tedious for words. Let us skip sex” (Nabokov 1973, 23). This and many other statements of this kind have assumed for many aficionados of Nabokov the proportion of an interdict and led them to pretend that sex, indeed, was a subject of minor significance. I, too, influenced by such structuralist pundits as Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette, long kept away from the subject. So much so that Barthes, who was sitting on the panel of my doctoral defense, mildly chastised me for my prudery and suggested that I “rely more frankly on psychoanalytical concepts.” Though I was already a dedicated reader of Freud and Lacan, I refrained from making use of their theories then, having undertaken to make a narratological and poetic study of Nabokov’s novels. I later picked up the gauntlet in two books, one in French and the other in English.1

M. Couturier (B) University of Nice, Nice, France © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_11

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There is an aspect of the subject of sex that I have not dealt with in these essays, the correlation between sensuality and the senses, omnipresent in the three novels I am going to examine, King, Queen, Knave, Lolita, and Ada. The protagonists in these novels have different kinds of sensuality which mobilize their senses differently, a shameful sensuality in the first one, as opposed to guilty and Edenic sensualities in the other two, three attitudes reflected by the narrative discourses, the first one being chiefly ironic, the second passionate and self-vindicating, and the third one dazzled. Our aesthetic relationship to these novels takes its roots eventually in the desires which drive these works, two of them being absolute masterpieces. Nabokov’s writing teems with exuberant images which appeal to the five senses, especially the sense of sight and the sense of touch, but not exclusively. At the same time, it is illuminated by a quest for meaning and poetry which partly vindicates his haughty denunciation of sex quoted above.

Shameful Sensuality: King, Queen, Knave In his book on eroticism, Georges Bataille declared what, to him, seemed an evidence: “Nobody disputes the ugliness of the sexual act” (Bataille 1957, 160). This formula must be taken with a grain of salt for Bataille was chiefly referring to eminently transgressive sexual practices, sadistic most of the time. It is true, though, that the modern novel long experienced tremendous difficulties to represent the sexual act aesthetically. The authors of pornographic novels, members of the establishment most of them, often used phoney artistic alibis to smuggle their obscenities into their pages but never really managed to join the literary canon, with perhaps two exceptions, John Cleland and De Sade. The modern novel per se was launched by writers telling the story of prostitutes (Defoe) or of rape (Richardson); adultery and sexual perversion soon became one of its major topics with Justine, Madame Bovary, Ulysses, and Crash. King, Queen, Knave is Nabokov’s only novel in which sexuality is described essentially in shameful terms. The story begins with the introduction of the protagonist, Franz, who on board a train is shocked by a passenger who is deprived of a nose: Most of the nose had gone or had never grown. To what remained of its bridge the pale parchment-like skin adhered with a sickening tightness; the

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nostrils had lost all sense of decency and faced the flinching spectator like two sudden holes, black and asymmetrical. (Nabokov 1928, 3)

This incident reactivates in the young man’s mind a series of sickening memories which bear witness to the hideousness of the mouth in his eyes and therefore to the rerouting of his oral drive, to borrow Lacan’s terminology: He remembered a dog that had vomited on the threshold of a butcher’s shop. He remembered a child, a mere toddler, who, bending with the difficulty of its age, had laboriously picked up and put to its lips a filthy thing resembling a baby’s pacifier. He remembered an old man with a cough in a streetcar who had fired a clot of mucus into the ticket collector’s hand. (Nabokov 1928, 3–4)

These are among the most repugnant images to be found in Nabokov’s fiction. They do not so much betoken the three characters’ oral drive as the scopic drive of young Franz who stares at the man deprived of a nose through his thick glasses and soon walks out of the compartment. These vivid memories which continue to haunt him have clearly a link with his mother who often inspired him with disgust. She had once humiliated him somewhat sadistically for no apparent reason: Once at Easter, when he was quite small but already bespectacled, she had ordered him to eat a little chocolate bunny that had been well licked by his sister. For having licked the candy meant for him Emmy received a light slap on the behind, but to him for having refused to touch the slimy brown horror, she delivered such a backhand whack in the face that he flew off his chair, hit his head against the sideboard and lost consciousness. His love for his mother was never very deep but even so it was his first unhappy love, or rather he regarded her as a rough draft of a first love. (Nabokov 1928, 94–95)

Two senses associated with his “first unhappy love” are mobilized here, the sense of touch and the sense of taste. His mother also remains linked in his memory with the sense of sight and the sense of smell: “he actually could not stand her physical appearance, mannerisms, and emanations, the depressing, depressingly familiar odor of her skin and clothes, the bedbug-brown fat birthmark on her neck, the trick she had of scratching with a knitting needle the unappetizing parting of her chestnut hair, her

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enormous dropsical ankles” (Nabokov 1928, 95).2 She was clearly at the root of his varied drives, themselves the original components of his lowgrade libido. His sexual desire is soon aroused in the new compartment he enters when he discovers a very appetizing woman who, he will discover later, is none other than his cousin. Mentally, he undresses her: “He bared the shoulders of the woman that had just been sitting by the window, made a quick mental test (did blind Eros react? clumsy Eros did, unsticking its folds in the dark)” (Nabokov 1928, 13–14). The reference to the myth of Eros fails to conceal the crudity of the evoked image, Nabokov’s writing bordering on the pornographic at this point, as elsewhere in this novel. When Franz later calls on her, he erotically fantasizes about her: He would compute within half an inch the exact degree to which she showed her legs while walking about the room and while sitting with her legs crossed, and he perceived almost without looking the tense sheen of her stocking, the swell of her left calf over the right knee; and the fold of her skirt, sloping, soft, supple, in which one would have liked to bury one’s face. (Nabokov 1928, 82)

The young man, an arch fetishist, zeroes in on the woman’s genitals wrapped in the folds of her skirt whose touch he wants to feel on his cheeks and on his mouth. Their first intercourse turns out to be a somewhat crude event, Martha making heavy demands on Franz’s blundering eroticism: ‘Now,’ she cried when he was magnificently sheathed; and baring her thighs, and not bothering to lie down, and reveling in his ineptitude, she directed his upward thrusts until they drove home, whereupon, her face working, she threw her head back and dug her ten nails in his nates. (Nabokov 1928, 97)

The experience is hers entirely. She uses his phallus, “shortish but exceptionally thick” (Nabokov 1928, 105) one learns later, rather than making love to him, nearly vampirizing him. The anatomical vocabulary reflects the crudeness of her desires as well as those of Franz. Ironically, it is Martha’s husband, not she, who eventually educates the young man’s sensuality when he shows him how to lure the customers in his store:

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Those rapid behind-the-counter exercises had as it were prepared his hands for other motions and contact, also rapid and nimble, causing Martha to purr with pleasure, for she particularly loved his forelimbs, and loved them most of all when with a succession of rhapsodic touches they would run all over her milk-white body. Thus a shop counter was the mute keyboard on which Franz had rehearsed his happiness. (Nabokov 1928, 104)

One might almost say that Dreyer taught his young cousin how to caress his own wife. Franz is unaware of the irony, of course, but the narrator is not and continues to disparage the lovers’ sexual behavior and their strange relationship. While they are dreaming of a future life together in an apartment, following their first session of oral sex, Franz suddenly expresses a wish to have “lots of beautiful knives… meat cleavers, and cheese cutters, and a roast pork slicer” (Nabokov 1928, 135), obvious signs of bourgeois opulence in his mind and not of his fear of castration, though Martha, like Armande in Transparent Things , is clearly a castrating woman. He dreams of being only a phallus and losing himself in her body: “If only he could glide thus forever, an eternal piston rod in a vacuum of delight, and never, never part from her” (Nabokov 1928, 154). There is no love lost between them. They become more and more engrossed in the coarse routine of their sexual acts and its paltry asides: “Ruminative, naked, morose, he sniffed one armpit, and tossed his undershirt under the washstand. It landed next to a rubber basin with Martha’s rather depressing paraphernalia” (Nabokov 1928, 168). It seems that in Nabokov’s world foul smells mark the ultimate limit to sexual desire and suggest that man is reversing to his animality. This pornographic slant of the novel, which has nothing to do with the bourgeois tone of its intertextual model Madame Bovary, is stressed in the last chapters by the presence of a couple of voyeurs, replicas of the author and his wife as many signs indicate. Franz, jealous of their relationship, feels they are watching him: he had the impression they were discussing him, and even pronouncing his name. It embarrassed, it incensed him, that this damned happy foreigner hastening to the beach with his tanned, pale-haired, lovely companion, knew absolutely everything about his predicament and perhaps pitied, not without some derision, an honest young man who had been seduced and appropriated by an older woman who despite her fine dresses and face lotions, resembled a large white toad. (Nabokov 1928, 262)

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In Nabokov’s world, the toad seems to be the ugliest and the most despicable animal. In Bend Sinister, the dictator is called “the Toad.” Franz, prodded by the author’s sneer, suddenly realizes that this mature woman who has initiated him sexually is none other than a pornè, a whore, who has grossly teased his senses and degraded his boyish sensuality.

Guilty Sensuality: Lolita At the beginning of Lolita, a thirteen-year-old boy is shown discovering by himself the inebriating pleasure of stroking and kissing a girl his own age; his senses of touch, of sight, of hearing, and even of taste are intensely tickled by the experience: Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion. (Nabokov 1955, 14–15)

Young Humbert’s budding sensuality is a great deal more refined than that of Franz. The mouth, which materialized three persons’ violent rejection of the other in King, Queen, Knave, constitutes here the most intimate channel of the young couple’s communion. There is no guilt attached to this intoxicating experience which clearly emulates that of the author as described both in Mary and Speak, Memory. The discovery of Lolita “in a pool of sun, half-naked” in Charlotte’s garden echoes the scene just quoted but is already tainted with guilt: It was the same child–the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from

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the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day (…). I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight (…) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts–that last mad immortal day behind the ‘Roches Roses.’ (Nabokov 1955, 39)

The mature man literally undresses Lolita but with a bad conscience as the expression “my aging ape eyes” testifies and his erotic experience is on the whole tainted with “awe.” In the journal he keeps of his early days in Lolita’s company, he lovingly itemizes the many charms of her young body and of her scant attire, “the silky shimmer above her temples,” “the glistening tracery of down on her forearm,” “the faded seat of her rolled-up jeans” (Nabokov 1955, 41), “the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs” (Nabokov 1955, 42); but for her mother’s interference, he would have experienced “a beggar’s bliss,” he says (Nabokov 1955, 42). Though he loves the “intoxicating brown fragrance of hers,” he thinks she should “wash her hair once in a while” (Nabokov 1955, 43). He has his first truly erotic contact with her when she allows him to lick her eye to remove a speck of dust: “Gently I pressed my quivering sting along her rolling salty eyeball. ‘Goody-goody,’ she said nictating” (Nabokov 1955, 43). All his senses are gradually teased by the irresistible nymphet. Immediately after she has departed for her holiday camp, he walks into her bedroom and obviously masturbates with one of her smelly torn knickers, his senses astir: “There was particularly one pink texture, sleazy, torn, with a faintly acrid odor in the seam. I wrapped in it Humbert’s huge engorged heart” (Nabokov 1955, 67). His sensuality has a strong masturbatory component, as the Sunday morning scene on the davenport, a kind of replay of the fall of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis, confirms. The scene is triggered by the playful manipulation of the apple and of the magazine, it goes on with Lolita impudently extending “her legs across [Humbert’s] lap,” the nympholept quickly availing himself of the situation “to attune, by a series of stealthy movements [his] masked lust to her guileless limps” while “keeping a maniac’s inner eye on [his] distant golden goal,” his orgasm (Nabokov 1955, 58–59). All his subtle maneuvers described in the following pages have but one goal, to coax his sexual arousal with Lolita’s perhaps not so innocent complicity, mobilizing many of his senses, his sense of touch,

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of course, but also his sense of hearing with the song, his sense of smell (“the pungent and healthy heat”), and his sense of sight (“The implied sun pulsated in the supplied poplars”). In his imagination he pretends to “be enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves” (Nabokov 1955, 60), nearly “reaching the hot hollow of her groin,” and finally enjoying “the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known” (Nabokov 1955, 61). An ecstasy which is not shared by Lolita, though she has obviously been excited, her cheeks being “aflame” (Nabokov 1955, 61) when she answers the phone. At the Enchanted Hunters, he struggles all night almost to possess her in her sleep, having taken the precaution to drug her. He finds it hard to curb his “burning life” (Nabokov 1955, 130) but, being not “a brutal scoundrel,” he doesn’t rape her. He couldn’t have had his long relationship with her if he had behaved like the Enchanter. The latter masturbates in front of the naked girl lying asleep on the bed; her frantic reaction when she wakes up and discovers his ejaculating penis in front of her scares him literally to death, no matter how much he tries to convince her that it’s “just a kind of game” (Nabokov 1986, 92). Humbert is not a rapist and not simply an onanist either. He prides himself on allowing her to take the initiative in the morning and acknowledges that his “life was handled by little Lo in an energetic, matter-of-fact manner as if it were an insensate gadget unconnected with [him]” (Nabokov 1955, 133–134). Humbert, the sensualist, is something of an artist as his confession testifies, hence his attempt to describe his first intercourse with Lolita in poetic and pictorial terms, summoning all the images that have accompanied the early stages of his relationship with her, yet portraying himself as a sultan “helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx” (Nabokov 1955, 134). This poetic evocation of the scene reads as well as an attempt to conceal his bad conscience, his guilt for doing something morally objectionable. Henceforth, Lolita will become gradually more reluctant to indulge him, nay to service him, Humbert blaming her for her lack of cooperation and pleasure: This sort of thing soon began to bore my easily bored Lolita, and, having a childish lack of sympathy for other people’s whims, she would insult me and my desire to have her caress me while blue-eyed little brunettes in blue shorts, copperheads in green boleros, and blurred boyish blondes in faded slacks passed by in the sun. (Nabokov 1955, 161)

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There is a touch of sadism in this passage, Humbert refusing to understand why she hates pleasuring him while he is feeding his lasciviousness upon the spectacle of other young bodies. To be sure, he likes to caress her but only to pamper his own sensuality: “For there is no other bliss on earth comparable to that of fondling a nymphet. It is hors concours, that bliss, it belongs to another class, another plane of s ensitivity” (Nabokov 1955, 166). Her growing restiveness leaves him no choice, he sadistically claims, but to pay her for her sexual services: I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms; – a salutary storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness of that otherwise admirable year! I had just retracted some silly promise she had forced me to make in a moment of blind impatient passion, and there she was sprawling and sobbing, and pinching my caressing hand, and I was laughing happily. (Nabokov 1955, 169)

He does not retract his promise to make Lolita suffer but in order to resume a semblance of paternal authority over her and keep her durably submissive. He later claims that these pitiful maneuvers eventually had a more devastating effect on him than on her: “And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with the satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health” (Nabokov 1955, 175). His pleasure keeps diminishing during the final stages of their trek and their months in Beardsley. His lack of consideration for her needs and his absence of true love for her makes him realize that Lolita is turning him into a dreadful bully and pervert. At some point he himself begins to see her as a whore: “Some of the red had left stains on her front teeth, and I was struck by a ghastly recollection – the evoked image not of Monique, but of another young prostitute in a bell-house, ages ago” (Nabokov 1955, 204). After losing her to Quilty, he will start to develop a genuine feeling of love for her, as his long poem bears witness, but too late as he realizes when he meets her for the last time at Coalmont and looks at her with different eyes, as if he had cleansed himself of his crude sensuality, resumed his self-respect, and rediscovered his aesthetic values: “I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the day, how much she looked – had always looked – like Botticelli’s russet Venus – the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty” (Nabokov 1955, 270). This realization will lead him to plead guilty for rape at the end of his long poetic confession which he tries to use as evidence that the aesthete in him has at last supplanted the cruel sensualist and pervert who ruined a girl’s life.

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Edenic Love and Sensuality: Ada Except for Mary and The Gift , there is no true love in Nabokov’s novels until Ada, only sensuality and/or perversion. Whereas in Lolita, the sexual scenes were usually veiled behind a poetic and often litotic varnish clearly intended to show the narrator’s discomfort, here they are often described in a tone at once poetic and humorous, sex being considered above all a pleasurable activity untarnished by any kind of moral interdict. Van portrays himself as a normal teenager initiated, somewhat awkwardly, by a whore before he meets Ada. Blanche, the French soubrette, is instrumental in arousing him after his arrival at Ardis: Her cameo profile, her cute pink nostril, her long, French, lily-white neck, the outline, both full and frail, of her figure (male lust does not go very far for descriptive felicities!), and especially the savage sense of opportune license moved Van so robustly that he could not resist clasping the wrist of her raised tight-sleeved arm. (Nabokov 1969, 48)

It is only crude sexual desire he experiences in her presence, not love of course. Being highly sensual, he is soon attracted to his young cousin who starts teasing him in various ways with her shadow games or her larvae: What Van experienced in those first strange days when she showed him the house […] combined elements of ravishment and exasperation. Ravishment – because of her pale, voluptuous, impermissible skin, her hair, her legs, her angular movements, her gazelle-grass odor, the sudden black stare of her wide-set eyes, the rustic nudity under her dress; exasperation – because between him, an awkward schoolboy of genius, and that precocious, affected, impenetrable child there extended a void of light and a veil of shade that no force could overcome and pierce. (Nabokov 1969, 59)

He will masturbate in his bed, kindling his desire with the memory of certain scenes, as when her skirt was wrenched up by a bracket, allowing him to see that “the child was darkly flossed” (Nabokov 1969, 59). Ada is as sensual as Van, though she will feign ignorance in sexual matters at some point, yet making of her honey-eating an erotic liturgy which Van finds absolutely entrancing. Their first bodily contact happens as she is sitting on his knees in the carriage that brings them back from her birthday picnic, Ada obviously doing her best to crush “the core of

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the longing” (Nabokov 1969, 87), but Van refraining from yielding to “animal laxity.” They are equals in terms of sensuality and desire and do not experience any kind of moral hang-ups, only doing their best to please each other. Van, two years older, is wary of shocking her, though he has “never had the occasion to witness anything close to virginal revolt” on her part; he does not realize that the “implicit cowardice” of his behavior “puzzled and distressed her” (Nabokov 1969, 97). Avoiding displaying his nudity, his tumescent phallus, he imagines her “recoiling with a wild look as she left his lust in the lurch to summon her governess or mother” (Nabokov 1969, 97). While she is sitting “on a cool piano stool,” drawing pictures of insects, Van glimpses her nakedness and is terribly excited: “whenever she concaved her back while moving her prominent scapulae to and fro and tilting her head […] Van, who had drawn up to her seat as close as he dared, could see down her sleek ensellure as far as her coccyx and inhale the warmth of her entire body” (Nabokov 1969, 99). He eventually snuggles against her, his “heart thumping, one miserable hand deep in his trouser pocket” and eventually lets “his parched lips travel down her warm hair and hot nape. It was the sweetest, the strongest, the most mysterious sensation that the boy had ever experienced” (Nabokov 1969, 99–100). At this stage, he does his best to conceal his excitement and at the end of such scenes he immediately goes back to his room and, “calling forth the image he had just left behind, an image still as safe and bright as a hand-cupped flame,” he masturbates “with savage zeal” (Nabokov 1969, 100), only a stopgap solution, “a dead end, because unshared; because horribly hidden; because not liable to melt into any subsequent phase of incomparably greater rapture” (Nabokov 1969, 100), nothing, anyway like Humbert’s “beggar’s bliss” (Nabokov 1955, 44). His sensuality is consistently associated with his growing feeling of love for Ada, a feeling that she gives countless signs of sharing. At the end of the moving scene just mentioned, he must content himself with a kiss which, in fact, marks the beginning of more tender and intimate exchanges, like when they suck each other’s tongues and Ada slips her hand into his trouser pocket to borrow his handkerchief but withdraws it quickly, accidentally touching his erect penis (Nabokov 1969, 103). They are both intensely sensual, slowly becoming attuned to the many little signs they address each other. All their senses are involved during the various stages of their relationship.

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The burning barn scene marks the true beginning of their passionate sexual life. Van remains careful at first, but starts to “fondle the flow of her hair, and to massage and rumple her nightdress, not daring yet to go under and up, daring, however, to mold her nates until, with a little kiss, she sat down on his hand and her heels, as the burning castle of cards collapsed” (Nabokov 1969, 117), a clear indication that she agrees to participate in this erotic liturgy. It is she who asks “for a bit of purely scientific information” (Nabokov 1969, 118), having noticed that he has an erection, playing the role of the innocent delphinet, no doubt in part to boost his excitement. He enjoys the situation immensely, priding himself on initiating this bright yet inexperienced girl, his sister, let us not forget. He gradually becomes graver as the scene draws toward its climax but he is still able to point out humorously how she should caress him, using a word which can be understood in its literal sense or as a grossly exaggerated geographical metaphor: “‘Relief map,’ said the primrose prig, ‘the rivers of Africa’” (Nabokov 1969, 118). Ada, the naturalist, prefers a botanical comparison: “‘The cap of the Red Bolete is not half as plushy. In fact’ (positively chattering), ‘I’m reminded of geranium or rather pelargonium bloom’” (Nabokov 1969, 118), her two main senses involved being the sense of touch and the sense of sight. At this critical moment, these two poetically-minded children bandy vivid images which represent rather accurately the object “at hand.” Had they used anatomical terms, it would have spoilt their experience, as well as that of the reader, of course. The whole scene is almost totally free of self-censorship, the children only bothering to please and love each other. Humor is present, of course, but mostly in the aging co-narrators’ retrospective commentaries. They both feel as if they had landed on another planet, now totally free to let their imagination and their erotic creativeness promote their love, as Van acknowledges: Tenderness rounds out true triumph, gentleness lubricates genuine liberation: emotions that are not diagnostic of glory or passion in dreams. One half of the fantastic joy Van was to taste from now on (forever, he hoped) owed its force to the certainty that he could lavish on Ada, openly and at leisure, all the puerile petting that social shame, male selfishness, and moral apprehension had prevented him from envisaging before. (Nabokov 1969, 123–124)

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And the discovery of the fact that they are brother and sister will neither dampen nor enhance their erotic relationship, incest being of no significance in their magic world. From now on, they spend a great deal of time perusing each other’s body, conscientious readers they both are: “He had resolved to deal first of all with her legs which he felt he had not feted enough the previous night; to sheathe them in kisses from the A of arched instep to the V of velvet” (Nabokov 1969, 129). They actually read erotic books, not so much to learn new techniques as to fire their young imaginations. They love Rabelais and Casanova but loathe “le sieur Sade and Herr Masoch and Heinrich Muller” (Nabokov 1969, 136), a reference to Henry Miller, of course. Their knowledge of art also contributes to stimulating their sensuality as when Ada practices oral sex: she had bent over him and he had possessed her hair. It tickled his legs, it crept into his crotch, it spread all over his palpitating belly. Through it the student of art could see the summit of the trompe-l’oeil school, monumental, multicolored, jutting out of a dark background, molded in profile by a concentration of caravagesque light. (Nabokov 1969, 141)

Nabokov endeavors to lend an artistic dimension to the various episodes of their lovemaking. The presence and interference of Lucette, their stepsister, becomes highly disturbing for both of them during their second summer together. Van is aroused by her who has matured into a sexy nymphet: “Lucette remained topless. Her tight skin was the color of thick peach syrup, her little crupper in willow-green shorts rolled drolly, the sun lay sleek on her russet bob and plumpish torso: it showed but a faint circumlocution of femininity” (Nabokov 1969, 198). Ada eventually allows her to get involved in some of their petting sessions: “Lucette’s dewy little contributions augmented rather than dampened Van’s invariable reaction to the only and main girl’s lightest touch, actual or imagined” (Nabokov 1969, 205). He doesn’t love Lucette and resents her constant snooping but he would have made love to her had he not seen Ada appear on the screen in the cinema on board the ship. Despite the nymphet’s interference, the two lovers pursue their amorous relations, which at some point assume a nearly metaphysical dimension as Van claims:

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What, then, was it that raised the animal act to a level higher than even that of the most exact arts or the wildest flights of pure science? It would not be sufficient to say that in his love-making with Ada he discovered the pang, the ogon’, the agony of supreme ‘reality.’ Reality, better say, lost the quotes it wore like claws – in a world where independent and original minds must cling to things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or death. (Nabokov 1969, 219–220)

This sounds like a striking echo of Georges Bataille’s statement about eroticism as “the approbation of life up onto death” (Bataille 1957, 15). Sensuality at this point transcends “the animal act”: it isn’t the simple combination of physical sensations taking their roots in the senses but of a much higher essence. This is the kind of eroticism which “puts [the] whole self in question” (Bataille 1957, 34), to borrow Bataille’s formulation. In other words, it is the acme of love. Van and Ada are superhuman, quasi Nietzschean, subjects who have managed to free themselves from the laws and constraints of our world and to live by the law of their respective desires and their passionate love for each other, recreating sensually, lovingly, the Edenic world prior to the Fall, that is before sex condemned each individual to the solitude of his/her own desire. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov conscientiously evoked the awakening of both his senses, including his sense of smell in Mademoiselle’s vicinity, and his finely honed sensuality, intimating that these were perhaps the deepest sources of his aesthetic tastes and ambitions. He was acutely aware of being haunted by tyrannical sexual desires and a polymorphous kind of sensuality which may have included homosexual inclinations. This largely contributed to fueling his no less aesthetic desire which led him to invent highly sophisticated narrative strategies and poetic devices to beat or tame his troublesome libido. The three stages that have been investigated above show how his poetic muse gradually managed to tap the resources of his acute senses and get past the cruder elements of his intense sensuality, not only because he was getting older but because he was growing more exacting as an artist. The international celebrity he acquired thanks to Lolita didn’t free him of his bad faith at first, as many of his attempts to dissociate himself from Humbert Humbert in his subsequent interviews testify, but it allowed him to acknowledge his transgressive leanings as a writer and made it possible for him to compose his most poetically sensual novel, Ada. The kind of aesthetic epiphany achieved by the two narrators

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and protagonists on the threshold of death reads a little like a cry of triumph on Nabokov’s part as if he were saying: “I have finally managed to transcend my sexual desire, my tyrannical sensuality, I have overcome my personal demon and have tethered it to my aesthetic demands.” From Franz’s Hell in King, Queen, Knave, he moved to Humbert’s Purgatory in Lolita, finally reaching the near Paradise of Van and Ada, the only characters, in fact, in all his novels, to have truly achieved “le grand amour.” A pity, though, that in The Original of Laura he was obviously heading back to Hell.

Notes 1. Nabokov ou la cruauté du désir (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2004) and Nabokov’s Eros and the Poetics of Desire (Basingstoke and New York, 2014). 2. This passage is reminiscent of Nabokov’s evocation of Mademoiselle’s bedroom, “a kind of hothouse sheltering a thick-leaved plant imbued with a heavy, enuretic odor” (Nabokov 1966, 450).

Bibliography Bataille, Georges. 1957. L’Erotisme. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Couturier, Maurice. 2004. Nabokov ou la cruauté du sujet. Seyssel: Champ Vallon. ———. 2014. Nabokov’s Eros and the Poetics of Desire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1969. Ada or Ardor, A Family Chronicle. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ———. 1928. King, Queen, Knave. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 2010. ———. 1966. Speak, Memory. Reprint, Novels and Memoirs 1941–1951, ed. Brian Boyd. New York: Library of America, 1996. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill. ———. 1955. The Annotated Lolita, ed. A. Appel. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1991. ———. 1986. The Enchanter, trans. D. Nabokov. London: Picador.

CHAPTER 12

The ‘Eyes’ Have It: The Pleasures and Problems of Scopophilia in Nabokov’s Work Julian W. Connolly

The sense of sight plays an immensely significant role in Nabokov’s work. We readily recall how avidly he and his principal characters observe the world and record, or even “caress” its details, as Ross Wetzsteon remembers Nabokov urging his students to do in a course lecture at Cornell (Wetzsteon 1970, 245). In his course lecture on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina Nabokov asserted: “All the great writers have good eyes” (Nabokov 1981, 141); and he once said of himself to an interviewer: “I think I was born a painter—really!” (Nabokov 1990, 17). In Speak, Memory he recalls how his drawing master Mstislav Dobuzhinsky would make him “depict from memory, in the greatest possible detail, objects I had certainly seen thousands of times without visualizing them properly: a street lamp, a postbox, the tulip design on the stained glass of our front door” (Nabokov 1966, 92). In more than one work of fiction, he depicts characters who have the sense of turning into an enormous eye, sometimes to horrifying effect, as in “Terror” (“I was no longer a man, but a naked eye, an aimless glance moving in an absurd world” [Nabokov 1997, 177]),

J. W. Connolly (B) University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_12

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sometimes to ostensibly soothing effect, as in The Eye (“I have realized that the only happiness in this world is to observe, to spy, to watch, to scrutinize oneself and others, to be nothing but a big, slightly vitreous, somewhat bloodshot, unblinking eye” [Nabokov 1965, 103]), and sometimes, simply for aesthetic delight, as in the opening scene of “The Vane Sisters” (“it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world’s socket” [Nabokov 1997, 619]). But we should also note that some of Nabokov’s characters engage in a special kind of observation—what one might call a voyeuristic observation of women or even young girls. Most notorious, of course, is Humbert Humbert’s rapt focus on little girls in parks and in schoolyards. But this is not the only type of voyeurism we find in Nabokov: we recall Charles Kinbote’s spying on his neighbor John Shade, and a variety of people peeping at young lovers on country estates in Mary, Ada, and Speak, Memory. In this essay, I propose to take a closer look at this phenomenon and map out the curious dimensions it assumes in Nabokov’s fiction. I will try to evaluate both how Nabokov follows some conventional patterns related to the pleasures to be derived from looking at others, as well as how he deviates from and even subverts those conventions. For the purposes of this examination, I plan to approach the subject by drawing upon concepts articulated by Laura Mulvey in her discussion of scopophilia—the pleasure derived from seeing other people as objects (primarily sexual)—in her important essay on the cinema, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which was originally published in 1975. Mulvey advances two central concepts in her essay. First, that the scopophilic pleasure that is produced when one person uses another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight is, “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance […] split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey 1975, 11). Secondly, when the scopophilic situation involves watching others perform, this can be a narcissistic pleasure that emanates from “identification with the image seen” (Mulvey 1975, 10). We will deal with each of these concepts in turn. First, considering the notion that there is a dichotomous relationship between the “active” male observer and the “passive” female object of the observation, we may recognize that this pattern surfaces repeatedly in Nabokov’s work, beginning with his earliest years as a prose writer. For

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example, the whole premise of “A Nursery Tale” relies on its protagonist Erwin’s predilection for observing women and fantasizing about possessing them sexually: “Erwin looked boldly and freely at passing girls, and then would suddenly bite his nether lip: this signified the capture of a new concubine” (Nabokov 1997, 161). And there is a whole series of male figures in the early prose who are described as looking with desire at female figures, often, as Maurice Couturier has pointed out, looking from behind, where they cannot be seen by the women themselves (Couturier 2014, 15). This situation arises in Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, when Ganin first sees his future beloved sitting in front of him at an amateur theatrical performance: “Amid the hot yellow glare […] Ganin saw only one thing: he stared ahead at a brown tress tied with a black bow […] and his eyes caressed the dark smooth, girlish sheen of the hair at her temple” (Nabokov 1970, 45, emphasis added). We should note that Ganin’s surreptitious observation of Mary occurs at a theatrical performance, and this underscores the theme of spectatorship, of an audience member watching someone perform before him. A similar, though less lyrical scene occurs in Glory, when Martin would see a household helper named Marie shaking out a dust cloth at an open window and he would go upstairs to find Marie “kneeling in meditation” and he would “see her from behind, with her black wool stockings and her green polka-dot dress” (Nabokov 1972a, 46). After his mother makes a face at the odor left by Marie in a room, Martin feels some aversion toward Marie, but “gradually, in the course of her subsequent appearances in the distance—framed in a casement, or glimpsed through the foliage near the well—he began to succumb to that enchantment, only now he was afraid to come closer” (Nabokov 1972a, 46). What is interesting about this renewal of interest is that it occurs at a safe, aestheticized distance, free of the danger of closeness, proximity, or intimacy and all that that may entail for the subject. Significantly, Marie “never looked at Martin, except once—and what an event that was!” (Nabokov 1972a, 46). These scenes may stem from Nabokov’s own experience with looking at female figures as described in Speak, Memory, first with the coachman’s daughter Polenka, with whom Nabokov had what he described as an “ocular” relationship (Nabokov 1966, 209), and later with “Tamara,” his first serious romance. Writing of Polenka, Nabokov recalls one particularly vivid episode in which he caught sight of Polenka and some other naked children “bathing from the ruins of an old bathhouse a few feet

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away” (Nabokov 1966, 211). He provides a detailed description of the tone and texture of her skin and hair and concludes by saying that he “crept away in a dismal haze of disgust and desire” (Nabokov 1966, 211). More consequential, certainly, was his observation of Tamara, whom he first saw standing still in a birch grove before she moved on to join two other “less pretty girls” (Nabokov 1966, 230). Nabokov observed them “from a vantage point above the river” (Nabokov 1966, 230), and then proceeded to ride by her summer cottage trying to glimpse her whenever he could: “I would ride my horse or my bicycle in the vicinity, and with the sudden sensation of a dazzling explosion […] I used to come across Tamara at this or that bland bend of the road” (Nabokov 1966, 230). Of course, we find such scenes of men observing young women later in Nabokov too, and frequently with more obvious sexual implications. One such scene occurs in The Gift when Fyodor recalls finding a “lone nymph” sprawling in the Grunewald with “her legs bared to the crotch and suedesoft to the eye” (Nabokov 1963, 335). He states that “temptation’s arrow had hardly had time to sing out and pierce him before he noticed, a short distance away at three equidistant points […] three motionless hunters visible between the tree trunks.” He continues: “and it seemed that these three pairs of eyes striking the same spot would finally, with the help of the sun, burn a hole in the black bathing tights of that poor little German girl, who never raised her ointment-smeared lids” (Nabokov 1963, 335–336). Similarly, Nabokov devotes an extensive passage in The Enchanter to a description of how steadfastly the protagonist observes a twelve-year-old roller skater in a park. Writing “it seemed to him that right away, at that very moment, he had appreciated all of her from tip to toe,” Nabokov provides a detailed catalog of the physical features apprehended by the observer that runs for about half a page (Nabokov 1986, 27). This pattern continues late into Nabokov’s career as well. In Ada, whole paragraphs are taken up with Van’s ardent observation of Ada. This is a representative example: Next morning, he happened to catch sight of her washing her face and arms over an old-fashioned basin on a rococo stand, her hair knotted on the top of her head, her nightgown twisted around her waist like a clumsy corolla out of which issued her slim back, rib-shaped on the near side. A fat snake of porcelain curled around the basin, and as both the reptile and he stopped to watch Eve and the soft woggle of her bud-breasts in profile, a big mulberry-colored cake of soap slithered out of her hand. (Nabokov 1969, 60)

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Years later, Van becomes obsessed with tracking down and attending screenings of a mediocre film called Don Juan’s Last Fling, in which Ada plays the role of a young Spanish woman (Nabokov 1969, 500). The scopophilic pleasure Van takes in the darkened cinema (“in dozens of towns” [Nabokov 1969, 500]) is tinged, however, with bittersweet poignancy, as his rapt focus on the screen figure only serves to remind him of her physical absence from his life. Then, in Nabokov’s next novel, Transparent Things , he depicts his protagonist Hugh Person gazing with rapt attention at a series of photo albums featuring Armande Chamar. Nabokov highlights the lasciviousness of his solitary observation when he writes Hugh “constructed a pile of albums to screen the flame of his interest from anybody overhead on the landing, and returned several times to the pictures of little Armande in her bath” or sitting “in the buff on the grass […] spreading wide, in false perspective, the lovely legs of a giantess” (Nabokov 1972b, 40–41). There could hardly be a clearer expression of the active/male and passive/female dichotomy than Hugh’s rapt devotion to the still images of the photographed child. Indeed, we should note that the narrator calls Hugh “our voyeur malgré lui” at this point in the text. The most notorious example of the pattern we have been discussing is undoubtedly Humbert Humbert’s obsessive fascination with young girls, which he characterizes as “one-sided diminutive romances” (Nabokov 1955, 20). It is no surprise, then, that his initial attraction to Dolly Haze is primarily visual. Catching sight of her sunbathing in her backyard and seeing a remarkable resemblance to his “Riviera love” Annabel Leigh, Humbert describes this initial encounter in a passage that combines frequent reference both to the sense of sight (his) and the details of the observed body (hers): A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day. And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess […] I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts. (Nabokov 1955, 39)1

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Later, he recounts another session of watching Dolly sunbathe with the comment that as she lay on her stomach, she showed to “the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood” her shoulder blades, thighs, etc. (Nabokov 1955, 42). In Humbert’s constant attempts to look at Dolly one even finds a characteristic scene of observation from the rear. In Humbert’s words: “Dorsal view. Glimpse of shiny skin between T-shirt and white gym shorts. Bending, over a window sill” (Nabokov 1955, 54). But Nabokov was never content to follow a well-trodden path without disruption. He clearly enjoyed playing with conventions and subverting them, subtly challenging the prevailing heteronormative paradigm of the day. In some cases, he created situations in which the figure that his lustful protagonist thought was a female turns out to be a male instead. This occurs twice in Lolita. Early in the novel, Humbert recalls being on a balcony and catching sight of “what looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror.” Racing “with all speed toward [his] lone gratification,” he would be sorely disappointed: “abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern of nudity I had adored would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper” (Nabokov 1955, 20). This scene is echoed later in the novel when he writes of crowding “all the demons of my desire against the railing of a throbbing balcony.” As his desire mounts, “the lighted image would move and Eve would revert to a rib, and there would be nothing in the window but an obese partly clad man reading the paper” (Nabokov 1955, 264). In other situations, Nabokov liked to reverse the paradigm and have a female figure—traditionally the object of the male gaze—become the master of the gaze instead. An early example of this occurs in King, Queen, Knave. Sharing a train compartment with Martha and Kurt Dreyer, Franz Bubendorf voyeuristically stares at Martha (“Franz […] now started to assert himself and openly, almost arrogantly, looked at the lady” [Nabokov 1968, 10]). But then he suffers the loss of his eyeglasses, and he is unable to see her accurately. She, however, relishes the sense of unease she detects within him, and toys with him to “see” how he would react (Nabokov 1968, 31). This is a relatively minor case of reversed roles, though. A more sobering and perverse example occurs in Laughter in the Dark. At the outset of the novel and through most of its pages, Margot Peters functions as the object of Albert Albinus’s lust-besotted gaze. Significantly, considering the focus of Mulvey’s article, Nabokov has Albinus first catching sight

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of Margot in a movie theater where she works as an usher. The passage is filled with words referencing Albinus’s gaze: Just as the light fell on the ticket in his hand, Albinus saw the girl’s inclined face and then, as he walked behind her, he dimly distinguished her very light figure. […] Whilst shuffling into his seat he looked up at her and saw again the limpid gleam of her eye. (Nabokov 1938, 20)

At the conclusion of the film Albinus “stared at her face almost in dread” (Nabokov 1938, 21), but he remained in the theater until the start of the next showing and thought: “‘Oh, but I will have one more look’” (Nabokov 1938, 21). After they have become acquainted, Albinus can indulge his desire to look more steadily: Albinus sat down beside her and looked and looked at that face in which everything was so charming—the burning cheeks, the lips glistening from the cherry brandy, the childish solemnity of the long hazel eyes and the small downy mole on the soft curve just beneath the left one. (Nabokov 1938, 48)

He maintains this rapt focus on Margot through much of the novel: “Lying alongside of her, Albinus propped up his cheek and looked with endless delight at the oily gloss of her closed eyelids and at her freshly made-up mouth” (Nabokov 1938, 112); “Now Albinus saw her figure framed in the gay pattern of the beach; a pattern he hardly saw, so entirely was his gaze concentrated on Margot” (Nabokov 1938, 113).2 This leads, of course, to a horribly ironic twist. Near the end of the novel, Albinus loses his sight and now it is Margot with her lover Axel Rex who sit and amuse themselves by gazing at Albinus and mocking him (see Nabokov 1938, 258 ff.).3 A particularly interesting type of variation on this basic pattern of the active male observing a passive female figure crops up in narratives in which a male gaze is directed at another male. In Nabokov’s work, this seems to have the effect of “feminizing” the observed male, as if the act of observation somehow worked to make the observed male conform to the traditional pattern of Mulvey’s article. For example, in Invitation to a Beheading , Cincinnatus finds himself under continual observation from his first day in his cell. In the very first chapter, he starts to make some notes on paper when he feels “a chill on the back of his head.”

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It is Rodion who was “peering with a skipper’s stern attention through the peephole” (Nabokov 1959, 13). Cincinnatus crosses out what he has written and turns his text into a drawing instead. The theme of observation culminates in Chapter Eleven when the narrator says that Cincinnatus’s enigmatic nature “so teased the observer as to make him long to tear apart, cut to shreds, destroy utterly this brazen elusive flesh, and all that it implied and expressed” (Nabokov 1959, 122). Cincinnatus would become aware “of the predatory eye in the peephole […] and lie down” (Nabokov 1959, 122). Significantly, Cincinnatus is often viewed or treated by his captors (and observers) as a feminized figure. Pierre in particular refers to him in this way, linking gender roles and observational practice in the same sentence: “To me you are as transparent as […] a blushing bride is transparent to the gaze of an experienced bridegroom” (Nabokov 1959, 162). A similar process of feminization shows up in The Eye, where the theme of observation involves both of Mulvey’s key concepts: defined gender roles and an element of narcissism informing the observer’s gaze. For much of the novel, the unnamed narrator is obsessed with observing a certain Smurov. To be in accord with Mulvey’s theory, the observed figure in this dyad should be a female, but of course, Smurov is not. However, as we shall see, Nabokov’s treatment of Smurov may leave the issue of his vaunted masculinity in doubt. As for Smurov himself, he seems desperate to be seen as a virile, even macho male. First, he tries to show how approving he is of an anecdote involving one man thrashing another out of jealousy (“‘Thrashed him?’ Smurov broke in with a smile. ‘Oh, good. That’s what I like—’” [Nabokov 1965, 36]), and later, he concocts an elaborate war story with himself as the courageous war hero coolly shooting two soldiers to escape imprisonment (Nabokov 1965, 46–49). Strangely enough, the narrator seems heavily invested in this image as well. He declares: He was obviously a person who, behind his unpretentiousness and quietness, concealed a fiery spirit. He was doubtless capable, in a moment of wrath, of slashing a chap into bits, and, in a moment of passion, of carrying a frightened and perfumed girl beneath his cloak on a windy night to a waiting boat with muffled oarlocks. (Nabokov 1965, 36)4

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This, of course, points to the narcissistic element in the observer’s relationship to the observed figure: Smurov and the narrator are one and the same. Yet it also explains why the narrator himself seems so distressed to learn that Roman Bogdanovich considers Smurov to be a “sexual lefty” (Nabokov 1965, 84). Indeed, after reading Roman’s description of this “sexually unfortunate individual” (Nabokov 1965, 84), the narrator dreams of Smurov dressed in a “remarkable fur coat with a feminine collar” and raising a “slender hand sparkling with rings” (Nabokov 1965, 86). Significantly, when the narrator declares his love to Vanya, his Smurov alter ego is nowhere to be seen. It is as if the feminized version of himself has temporarily been banished to allow the narrator to evince his overt heterosexual ambition. It has been noted, of course, that “Vanya Smurov” is the name of the young figure in Mikhail Kuzmin’s novel Wings who comes to know the allure of homosexuality in that novel.5 At the end of The Eye there appears to be a collapse of the supposed distinction between the narrator and Smurov. The narrator seems to give up both the process of observing an externalized Smurov figure and the attempt to maintain the image of Smurov (or himself) as manly. He describes himself as walking with “mincing steps” (Nabokov 1965, 97), and sniffing a flower bouquet to hide his joy and gratitude at being offered a job by his former tormentor Kashmarin. Another variation on the pleasures (and perils) of male voyeurism is the “important passage” in Despair, which Nabokov claimed had been “stupidly omitted in more timid times” (Nabokov 1937, xii). In this scene Herman Karlovich recounts how he enjoyed watching himself make love to his wife Lydia, and he describes the scene in terms of a theatrical performance: “I longed to discover some means to remove myself at least a hundred yards from the lighted stage where I performed; I longed […] to watch a small but distinct and very active couple through opera glasses” (Nabokov 1937, 38). This scene illustrates well Mulvey’s identification of a narcissistic pleasure arising from the observer’s identification with the image seen. Mulvey writes: “As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence” (Mulvey 1975, 12). Again, however, Nabokov subverts this element of narcissistic satisfaction by having Herman discovers that he is not really in bed with Lydia and that the “especially good

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show” he anticipates with his “acting self in colossal form” was merely a delusion (Nabokov 1937, 28). Nabokov’s treatment of Herman in the novel suggests a rationale for Herman’s eagerness to see himself as a virile sexual performer: he plants several clues indicating that Lydia is unfaithful to Herman with the artist Ardalion—perhaps the most obvious is the scene when Herman walks into Ardalion’s room to find Lydia “half dressed—that is, shoeless and wearing only a rumpled green slip”—on Ardalion’s bed (Nabokov 1937, 104). Herman is either blind to this situation or is trying to block it from his consciousness. Nabokov also reintroduces the notion that the observation of one male by another may have the effect of feminizing the observed male in his handling of the Herman–Felix relationship. Claiming that Felix is his identical double, Herman spends a good deal of time and energy observing Felix closely. In Chapter One, for example, when he first sees Felix he writes: “I was gazing at a marvel” (Nabokov 1937, 9), and in Chapter Five, when they spend the night together in an inn, he recalls: “I shot glances at him, examining eagerly that stark-naked man”; he comments on his “coccyx,” “buttocks,” and “animal parts” (Nabokov 1937, 93). Nabokov deliberately includes several images that hint at a homosexual element in Herman’s obsession with Felix. For example, when he realizes that Felix has “pocketed” his pencil, he imagines “[a] procession of silver pencils” marching down “an endless tunnel of corruption” (Nabokov 1937, 14). Later, when Herman leaves Felix at the inn, he compares his feeling of relief to that of an adolescent who “after yielding once again to a solitary and shameful vice” pledges to commit himself to a life of purity (Nabokov 1937, 96). Herman himself registers these allusions and tries to forestall any interpretive readings along such lines, writing about his manuscript: “let other nations, too, translate it […] translate it into their respective languages, so that […] the French discern mirages of sodomy in my partiality for a vagabond” (Nabokov 1937, 159). Yet whether or not such mirages exist in the text, there can be no doubt that Herman is thrilled at the prospect of transforming the subject of his observation into an entirely passive object—a corpse—and after he has killed Felix, he “went up to the body and, with avidity, looked” (Nabokov 1937, 171).6 The notion that the process of a male gazing at another male thereby “feminizes” the observed male also finds reflection in Pale Fire, where the homosexual Charles Kinbote takes great pleasure in spying on his

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neighbor John Shade. Nabokov may be toying with what Mulvey identified as the traditional relationship between the active/male spectator and passive/female figure being spied upon in his handling of Kinbote’s voyeurism. Kinbote is homosexual, not the typical heterosexual male of the Mulvey formula, but in his treatment of Shade, he seems to be trying to minimize Shade’s own “maleness.” In his extended initial description of Shade, he contrasts the poet’s appearance with that found in the “fashions of the Romantic Age,” which “subtilized a poet’s manliness by baring his attractive neck, pruning his profile and reflecting a mountain lake in his oval gaze.” Shade, in contrast, reminds one of “a fleshy Hogarthian tippler of indeterminate sex” in Kinbote’s opinion (Nabokov 1962, 26). Thus far we have been discussing the scopophilic pleasure that one may derive from gazing at another person. Nabokov also includes the flip side of this feeling in his fiction: the discomfort or even terror that some characters experience when they realize that they are the object of someone else’s gaze. One finds several examples of this in Nabokov’s fiction, from Aleksandr Luzhin’s anxiety at the émigré ball that “there was nowhere to hide, and everyone, probably, was looking at him,” (Nabokov 1964, 195) to Ganin’s “deep shudder of shame” at seeing his image on a movie screen (Nabokov 1970, 21), to the narrator’s sense of humiliation at being watched by his two young charges at the outset of The Eye.7 Yet there is one variant version of this situation that seems particularly troubling to Nabokov’s male heroes: the sense that they are being observed while in intimate contact with the women they love. We recognize this scenario multiple times in Nabokov. In Mary, Ganin realizes that he and Mary are being spied upon by the watchman’s son, “a foulmouthed lecher” with “carroty hair and gaping mouth” (Nabokov 1970, 68). Ganin beats the young man up in a furious rage. This abbreviated episode, which may be an echo of Nabokov’s own dismay at being spied upon with Tamara by one of his tutors (see Speak, Memory, 231 and 232), finds great expansion in Ada, where Ada and Van are not only spied upon, but photographed by an Ardis kitchen boy, Kim Beauharnais. When Ada shows Van Kim’s photographs, Van expresses great rage: Art my foute. This is the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre! I’m sorry you showed it to me. That ape has vulgarized our own mindpictures. I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle. (Nabokov 1969, 406)

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Actually, he does something close to both of those things. He blinds Kim with an alpenstock (in a fury of destruction) and writes Ada (in a burst of creation). It is worth noting that Mulvey offers an explanation for the type of discomfort felt by Van here. Aside from simple embarrassment or dismay at the invasion of privacy this represents, Mulvey argues that “the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like” (Mulvey 1975, 12). Women, however, have often been put into the role of the observed object, and some have been depicted as relishing this role, at least in films. Mulvey points to the character of Scottie in Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Lisa in Rear Window (Mulvey 1975, 16), and the recent film, The Danish Girl (2015), makes a similar point. In Lucinda Coxon’s screenplay, Gerda the female painter tells a man who is sitting for a portrait: “It’s hard for a man to be looked at by a woman. Women are used to it, of course, but for a man. […] To… submit to a woman’s gaze. It’s unsettling.” The man she is painting agrees: “that’s exactly it.” Significantly, as Maurice Couturier has pointed out, female characters in Nabokov’s work also seem less distressed than men at being the object of the voyeur’s gaze. As he puts it, “The male characters in Nabokov’s novels are always afraid of being spied upon while making love with a girl or woman but their mates never share their fear—perhaps, Nabokov seems to suggest, because there is nothing ugly or animal-like in their behavior during intercourse” (Couturier 2014, 45). He cites Iris Black as one such figure, but one could reasonably count Margot Peters and even Ada herself as others with an exhibitionistic streak. Indeed, we can contrast Van’s fury at Kim’s voyeuristic photographs with Ada’s reaction. She tells Van to look at the pictures and savor the recollections they bring up: “Please, Van, do glance! These are our willows, remember?” She asserts that in Kim’s “sordidity” there is “an istoshnïy ston (‘visceral moan’) of crippled art” (Nabokov 1969, 406). In conclusion, it is tempting to extend this analysis to include the reader’s role as “observer,” arriving at a structure analogous to the spectator or viewer in the cinema. In fact, some of Nabokov’s characters invite the reader to take up that very role. Herman Karlovich writes, for example: “An author’s fondest dream is to turn the reader into a spectator” (Nabokov 1937, 16). And Humbert Humbert is well aware of the reader’s scopophilic interest in his descriptions of Dolly and their sex lives. Thus, he remarks on his reader’s reaction when he speculates that he could have kissed Dolly’s throat with “perfect impunity” and that

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she would have welcomed this: the learned reader’s “eyebrows, I suspect, have by now traveled all the way to the back of his bald head” (Nabokov 1955, 48). Then, Humbert goes even farther when he embarks upon his description of the “couch scene,” and invites the reader to “participate in the scene I am about to replay” (Nabokov 1955, 57). Nabokov’s handling of the Humbert–reader relationship here is described well by Mulvey, if one substitutes the words “reader,” “narrative,” and “textual” for Mulvey’s terms “spectator,” “film,” and “screen”: The man controls the film [narrative] phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator [reader] […]. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film [narrative] around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator [reader] can identify. As the spectator [reader] identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen [textual] surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. (Mulvey 1975, 5)

Of course, Nabokov subverts this structure by making Humbert sufficiently unappealing as a person and unreliable as a narrator that readers ultimately question and withdraw any identification they may have made with the protagonist. This is Nabokov at his best. While fully aware of the pleasure that some may derive from looking at a female figure from a safe distance, he enjoys destabilizing this impulse through parody, satire, and exaggeration, as well as by turning the tables on his male observers by making them the object of others’ scrutiny, female as well as male. In the realm of sight, as well as in the realms of the other senses, Nabokov displays a spirit of engagement, wit, and command that is truly fascinating.

Notes 1. Shute (2003, 115–116) offers an engaging analysis of Nabokov’s descriptive technique in this scene. 2. Nabokov’s underscoring of Albinus’s inability to tear his gaze from Margo echoes the plight of Eugene Irtenev, the married protagonist of Leo Tolstoy’s short story “The Devil,” who finds himself uncontrollably drawn to seek out sightings of his former mistress, Stepanida. Hyde (1977, 59–63) discusses some affinities between the two works.

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3. Mulvey’s dichotomy of active/male vs. passive/female finds an intriguing incarnation in the counterpoint Nabokov creates in the English-language version of the novel: in the film scene glimpsed by Albinus at the beginning of the novel, “a girl was receding among tumbled furniture before a masked man with a gun” (Nabokov 1938, 20). Later it is Margot who gains control of Albinus’s gun and shoots him, leaving him in the ultimate passive state—death. In the Russian-language original, there is no mention of a gun: a broad-shouldered man simply advances on a retreating woman (see Nabokov 1932, 14). 4. Nabokov introduces a fascinating twist on the male observer/female observed object dichotomy at the end of this scene. The narrator takes note of the way Marianna Ivanovna, a female doctor, was looking at Smurov (with an “unfriendly gaze”) and comments: “I felt that the more intently Marianna, the cultured lady doctor, stared, the more distinct and harmonious became the image of a young daredevil with iron nerves” (Nabokov 1965, 37). It seems important to the narrator that a female observer register the manliness of the male subject to bolster the latter’s image of virility and valor. 5. For an analysis of the allusive network Nabokov weaves between his novel and Kuzmin’s novel, see Skonechnaia (1996). As Skonechnaia points out, Nabokov splits the name Vanya Smurov between the male narrator–protagonist and the female object of his obsession, Vanya. 6. Looking back on the scene later, Herman finds himself amazed at Felix’s “submissiveness, the ridiculous, brainless, automatous quality of his submissiveness” before the murder (Nabokov 1937, 177). As some readers have suggested, there may be an element of self-loathing involved in Herman’s murder of Felix since he considers Felix to be his identical double. See for example, Stephen Blackwell’s characterization of Herman as “filled with self-loathing cloaked as narcissism” (Blackwell 2002/2003, 136). 7. For a discussion of Nabokov’s treatment of characters’ aversion to being looked at, see Connolly (1998).

Bibliography Blackwell, Stephen. 2002/2003. Nabokov’s Weiner-Schnitzel Dreams: Despair and Anti-Freudian Poetics. Nabokov Studies 7: 129–150. Connolly, Julian. 1998. To See or Be Seen: The Function of the Gaze in Nabokov’s Russian Fiction. In And Meaning for a Life Entire: Festschrift for Charles A. Moser on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Peter Rollberg, 269–286. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. Couturier, Maurice. 2014. Nabokov’s Eros and the Poetics of Desire. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Hyde, G.M. 1977. Vladimir Nabokov: America’s Russian Novelist. London: Marion Boyars. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1932. Kamera obskura. Reprint, Ann Arbor, Ardis, 1978. ———. 1937. Despair. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1989. ———. 1938. Laughter in the Dark. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1989. ———. 1955. Lolita. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1989. ———. 1959. Invitation to a Beheading. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1989. ———. 1962. Pale Fire. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1989. ———. 1963. The Gift. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1991. ———. 1964. The Defense. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1990. ———. 1965. The Eye. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1990. ———. 1966. Speak, Memory. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. ———. 1968. King, Queen, Knave. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1989. ———. 1969. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Reprint, New York: McGrawHill, 1981. ———. 1970. Mary. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1989. ———. 1972a. Glory. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1991. ———. 1972b. Transparent Things. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1989. ———. 1981. Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Bruccoli Clark. ———. 1986. The Enchanter. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. ———. 1990. Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage International. ———. 1997. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Vintage International. Shute, Jenefer. 2003. ‘So Nakedly Dressed’: The Text of the Female Body in Nabokov’s Novels. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook, ed. Ellen Pifer, 111–120. New York: Oxford University Press. Skonechnaia, Olga. 1996. ‘People of the Moonlight’: Silver Age Parodies in Nabokov’s The Eye and The Gift. Nabokov Studies 3: 33–40. The Danish Girl. 2015. Screenplay by Lucinda Coxon. Online at http:// focusguilds2015.com/workspace/media/dg-finalversion.pdf. Accessed 11 April 2016. Wetzsteon, Ross. 1970. Nabokov as Teacher. In Nabokov: Criticisms, Reminiscences, Translations, and Tributes, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. and Charles Newman, 240–246. New York: Simon and Schuster.

CHAPTER 13

The Carmen in Nabokov’s Lolita Suzanne Fraysse

In a letter to Louise Colet written on July 15, 1853, Flaubert robustly connected the senses with lyrical poetry: “Life! Life! Hard-ons! That’s the thing. That’s why I so love lyricism.” Similarly, Humbert—whose name rhymes with Flaubert—locates the lyrical impulse in the senses: Lolita sets his loins on fire, she enchants him and makes him “chant” as he first does in Charlotte’s garden when he bursts into the quintessentially lyrical ejaculation—“beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!” (Nabokov 1955, 40)—which he will elaborate upon in his manuscript. What is more, Humbert keeps on trying to catch the essence of his little “Carmen,” a word which means “poetry,” “song,” “enchantment,” “magical sayings,” and “prophecy.” This turns Lolita into an extended meditation on lyric poetry by a “pentapodic” narrator whose five feet are not necessarily metrical and who often appears to be as taut as any lyrical poet could wish to be. Humbert has the makings of an exemplary lyrical poet, but he warns us that he is only a “conscientious recorder” writing “fancy prose,” not poetry. Nabokov concurred and called Humbert a “poet manqué” (Pivot 1975). Does Humbert, stealing the carmen from Lolita, play a magic violin or does his cracked soul produce a “son fêlé” (Nabokov 1955, 256), as he calls it in probable allusion to “La cloche fêlée,” a poem

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by Baudelaire (whose name also rhymes with his)? Is the fact that he is a moral monster the reason why he cannot be truly lyrical, and in that case, why should it be so? And why did Nabokov choose to embody the lyrical poet in a repulsive character? Does he really want us to be “entranced by the book while abhorring its author,” as Ray suggests (Nabokov 1955, 5)? Or is there something inherently monstrous about the lyrical? I will tackle these questions by focusing mainly on the first paragraph of the first chapter which many critics have hailed as the most lyrical passage in the book: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-Lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” (Nabokov 1955, 9). It is so “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!” that few readers can resist the temptation of learning it by heart, saying it aloud, lending their own bodies and voices to the text. But this paragraph also contains a metatextual dimension which has generally been overlooked and needs to be examined to show how it encapsulates Nabokov’s attraction and resistance to lyric poetry.

From Silent Shock to Mechanical Jingle In Lolita, Nabokov explores the paradoxical nature of lyric poetry: even if it springs from an emotional and sensuous shock, yet its fundamental impulse is to control, tame, and even deny the experience. On first seeing Lolita, Humbert is struck dumb by the shock of Lolita’s beauty just as Catullus was by his puella in “Carmen 51,” which is precisely the reason why Humbert explicitly compares himself to Catullus (Nabokov 1955, 66) and even starts jabbering in home-brewed Latin when emotion overwhelms him (Nabokov 1955, 120). He also implicitly compares himself to Actaeon coming upon Diana, a traditional motif in French poetry from Jodelle to D’Aubigné which combines the themes of enchantment, cruelty, and hunting. It takes him a while before he can blurt out what is really the lyrical germ of the text: “Yes. These are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!” (Nabokov 1955, 40). After all, Humbert is given to see what Baudelaire viewed as the most suitable topic for lyric poetry: a child. Children have the most beautiful faces, Baudelaire explained, because they are free from the strains of passion, anger, sin, anguish, and care (Baudelaire 1869). Humbert’s ejaculation meets the definition of lyric poetry as an ecstatic exclamation (Maulpoix 1989, 71). The exclamation point, the most emotional and expressive sign in

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language, reproduces the tone of a voice of a person who is being carried away. Nabokov will make playful narrative use of these poetical and amorous transports with the carmen motif he weaves into his story, taking those metaphors quite literally and converting the lyrical force of an emotional shock into a clever literary game. But this lyrical outburst breaks the very spell it celebrates: it manifests the poet’s ability to speak out despite the spell which muted him. By putting pen to paper, Humbert regains control of his voice and tries to convert his spontaneous cry in Charlotte’s garden into an elaborate written prose poem. Addressing the reader’s ear, Humbert equates the word “beautiful” and the name “Lolita” in the first paragraph: both are trisyllables which are repeated three times. The dashes and full stops within her name mime the moments when words fail the poet who, gorging on beauty, dissolves in a pool of arrested time; the mostly iambic rhythm of those first sentences modulates the original cry, suggesting the pounding of Humbert’s heart and his emotional disarray. In a letter to Louise Colet written on July 22, 1852, Flaubert considered that “a good sentence ought to be as rhythmical and as sonorous as a good line of verse” (Flaubert 1852). Humbert’s opening paragraph certainly meets Flaubert’s literary standards, but it also lends itself to the same kind of reproach that was leveled at Flaubert for being too “rhythmical.” Similarly, Emerson famously blamed Poe for being a mere jingle man. And indeed, Humbert’s imitation of Poe’s alliterative technique turns the original cry into verbal engineering. Symptomatically enough, the lyrical exclamation mark is absent from the opening paragraph (interestingly, Lodge so responded to its lyrical quality as to misremember it as a “series of exclamations” [Lodge 1992, 95]). Humbert’s almost childishly awed and iterative recognition of beauty in Charlotte’s garden is replaced with such time-honored clichés as “light of my life, fire of my loins” which Humbert filches from Sappho, Catullus, or Sidney. Such clichés are the very opposite of the mumbling, moaning, cooing, screaming, and screeching so often described in Lolita where the whole ambitus of inarticulate passion is represented. True, there is nothing more “beautiful” than clichés, as Baudelaire asserted, and this is undoubtedly the reason why Humbert’s incipit is so catchy. But Humbert’s own voice, blending in with the voices of other poets such as Poe, Belloc, Cervantes, or Sidney, can no longer be heard. Instead of a song, we get the para-ode of a parody. The lover has given in to the scholar. And so, just as Charlotte wants to brace her “beautiful”

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daughter, Humbert braces his own poetic mouth into a “fancy prose” based on alliterations, paronomasias, and intertextual allusions, in a desperate effort to regain his word control and deny Lolita’s carmen, that is, her power to mute men. The same logic is at work in the couch scene when Humbert can only transcribe the words of the garbled Carmen song at the end of the chapter when the spell is over.

Snapping Traps As an heir to nineteenth-century poets, Nabokov explicitly took side in the conflict which pitted the poets of the afflatus such as Musset and Vigny against the upholders of l’écriture artiste such as Baudelaire or Mallarmé, who, incidentally, both translated Poe—the most significant reference in Lolita. Nabokov’s famous blasts against sincerity in art and his sophisticated literary technique make it clear that in assessing Poe, he would have sided with Mallarmé and Baudelaire against Emerson for, like them, he admired Poe for being a “maker.” After all, the word poetry comes from the Greek poein which means “to make,” “to compose.” It would be tempting to suggest that Humbert allows Nabokov to transcend the debate: acting as Nabokov’s spokesman, Humbert parodies Poe and foregrounds the verbal technique needed to write poetry; but he also wears the mask of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that “the passions must have wrested the first voices” (Rousseau 2000, 293–294). This prompts him to focus on his own feelings and sensations, on his loins, on his tongue tapping against his teeth, in acknowledgment of the fact that poetry is rooted in the senses, in the body. However, Lolita offers no synthesis, leaving its readers to waver between two opposite responses which are in fact both debunked. Thus, the readers who respond to Humbert’s attempt at reproducing emotion through rhythm will be implicitly derided as kin to Lolita who “swoons” to “hiccuppy music” (Nabokov 1955, 104), including the “automatic stuff” of her favorite “little Carmen” song (Nabokov 1955, 59). Such readers may eventually realize that Humbert expects them to be as childishly entranced by the amphibrach “Lolita” as Lolita is foolishly bewitched by what Humbert, not such a good specialist in poetry after all, mistakenly calls the “trochaic lilt” of the words “novelties and souvenirs.” Of course, these are not trochees—nor cretics either as Couturier claims (2010, 1671), but dactyls, like the word “beautiful.” Nabokov uses

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rhythm to create meaning: Lolita is “beautiful” because she is both a “novelty” and a “souvenir” for Humbert. But the trap also snaps on the more sophisticated readers who are alert to Humbert’s dazzling technique. The first paragraph turns the name “Lolita” into what Mallarmé would call an “aboli bibelot d’inanités sonores ” (“abolished trinket of sonorous emptiness”) in his “Sonnet en X,” on a par with the echomimetic “plap-plap-plap” (Nabokov 1955, 228) of a flat tyre or the “ah-ah-ah” (Nabokov 1955, 268) of a creaking door. Humbert’s “humming” turns into hammering and one can almost hear the sledgehammer driving the nails home between each of the syllables of Lolita’s name: “Lo. Lee. Ta.” Humbert appears as kin to Dick, Lolita’s husband, a dabbler in carpentry who is also half-deaf, just as Humbert is half-deaf to Lolita, to her carmen, and to true music. The verbal engineering of the paragraph turns Humbert into “a specialist of the mechanical field” (as Lolita calls her husband in her letter [Nabokov 1955, 266]). After all, even though he claims not to be “very mechanically minded” (Nabokov 1955, 208), he does compare himself to Lasalle, a 50-year-old mechanic who abducted young Sally Horner (Nabokov 1955, 289). In fact, the dashes and full stops check Humbert’s original energy and the first paragraph soon peters out, as if the poet were no longer sustained by the lyrical afflatus and ran on a flat tyre. Lo. Lee. Ta. Plap-plap-plap. Ah, ah, ah! This double debunking allows Nabokov to forestall the two types of criticism which might be leveled at lyrical poetry as it hesitates between its two polar opposites, the inane cry and the dry witticism. Nabokov thus eludes whatever critic might be on the prowl, appearing as a very elusive prey indeed.

Nevermore But lyric poetry has two distinctive streaks: either it may celebrate beauty in the ecstatic manner examined so far or it may also address a mournful apostrophe to a dead, absent, or otherwise inaccessible woman. This elegiac strain is obvious in Lolita when Humbert disconsolately repeats the name of his beloved (Nabokov 1955, 109) or when he calls out to his absent lover: “Lo! Lola! Lolita!” (Nabokov 1955, 236). But it is easy to miss in the opening paragraph. In spite of the many allusions to

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Poe’s dead Annabel Lee, first-time readers cannot yet know that Humbert has lost his Lolita and that she is even dead when they open the book. And re-readers might well miss two other poems, both hinging on the word “nevermore” which also haunts Nabokov’s opening paragraph: Poe’s “The Raven” and Belloc’s “Tarantella.” The phrase “tapping against the teeth” seems modeled on Poe’s “tapping at my chamber door” and Humbert’s word golf is similar to Poe’s in “The Raven.” The tongue tripping down the palate to the accompaniment of castanet-like alliterations is reminiscent of Belloc’s dancing gipsy. In Belloc’s poem, the lost Eden is an inn which Nabokov recycles into various hotels and motels, and the very title of the poem, referring to a dance originally performed to sweat out the poison of spiders, breeds the important spider motif in Lolita. Fundamentally, these two poems serve to equate the name “Lolita” with the word “nevermore,” an equation which was so important to Nabokov that he made a pastiche of Poe’s reasons for choosing the word “nevermore” when he told an interviewer why he selected the name “Lolita” (Nabokov 1973, 20). Just as Poe asserted that his refrain hinged on the word “nevermore” because he needed the sounds of the letters “O” and “N,” Nabokov claimed that he required the limpid and luminous letter “L” and the Latin tenderness of the suffix “ita” for his nymphet’s name. All lyrical poets are fatally drawn to “the lost Eden” which has the same color in Lolita as in Baudelaire’s “Moesta et errabunda.” Echoing Baudelaire’s green paradise of childhood loves, Humbert shows Lolita appearing in a “burst of greenery” (Nabokov 1955, 39) and later in “apple-green light” (Nabokov 1955, 41). In fact, Humbert might well have entitled his manuscript “Moesta et errabunda,” for he too is “grieving and wandering.” But the feminine gender of the Latin words might have suggested that Lolita, rather than himself, was to be pitied…Nabokov probably also had in mind a poem by St-John Perse which celebrates childhood sensations since Humbert’s reference to “an old perfume called Soleil Vert ” (Nabokov 1955, 256) mirrors St-John Perse’s “et l’eau était du soleil vert ” (and water [or is it Lo?] was made out of green sun). No wonder if Lolita’s saliva tastes like peppermint (Nabokov 1955, 27): it tastes like Humbert’s very childhood, and like every lyrical poet’s lost green Eden. In “Moesta et Errabunda,” Baudelaire wondered if one could call this lost Eden back “with plaintive cries and animate it with a silvery voice.” Nabokov gives that silvery voice to Monique (a name in which the plaintive cry, the moan, can be heard, as it can also be heard in

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anagrammatic Mona) as if her peripatetic abilities made her more capable of resurrecting the past than Humbert’s poetic skills. In the opening paragraph, Humbert’s tongue takes a trip of three steps down his palate, foreshadowing the way a bell-boy will come “tripping down the steps” with a “remarkably melodious cry” about some distant call (Nabokov 1955, 234). Nabokov thus seems to suggest that he regards his Humbert if not exactly as a “jingle man,” at least as a “bell-boy” rather than as a genuine poet with a silvery voice. Trying hard to stop time and recover his lost Eden, Humbert dispenses with verbs and plants full stops deep into Lolita’s name. His effort is short-lived however and a “rush of roaring black time” (Nabokov 1955, 254) crashes into the very next paragraph with its haunting “she was” structure. The lyrical ambition to freeze time fails at the end of the first paragraph and Humbert is left to describe the pedestrian routine of a day in Lolita’s life in the very next paragraph.

A Name to Play With Lolita being gone, Humbert complains that “he has only words to play with” (Nabokov 1955, 32) just as Poe’s narrator in “Ligeia” had complained that he had only that “sweet word alone,” Ligeia, left him. Long before them, Petrarch, in his “canzoniere 291,” had lamented the fact that Laura had left him “nothing of herself save a name,” and countless lyrical poets in that tradition followed suit from Ronsard and Du Bellay to Aragon and Larbaud. Lolita gone, Humbert relishes a name which excites him “almost to tears” (Nabokov 1955, 52) as he examines each of its syllables, as if he were an alchemist identifying the various components of a magic philter. Consequently, the first paragraph reads as a blazon or as a how-to-thrill guide: we have to take the name and break it to bits, pull it apart, squash it, munch it, and roll it upon the tongue with relish, as literature itself must be enjoyed, or so Nabokov told his students in his lecture on Dostoevski (Nabokov 1983, 105). Appealing to his readers’ senses, Humbert inveigles them into checking what their own tongue does when they pronounce the name, making them pay attention to this mouth-to-ear circuit which Valery called “bouchoreille” in his 1926 Charmes (a title which means “carmen”). As Martine Broda explained in her essay on proper names in the lyrical tradition, Petrarch celebrated “the laurus” (a symbol of poetry) through Laura, and similarly, Humbert celebrates the carmen through Lolita. The

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liquidity of the name, which was so important to Nabokov, does not simply usher in the nymphet theme; it also suggests the very liquidity of language, which, as Bachelard noted in L’eau et les rêves, “wants to flow” (Bachelard 218). What is more, just as Petrarch had dallied with his beloved’s name (having Laura turn into laurus, l’auro, etc.…), Humbert plays with Lolita’s name to generate not only the first paragraph (“lo” gives “loin,” “li” begets “light” which produces “life” which engenders “fire,” etc.) but also a large part of the narrative. The ear must catch the echoes of the nymphet’s name throughout the novel, just as Laura reverberates in Petrarch’s poem or as Lenore does in Poe’s “The Raven.” Thus, for example, the syllable “ta” generates the word “tapping” which repeatedly crops up in the story at key moments and, as in “The Raven,” morphs into “rapping” and into various other words such as raping, rasping, raspberry, therapy, patter, Pratt or Trapp (and of course “palate”). Such echoes reveal the narrator’s obsession over his lover’s name and his desire to make the whole text rhyme with his beloved. They also betray his attempt at using his lover’s name as a sesame to open up an enchanted poetical world. In this poetical playfield, Lolita sports with her likes: the syllables in her name echo the names of countless other nymphets from Petrarch’s Laura to Melville’s Loo in Omoo, Poe’s Annabel Lee or Lenore, Byron’s Leigh, the Biblical Lilith, Chaplin’s Lita Gray, Lola-Lola in Sternberg’s Blue Angel (1930), Max Ophüls’ Lola Montes (1955), etc. Each reader is invited to contribute his own reading list, adding this or that voice to that concert. There might be a few false notes here and there: Nabokov himself blundered in a 1959 interview quoted by Couturier when he wrongly remembered the name of Dumas’ heroine in Le Comte de Monte Cristo as Dolores instead of Mercedes (Couturier 2011, 141). Couturier fails to correct the mistake, tempting though it should have been to identify Lolita with…a car woman! But the one unavoidable reference is Chateaubriand’s definition of the sylphide (sylphs) in Les Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe as a combination of odds and ends culled from real or fictitious ladies: this is the very principle by which Nabokov’s nymphet is constructed as a character. The effect produced by this lyrical celebration is that Lolita’s name seems to rule over Humbert’s language, if not over his destiny. A carmen is a prophecy. There is an omen in the nomen as any re-reader will readily perceive: the syllable “lo” breeds the water motif in the novel, and its opposite, the fire motif (which already appears in the first paragraph). The syllable “ta” leads to the “teeth” which will generate a dentist, a

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redresser of teeth, and his cousin, Quilty, a redresser of wrongs. As a result, Humbert slyly poses as the victim of his own victim since Lolita spells his doom. What is more, Nabokov draws our attention to the ethical consequences of this lyrical focus on names, rather than on the real persons supposedly celebrated or mourned for. Through Humbert, he exposes the dark side of the lyric tradition: he criticizes the callousness of the lyric poet selfishly obsessed with his own feelings and sensations, enamored with his own exquisite sensitivity, and fundamentally blind and deaf to the woman he supposedly adores. Humbert celebrates himself and sings himself, proudly remarking that one has to be “an artist and a madman” to recognize nymphets in a crowd of “wholesome children” (Nabokov 1955, 17) and to be able, as Nerval did in Aurelia, to make “a Laure or a Beatrice out of a person living in our century” (Nerval 1855). The more banal and even the more vulgar the girl is, the greater the lyrical achievement of the poet. There is a sadistic, misogynistic streak in Humbert, as there was in Baudelaire and Rimbaud, as he criticizes Lolita for failing to live up to his own enchanting ideal woman. In the end, one is left to reflect that after all, Narcissus cared little for nymphs. Paradoxically enough, then, the lyric poet cultivates hyperesthesia but reveals himself to be blind to reality. Baudelaire argued that lyric poetry was reality brought to an apotheosis, but Humbert is indifferent to Lolita’s sobs at night and ensures that no one will hear what she has to say. As a result, he reveals himself to be a fool of the Benito Cereno kind, a kinship which Nabokov hints at when Humbert is shaved in Kasbeam just as Benito is barbered by Babo in one of the most striking scenes of Melville’s short story. Just as Benito is fooled by the slaves he despises, Humbert is easily deceived by the people he scorns—Valeria, Charlotte, Lolita, or Quilty. Humbert is also surprisingly akin to Chernyshevksi, the myopic realist writer Nabokov described in The Gift . This is possibly the reason why Nabokov adapts an episode from Chernyshevski’s life when he has Humbert pretend that his diary contains the notes for a novel. According to Nabokov, this is what Chernyshevski also claimed when the police seized his notebooks. Chernyshevski then proceeded to write the novel What is to be Done? to substantiate his claim. In any case, the same passionate and sensuous attention to the “real” world prompts Nabokov to expose both Chernyshevski’s brand of realism and Humbert’s lyricism. However, the world Humbert ignores makes itself heard, vying with the lyrical voice with the harsh, grating sounds of shrill phone rings, roaring

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fridges, whining faucets, crackling ice cubes, not to mention Lolita’s own “strident” voice. Nabokov thus identifies yet another paradox of lyricism: lyrical poets symbolically kill the women they claim to immortalize. In the opening paragraph, Humbert seems to generate Lolita Anadyomene in the watery kingdom of his poetic mouth, yet he symbolically kills her, denying her any individuality (she is his life, his sin, his soul, but she is not herself), and crucifying her with those full stops nailed into her name which foreshadow the last image of Lolita “crucified” against the door in his last encounter with her (Nabokov 1955, 270). He takes her to pieces in a reversal of the Diana story. The spell is broken, the girl is dead: the murder announced in the opening chapter is invisibly performed under our very eyes, and the Mérimée clue—promising the death of the female lover—is revealed to be falsely misleading after all.

Stealing the Carmen from Lolita Having symbolically killed Lolita, Humbert proceeds to steal her carmen, trying to enchant his readers just as he had been enchanted by her, substituting the book for the girl. He sucks out poison from Lolita’s “spicy blood” (Nabokov 1955, 156), imbibes her meli (Greek for honey), her melê (Greek for song), and regurgitates the melody, putting his mouth to our ears just as Lolita had put her mouth to his to conjure up “a mad new dream world” (Nabokov 1955, 133). Vying with her “bouchoreille,” he contrasts his own “deep and sonorous” voice—said to be “stirring in a little girl” (Nabokov 1955, 43)—to Lolita’s voice which he describes as “harsh” (Nabokov 1955, 42), “strident” (Nabokov 1955, 65), or “raucous” (Nabokov 1955, 278). He imagines his obviously male reader quaffing his poetry, savoring—if not “apple-sweet” Lolita—at least what he calls the “pomme de sa canne” (Nabokov 1955, 226). The masturbatory fantasy implied by this phallic cane, an equivalent for the enchanter’s magic wand (the word “cane” is contained in the word “enchanter” as Quilty points out when he signs up with an anagrammatic “Ted Hunter, Cane, N.H.” [Nabokov 1955, 251]), suggests that the object of fascination should no longer be Lolita, but the poet’s fascinum (Nabokov 1955, 19), the male organ itself. The substitution of a female object of desire for a male one organizes the novel since part II replaces the quest for Lolita with the quest for a male rival. Humbert briefly identifies the latter as “Dick,” Lolita’s husband,

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implying that Humbert is indeed after that maleness which Flaubert saw as inherent in lyric poetry and which Humbert flaunts in his subtitle where he defines himself as “a white widowed male,” as a white whale aspiring to be (or dreading to be) some Moby Dick. Pretending to hanker after a lady-writer’s pen (Nabokov 1955, 49) is just a way for Humbert to assert his own supposedly undeniable maleness. After all, he knows that ladies do not have pens, at best, they have tennis rackets, like Lolita whose “overhead volley was related to her service as the envoy is to the ballade” (Nabokov 1955, 232). In the first paragraph, the substitution of Lolita’s body by Humbert’s already occurs as Humbert describes the way his own tongue dances down his palate, imitating Lolita or Belloc’s gipsy girl who twirls and swirls to the “ting! Tong! Tap!” of a guitar. Vying with the “magic and might” of her “soft” mouth (Nabokov 1955, 184), he focuses on his own mouth, which a dentist will later regard as an Ali Baba cave full of priceless treasures (Nabokov 1955, 291). Addressing the re-reader, he implies that the true origin of the world he is about to conjure up is not really Lolita’s name after all, but his own melic mouth: his lost Eden is strangely like his own mouth, as if the waves came from his saliva, the red rocks from his gums, and the white pebbles from his teeth. The three trips of his tongue down the palate foreshadow his three trips with and without Lolita, not to mention the cantrip (witch’s trick) motif closely linked with the carmen motif. The teeth breed the character of Quilty the dentist, and his relative Clare Quilty. Naturally, all this boils down to an assertion of the fictitious character of the story. This claim is valid for Nabokov, but not for Humbert. In his case, such innuendoes are either a sign of incipient madness or a hypocritical way of denying the reality of the events he confesses. But there is something wrong with the body which supposedly generates the story: all the organs needed for the utterance of the lyric voice— his teeth, his heart, his lungs—are ailing. Humbert is short-winded and can only sing lyrically by fits and starts; his text falls from the lyric heights of the opening paragraph to the abysses of the farcical and the grotesque in the final murder scene. At the end of the novel, what comes out of his poetic mouth is neither honey nor some green paradise, but “a torrent of browns and greens” (Nabokov 1955, 238). The bubble of hot poison Humbert was so proud to have in his loins (Nabokov 1955, 17) finally bursts on the lips of his alter ego Quilty as a repulsive blood bubble (Nabokov 1955, 304).

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Concord and Discord But above all, Humbert’s lyrical bubble is burst by the ethical thorn. As Maulpoix pointed out, lyric poetry requires not just the ability to sing, but the ability to enchant the reader, to make him join in the song (Maulpoix, 2000, 30), a feat Humbert only manages to accomplish once in the novel in the Davenport scene. Consequently, lyric poetry is always more or less explicitly addressed to the reader and not just to the woman it celebrates or mourns. When Humbert reveals himself to be a murderer in the third paragraph of his incipit, he extinguishes the lyrical flame for his readers, transforming the lovers who might sing in unison with him into judges looking down on him. Nabokov rightly insisted in his lecture on Dostoevski that “feelings of horror and of disgust” must not “obscure our realization that we are, as readers or spectators, participating in an elaborate and enchanting game” (Nabokov 1983, 106). Poets cannot kill and remain, poets, for then they lose their power to enchant us in so far as our repugnance is likely to spoil our delight. Humbert needs to coerce Quilty into reading his poem, for no one can be spell-bound at pointblank range. Thus, Ray is deeply mistaken when he suggests that we might be “entranced with the book, while abhorring its author” (Nabokov 1955, 5). The ethos of the poet is revealed to be crucial to lyric poetry. This is the reason why Nabokov so carefully constructs his persona both in his afterword and in interviews, repeatedly claiming that he has no personal interest in little girls. As a result, though the texts written by Humbert and by Nabokov are practically identical (though Nabokov adds Ray’s foreword and his own afterword), we may be enchanted by Nabokov’s Lolita, and not by Humbert’s. We can accept to join Nabokov, but not Humbert, in the commonplaces of the opening paragraph. From this viewpoint, it is important that Humbert’s key moment of moral awareness should hinge on his sudden realization that he prevented Lolita from singing in unison with other children: “What I heard was the melody of children at play […]. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope […] and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord” (Nabokov 1955, 308). This passage is strikingly reminiscent of Hawthorne’s description of Pearl as an outcast whose bird-like voice is not allowed to mingle with other children’s voices:

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[…] and then what a happiness would it have been, could Hester Prynne have heard her clear, bird-like voice mingling with the uproar of other childish voices, and have distinguished and unraveled her own darling’s tones, amid all the entangled outcry of a group of sportive children! But this could never be. Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. (Hawthorne 1850, 64)

A lot might be said about the kinship between Lolita and The Scarlet Letter. Like Pearl, Lolita (whose lips are scarlet) is depicted as an ambiguous character—a demon child and an innocent waif. In his afterword, Nabokov misremembered the anonymous narrator of The Enchanter as Arthur, possibly because he remembered Pearl’s father, Arthur Dimmesdale (Nabokov 1955, 312). What is more, Humbert often strikes the same pose as Hester’s, that of a romantic artist and rebel painfully acknowledging his guilt: every single word in his confession hurts him as every single stitch hurt Hester. But what matters most here is the fact that Humbert should have prevented Lolita from singing with her likes, as she did in camp Q. Interestingly, Lolita will leave Humbert on the 4th of July which Nabokov does NOT present as “Independence Day” but “as a great national celebration” (Nabokov 1955, 245): she leaves the lone pervert on the day when Americans (lyrically) celebrate their country in unison. Even though Nabokov claimed that his novel had “no moral in tow,” he examined the conflict between ethics and aesthetics in much the same way as Hawthorne had. On the one hand, art is born of the senses and of the passions, but an overindulgence in lawless desire will turn one into a sadistic monster and a social outcast. On the other hand, strict obedience to the law will turn one into a lifeless dummy soullessly performing his appointed social role. Contrary to Hawthorne, Nabokov downplays the second half of the alternative, only depicting a man who ends up locked up in the prison of his own obsession (like Dimmesdale and Chilllingworth), and in a real prison (like Hester). He thus arguably puts the emphasis on the taming of the erotic impulse rather than on the need for the liberation of erotic urges. The image of an ape painting his prison bars which Nabokov presented as the “initial shiver of inspiration” for Lolita is indeed crucial to the novel (Nabokov 1955, 311). This tension between art and individual desire on the one hand and the law and the need for social cohesion on the other hand is foregrounded in the opening chapter: the lyrical voice is counterpointed with the judicial

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voice which gradually asserts itself. The two voices will strike discordant notes throughout the novel. The lyrical mode makes nonsense of Humbert’s defense: read aloud in the courtroom, the first paragraph would sound inappropriate; more importantly, the celebration of Lolita forces Humbert to reveal a crime no one suspects him; it foolishly deprives him of his best defense as an outraged guardian who should be given extenuating circumstances (for what did he do but kill the pervert who kidnapped and corrupted a poor waif?). Conversely, the judicial voice mars the lyrical song for it casts us in the role of judges and forces us to face the ethical problem which is irrelevant to the disinterested contemplation of beauty.

Conclusion Through Humbert, Nabokov took stock of the main ingredients of lyric poetry: the moaning and mourning over a beautiful absent young girl, the hyperesthesia, the word-joy, the desire of the moth for the star, the arrest of time in moments of apotheosis, the call for the (preferably male) readers’ complicity, the substitution of a beautiful girl for a beautiful text to which the readers are expected to respond sensuously. But crooked Humbert can only sing a cracked song and join the other failed artists in Nabokov’s novels: Chernyshevski in The Gift , Herman in Despair, or Kinbote in Pale Fire. However, much of the appeal of Lolita comes from this lyrical streak. Not only does Nabokov pay an extended tribute to lyrical poets, in particular to nineteenth-century French poets, but he vindicates the experience of the senses which is crucial to lyric poetry. Through Humbert however, he shows how this experience can go wrong: Humbert cannot control his lust, and, like Herman, he crosses the forbidden boundary between fact and fantasy, thus exiling himself from the dreamland where poets and readers sing in unison. Like Chernyshevski, he is oblivious to the reality he should celebrate. And like Kinbote in Nabokov’s next novel, he often has little word control and can only offer his readers the scattered fragments of the truly lyrical poem he is unable to write. In an interview, Nabokov famously claimed that he was “a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel – and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride” (Nabokov 1973, 193). In Lolita, Nabokov harshly criticizes the callousness of a self-centered lyrical poet. His next poet, John Shade in Pale Fire, will be tender, talented, and proud. But he will shift the topic of his poetry from

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the stereotypical celebration of a beautiful, conveniently dead, lover to the intensely personal grieving for the death of a painfully plain daughter. The fire is out; but Shade manages to be what deaf, blind, and short-winded Humbert can never truly hope to be: truly touching.

Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. 1942. L’eau et les rêves. Paris: Corti. Baudelaire, Charles. 1857a. La cloche fêlée. In Les Fleurs du mal. https:// fleursdumal.org/poem/157. Accessed September 25, 2018. ———. 1857b. Moesta et Errabunda. In Les Fleurs du mal. https://fleursdumal. org/poem/154. Accessed September 25, 2018. ———. 1869. L’Art romantique. https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page: Baudelaire_-_L%27Art_romantique_1869.djvu/380. Accessed September 25, 2018. ———. 1908. Œuvres Posthumes. https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page: Baudelaire_-_%C5%92uvres_posthumes_1908.djvu/135. Accessed September 25, 2018. Belloc, Hilaire. 1929. Tarantella. http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/ Belloc-Hilaire_Tarantella.html. Accessed September 25, 2018. Broda, Martine. 1997. L’amour du nom; essai sur le lyrisme et la lyrique amoureuse. Paris: Corti. Catullus. Carmen 51. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_51. Accessed September 25, 2018. Chateaubriand, François-René de. 1850. Fantômes d’amour. In Les mémoires d’Outre-Tombe. https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/M%C3%A9moires_d%E2% 80%99outre-tombe/Premi%C3%A8re_partie/Livre_III. Accessed September 25, 2018. Couturier, Maurice (ed. and trans.). 2010. Lolita. Gallimard: Paris. ———. 2011. Nabokov, ou La tentation française. Paris: Gallimard. Flaubert, Gustave. 1852. Letter to Louise Colet, July 22, 1852. http://flaubert. univ.rouen.fr/correspondance/conard/outiles/1852.htm. Accessed April 25, 2019. ———. 1853. Letter to Louise Colet, July 15, 1853. http://flaubert.univ-rouen. fr/jet/public/correspondance/trans.php?corpus=correspondance&id=10029. Accessed September 25, 2018. Hawthorne, Nathanael. 1850. The Scarlet Letter. Reprint, New York: Norton, 2015. Lodge, David. 1992. The Art of Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mallarmé, Stéphane. 1899. Sonnet en X. In Poésies. https://fr.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Sonnet_en_X. Accessed September 25, 2018. Maulpoix, Jean-Michel. 1989. La Voix d’Orphée. Essai sur le lyrisme. Paris: Corti.

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———. 2000. Du Lyrisme. Paris: Corti. Melville, Herman. 1847. Omoo. Reprint, New York: Library of America, 1982. ———. 1855. “Benito Cereno” in The Piazza Tales. http://www.esp.org/ books/melville/piazza/index.html. Accessed September 25, 2018. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1937. Despair. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1987. ———. 1955. The Annotated Lolita. A. Appel (ed.). Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. London: Weidenfeld. ———. 1983. Lectures on Russian Literature (1981). London: Pan Books. Nerval, Gérard de. 1855. Aurélia ou le Rêve et la Vie. https://fr.wikisource. org/wiki/Page:Nerval__Le_R%C3%AAve_et_la_Vie,_L%C3%A9vy,_1868. djvu/14. Accessed September 25, 2018. Petrarca, Francesco. Canzoniere 291. https://petrarchreadinggroupoxford. wordpress.com/category/canzoniere-291/. Accessed September 25, 2018. Pivot, Bernard. 1975. DVD: Les Grands Entretiens de Bernard Pivot: Vladimir Nabokov. Gallimard/INA. Poe, Edgar. 1838. Ligeia. https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/ligeiag.htm. Accessed September 25, 2018. ———. 1845. The Raven. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/55749/55749-h/ 55749-h.htm. Accessed September 25, 2018. ———. 1846. The Philosophy of Composition. http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/55749/55749-h/55749-h.htm. Accessed September 25, 2018. ———. 1849. Annabel Lee. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ 44885/annabel-lee. Accessed September 25, 2018. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1781. Essay on the Origin of Languages. In The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 7, ed. J.T. Scott. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2000. Saint-John Perse. 1911. Pour fêter une enfance. In Éloges. http:// fondationsaintjohnperse.fr/html/loeuvre_02-eloges.htm. Accessed September 25, 2018.

CHAPTER 14

‘I’d Like to Taste the Inside of Your Mouth’: The Mouth as Locus of Disgust in Nabokov’s Fiction Anastasia Tolstoy

In the middle of his lecture on Fyodor Dostoevski, Nabokov would seemingly diverge from the topic at hand to tell his students the following: Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed – then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, only then, its rare flavour will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood. (Nabokov 1982, 105)

Nabokov’s statement reveals the extent to which he saw literature as a complex process of mastication, consumption, and digestion, while the prevalence of gustatory metaphors underlines the extent to which for him literature was, ultimately, a question of taste. The image is rather an unsettling one—presented as an assault on the senses, the prevalence of violent

A. Tolstoy (B) Wolfson College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_14

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verbs (“broken,” “pulled apart,” “squashed,” and “crushed”) all point to the way in which destructive elements figure in the process of creation (or re-creation on the part of the reader) and imply that the beauty of literature can only be appreciated once it has been broken down and ingested. This statement gestures to an aspect of Nabokov’s fiction that has to date been little probed by his scholars—that is the way in which he uses his writing to re-examine accepted notions of taste through the exploration of its antithesis: disgust. As the above quotation illustrates, Nabokov frequently chose to explore the aesthetics of disgust by placing the question of taste at its literal origin, that of the mouth. Such a concentration of disgust images in the mouth was Nabokov’s way of reminding his reader that disgust is by nature hard to swallow, unlike beauty which slips down easily because it is a taste we have become accustomed to over centuries of classical aesthetics. Nabokov’s engagement with disgust is therefore in part an attempt to engage with a more complex type of beauty. I hope to show the way in which issues of distaste and disgust are central to Nabokov’s writing, concentrating on this particular locus of disgust in two of his Russian novels—Korol’, dama, valet (1928) [trans. King, Queen, Knave, 1968] and Otchaianie (1934) [trans. Despair, 1966]. I wish to argue that the contradiction embedded in that oxymoronic “lovely reek” was not a contradiction for Nabokov at all, and that, in fact, the examination of the point at which beauty stops and disgust begins, and vice versa, is central to much of his fiction from his early Russian prose to the Rococo excesses of his late English novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). Nabokov was an artist who appreciated “rare flavour,” not a simple, easily digested kind of art, but difficult art which makes us question our preconceptions about the nature of beauty and the role of artistic creation more broadly. By incorporating disgust so provocatively into his writing, he was surely reminding us that the finely evoked pleasures of art are impossible without its finely evoked displeasures. These darker, more challenging elements would not fully emerge in Nabokov’s work until the late 1920s, when the young writer had already moved from writing poetry to prose. His first novel, Mashen’ka (1926) [trans. Mary, 1970] is light on explorations of disgust, although it does exploit the drab and dirty setting of a run-down Berlin rooming house full of displaced émigrés to touch on elements of human disgust which derives from the characters’ unwanted sense of proximity. Unsavory details are here predominantly included to convey the sense of shabbiness pervading

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the lives of the émigrés. In particular, these details manifest themselves in the descriptions of the dirty pension, which Nabokov’s characters inhabit: The pension was both Russian and nasty… At the end of the first stretch of the passage was the dining room, with a lithograph of the Last Supper on the wall facing the door and the yellow, horned skulls of deer along another wall above a bulbous sideboard. On it stood two crystal vases, once the cleanest things in the whole apartment but now dulled by a coating of fluffy dust. Upon reaching the dining room, the passage took a right-angled turn to the right. There, in tragical and malodorous depths, lurked the kitchen, a small room for the maid, a dirty bathroom and a narrow W.C. (Nabokov 1970, 5–6)

The picture being painted is not a pleasant one: the bathroom is dirty, the pension is an unpleasant tangle of musty rooms, its contents caked in dust—and yet the “malodorous depths” are also “tragical,” so that any feeling of disgust is mitigated by a note of pity. As a result, the dirtiness never quite manifests itself as anything nearing repulsiveness; on the contrary, there is almost something warm and homely about the “fluffy dust,” which only serves to further underscore the irony that this is no home at all. Nonetheless, the novel’s heavily lyrical and nostalgic mode adheres to a traditional, classical aesthetic, rooted in its evocative descriptions of the beauty of nature and the resurrected memories of a pastel past. This makes the emergence of the grotesque and repulsive imagery in Nabokov’s next novel, King, Queen, Knave, all the more startling, since here disgust is undoubtedly sounded as the dominant note. Indeed, the novel was so full of disturbing images that it prompted Yulii Aikhenval’d, one of the leading critics of the Berlin emigration, to remark in an otherwise positive review that “Sirin is also sinning against taste by displaying a strange predilection for unnecessary references to things that are nasty and disgusting.” [My translation of “Gpexit ppotiv vkyca Cipin i tem, qto obnapyivaet kaky-to ctpanny cklonnoct k nenynomy ypominani o vewax ppotivnyx i otvpatitelnyx”] (Aikhenval’d 1928, 3). Aikhenval’d’s criticism implies the view that Nabokov had perhaps gone too far, that by pushing the limits of taste to its extreme he had himself fallen prey to the very tastelessness which he was attempting to expose in the bourgeois vulgarity of this milieu. Such criticism notwithstanding, almost all of Nabokov’s works which followed King,

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Queen, Knave manifest the pushing of the boundaries of taste by repeatedly probing those unseemly corners of life where the “nasty” and “disgusting” lurk, suggesting a deep interest on the writer’s part in the intersections between these categories and the categories of art and begs the question: what prompted Nabokov to begin experimenting with a more avant-garde and radical set of aesthetics? There is an argument to be made for an emergence of a broader philosophical discourse around the aesthetics of disgust that began gaining momentum during the 1920s and 1930s, precisely around the time that Nabokov began engaging with it as a theme. In 1929 Aurel Kolnai, a Hungarian-born philosopher living in Vienna, published a pioneering study called Der Ekel [On Disgust ], generally considered to be the first philosophical investigation of disgust and its relationship to traditional aesthetics. Around the same time, Georges Bataille began publishing his surrealist art magazine Documents (1929–1930), which was conceived as a “war machine against received ideas,” none more so than the received idea of ideal beauty (Ades and Baker 2006, 11). For Bataille and his surrealist circle, beauty and disgust shared a core identity, “a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse” (Bataille 1985, 20–21), in which everything can be both beautiful and ugly. The incorporation of disgust directly into art therefore presented itself as a kind of backlash against the cult of beauty countered by artists beginning to provide a positive aesthetic for the disgusting. In an essay on “Dante” published in The Sacred Wood, T. S. Eliot best summarized this take on the role of the modern artist when he wrote: “The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty” (Eliot 1920, 168– 169). This Modernist position represented a particularly radical departure from traditional aesthetics precisely because disgust had for so long been singled out as the only aesthetically unredeemable emotion. That disgust ought to be perceived as an unsuitable aesthetic category was first posited by Immanuel Kant in Critique of Judgment (1790), where he outlined the impossibility of the integration of this emotion into art: Fine art shows its superiority precisely in this, that it describes things beautifully that in nature we would dislike or find ugly. The Furies, diseases, devastations of war, and so on are all harmful; and yet they can be described, or even presented in a painting, very beautifully. There is only one kind of ugliness that cannot be presented in conformity with nature

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without obliterating all aesthetic liking and hence artistic beauty: that ugliness which arouses disgust. (Kant 1790, 180)

Kant’s statement recognized the possibility of incorporating certain “negative emotions” into works of art, arguing that the ugly, evil, and monstrous could all be made beautiful, or at least “pleasurable,” by their artistic transformations. Beautiful representations of the ugly would transcend the original ugliness of the object. Disgust, however, resists the power of mimesis since its representation always retains its power to repulse the viewer or reader to the same degree that the real object of disgust would do in life, thereby circumventing any aesthetic pleasure drawn from its artistic depiction. Disgust is, of course, by no means a Modernist phenomenon. The difference, however, lies in Modernism’s inclusion of disgust into art as a deliberate violation of classical norms and accepted tastes with the aim of making the disgusting a taste in its own right. As Adorno notes in his essay “On the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful and Technique,” “the anatomical horror in Rimbaud and Benn, the physically revolting and repellent in Beckett, the scatological traits of many contemporary dramas, have nothing in common with the rustic uncouthness of seventeenthcentury Dutch paintings” (Adorno 2004, 61). A new kind of aesthetics of disgust emerged in the twentieth century, one that was not easily fixed and which did not operate merely as a counterbalance to the beautiful. Instead, both categories began to be perceived as being in constant flux, easily slipping into one another, so that a new dynamic emerged in which an aesthetic of the ugly or the disgusting was an inevitable possibility. It is this difference too which can be detected in Nabokov’s own forays into the anti-aesthetic, in which the boundaries between the beautiful and the disgusting are not always so easy to determine. I do not mean to suggest that Nabokov was at this point in his writing being directly influenced by these Modernist writers, although it is likely that he would have been aware of the writings and ideology of the French surrealists at least (which I will touch on below), but rather that there existed a general movement toward the incorporation and aestheticization of disgust into art by Modernist writers, which became most pronounced around the same time that Nabokov himself began to dabble in the disgusting and that his methods and modes of expressing and exploring these issues often found parallels with the ways in which other Modernist writers of the period were engaging with these same issues.

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Nowhere can this be detected more clearly than in Nabokov’s second novel. From the outside, King, Queen, Knave appears to be a fairly trivial story of adultery. The plot focuses on the love triangle between its three central characters—Dreyer, a rich German businessman with an artistic flair for life; his cold, calculating wife Marta; and Franz, Dreyer’s young nephew who moves to Berlin to work for his uncle and soon begins an affair with his wife. From its opening pages, however, the novel erupts in a sequence of repulsive images so visceral and graphic that they herald the transition of disgust from a peripheral theme in Nabokov’s work to the most dominant note in his aesthetic arsenal. With little warning, the reader is confronted with a sequence of unsavory images that spring forth from the “chamber of horrors” (Nabokov 1968, 3) that is Franz’s imagination: He remembered a dog that had vomited on the threshold of a butcher’s shop. He remembered a child, a mere toddler, who, bending with the difficulty of its age, had laboriously picked up and put to its lips a filthy thing resembling a baby’s pacifier. He remembered an old man with a cough in a streetcar who had fired a clot of mucus into the ticket collector’s hand. (Nabokov 1968, 3–4)

This is the first time that we see Nabokov dealing in such candidly repulsive images, persistently and deliberately layering one abhorrent image on top of another. Amidst the panoply of revolting images paraded before our eyes, the reader could be forgiven for missing the image of the child picking up what is undoubtedly a used prophylactic from the pavement and putting it to its lips as though it were a balloon. What stands out most in this cornucopia of sickening images is that they all originate from the same source. Coughed up mucus, vomit, a child’s lips—all these images bring the reader’s attention to one point of origin: the mouth. By giving center stage to such traditionally peripheral elements, Nabokov was doubtlessly aware of the radical challenge which he was mounting against a more traditional set of aesthetics and marks this novel as the watershed moment in which the writer truly began to incorporate the “unrepresentable” and “unnamable” into his own art. Franz is a prime example of a Nabokov protagonist for whom the charge of the senses has become overcharged, a factor which is predominantly manifested in the continuous nausea which he feels toward the world throughout the novel: “he would throw himself prone on his bed

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and try to fight off the fit of nausea” (Nabokov 1968, 4), “Franz had been trying for some time to fight off the welling of nausea but now he was going to be sick, and he hurriedly left the room” (Nabokov 1968, 147), and again a few pages later “Franz felt another onset of nausea” (Nabokov 1968, 148) and so on. Franz’s nausea is in part induced by his contact with the outside world, but it is also firmly rooted in his overactive imagination, such as when he imagines the violent consequences of a car crash: “all that jagged glass hitting you in the face, that crunch of metal and bones, and blood, and blackness. I don’t know why I picture such things so clearly. Makes me want to vomit” (Nabokov 1968, 134). Franz takes in and tastes the world as much through his mouth as through his eyes and as a result we as readers too are constantly being placed there with him: Franz’s “tongue felt repulsively alive; his palate nastily moist’ (Nabokov 1968, 7). Not only is the image a radical one (to be disgusted by one’s own mouth and tongue is an extreme notion), but enacts what many theoreticians have singled out as an essential aspect and definition of disgust—that of “a nearness that is not wanted” (Menninghaus 2003, 1). In this case, the nearness that is not wanted is one that is being deliberately and calculatedly thrust upon the reader, something which is only further underlined by the double emphasis placed on disgust in the words “repulsively” and “nastily”. This technique of placing the unwitting reader into the mouth of his characters is of course one that Nabokov most memorably returns to in the opening lines of Lolita (1955), where the reader finds himself hanging onto every thrust of the narrator Humbert Humbert’s tongue: “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap at three, on the teeth” (Nabokov 1955, 9). There is nothing disgusting about the image itself, indeed the soft syllables and the ordered rhythm make it an entirely sensuous experience, but the moral danger of complicity with the sounder of these words marks this too as “a nearness that is not wanted.” That Nabokov chooses to achieve this discomforting reaction in his readers through repeated images of mouths is fascinating specifically because of the special place which the image of the open, gaping mouth holds within the canon of disgust. As the disgust theorist Winfried Menninghaus points out in Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, the gaping mouth has long been perceived as a violator of the classical laws of beauty: “the widely open mouth thus elicits disgust—in both a direct and metonymical manner—simply by inscribing a ‘spot’ onto the perfect skin of the aesthetic” (Menninghaus 2003, 62).

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Such a “spot” was perfectly illustrated by George Bataille in his article “Mouth,” published in Documents in 1930, famously accompanied by Jacques-André Boiffard’s 1930 shocking photograph of a giant, gaping oral aperture, entitled Mouth. The photograph depicts almost impossibly wide-open lips, inside which threatening shards of teeth dangle above the glossy wetness of a saliva-coated tongue. The image fades out into the fleshiness of the glistening uvula, in turn giving way to a horrifying, hollow black abyss. For all of Bataille’s desire to give a positive aesthetic affirmation to that which had traditionally been dismissed as disgusting, the open, gaping mouth seems to resist such transformation, and Bataille ends the article by noting “the magisterial look of the face with a closed mouth, as beautiful as a safe” (Bataille 1985, 60). Elsewhere, in an earlier article in Documents entitled “The Big Toe” (1929), Bataille wrote: “the form of the big toe is not, however specifically monstrous: in this it is different from other parts of the body, the inside of the gaping mouth, for example” (Bataille 1985, 22). For once, Bataille is not so much contravening classical aesthetics as borrowing from them, the image of the gaping mouth having traditionally been perceived as irreconcilable with the “laws of beauty.”1 It is precisely such an irreconcilability that we are made to witness when, several lines on from being exposed to his “moist palate,” the reader is forced back into staring at the abyss of Franz’s open mouth: “he slept with his mouth agape so that his pale face presented three apertures, two shiny ones (his glasses) and one black (his mouth)” (Nabokov 1968, 14). This moment is a prime example of what Bakhtin has described as the ultimate representation of the grotesque. The open mouth, he writes, “dominates all else. The grotesque face is actually reduced to the gaping mouth; the other features are only a frame encasing the wide-open bodily abyss” (Bakhtin 1984, 317). By spending so much time in the mouths of his characters, Nabokov draws attention to the fact that the metaphor of taste places all aesthetic issues literally at the heart of that cavity, the mouth being the natural arbiter of both good and bad taste. Franz’s constant experience of the world around him as nauseating not only provides the main source of disgust images in the novel, but also allows Nabokov to probe some key questions about disgust’s relation to life, and thereby to art. What role does disgust play in our perception of reality? What would happen if we perceived everything in the world as disgusting? Are there aspects of disgust which we secretly find attractive? These are some of the central questions that

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lie at the heart of King, Queen, Knave and which call attention to the way in which disgust affects not only how we see, but also how we feel. That the mouth is also the organ through which we give and, most importantly, express pleasure is emphatically underlined in King, Queen, Knave in the repeated conflation of desire and disgust that is rendered in the novel through images of food and eating, inevitably placing the mouth at the center of these images of consumption. While departing the train station, Franz notices a “sandwich-and-fruit” vendor whose prize produce are the “plump, lumpy, glossy, red strawberries positively crying out to be bitten into, all their achenes proclaiming their affinity with one’s own tongue papillae” (Nabokov 1968, 2). Here, we are clearly in the pleasure domain of taste, invited to fulfill Nabokov’s metaphor that literature needs to be relished on the tongue. Nabokov sets up a tight parallel between the image of the strawberries, dripping in ripe sexualization with their ample red fleshiness and their achenes (the strawberry’s reproductive organs), which have been duly magnified and their visual counterparts, the tongue’s papillae—the physical home of the taste bud. That Nabokov chooses a fruit that naturally resembles the tongue only reconfirms the way in which everything in this novel reverts back to the mouth, that first barrier of taste. Several lines later, we are once again thrust into the mouth of yet another character, this time Martha: “while looking sideways out of the window she yawned: he glimpsed the swell of her tense tongue in the red penumbra of her mouth and the flash of her teeth” (Nabokov 1968, 11). Here, by contrast the experience is not unpleasant. Franz, who finds everything disgusting, manages to find this vision of her gaping mouth sexually alluring, and describes Martha’s yawn as “one that resembled somehow those luscious lascivious autumn strawberries for which his hometown was famous” (Nabokov 1968, 11). The imagery here foreshadows the appearance of Martha in Franz’s room several chapters later, when they are about to consummate their affair: “Franz began helping her to get rid of her coat. The silk lining was crimson, as crimson as lips and flayed animals, and smelled of heaven” (Nabokov 1968, 96). The silk lining “crimson as lips” links this passage directly back to the image of the strawberries and the “red penumbra” of Martha’s mouth, while the unexpected appearance of flayed animals conveys the fine line which exists between that which repulses and that which attracts. The image of desire that is invoked by appealing to innards of animals clearly also anticipates Nabokov’s famous image of bodily transgression in Lolita, in which Humbert Humbert expresses his desire to

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“turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys” (Nabokov 1955, 165), where once more an unnatural and transgressive desire is mitigated specifically through the mouth. Nabokov would return to this parallel image of tongue and strawberry in Ada, arguably his most erotic and transgressive novel, when Van Veen declares to his sister and lover: “I’d like to taste,” he said, “the inside of your mouth. God, how I’d like to be a goblin-sized Gulliver and explore that cave.” “I can lend you my tongue,” she said, and did. A large boiled strawberry, still very hot. He sucked it in as far as it would go. He held her close and lapped her palate. Their chins got thoroughly wet. (Nabokov 1969, 83)

Not only does this moment perpetuate the male desire to transgressively enter the female body, but also once more places the mouth at the borderline between desire and disgust. Here, the relationship between the two is constantly in flux, shifting almost imperceptibly from an all-consuming ardor that destroys all trace of otherness (where bodily fluids are happily exchanged and all physical transgression is eliminated at the cost of the social transgression: Van and Ada are less disgusted by one another’s excretions precisely because they are brother and sister). Indeed, the novel, which is at times extremely graphic in its exploration of uninhibited sexual desire, frequently invokes the image of the mouth as a metonym for the violating desire which exists between the two siblings. Nabokov underlines the dichotomy of this desire specifically through the image of lips: “Endlessly, steadily, delicately, Van would brush his lips against hers, teasing their burning bloom, back and forth, right, left, life, death, reveling in the contrast between the airy tenderness of the open idyll and the gross congestion of the hidden flesh” (Nabokov 1969, 83), where the duality of the mouth’s position is openly exposed. It is at once an idyll and a gross congestion, whose hidden flesh signals something both mysterious and illicit. The central role played by the mouth, as a source of disgust would become even more apparent in the novel Despair, in which manifestations of disgust abound not only thematically and imagistically, but actually penetrate the formal make-up of the text. Indeed, so prominent is the part played by this orifice, that Nabokov called the Russian title, Otchaianie,

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a “sonorous howl” (Nabokov 1966, vii), as if to suggest that the entire novel is akin to the gaping abyss of a howling mouth. The reader is thrust into the internal, solipsistic world of Herman Karlovich, whose deluded, self-absorbed perspective we are forced to share, and where the firstperson narration once more represents a “nearness that is not wanted.” If in King, Queen, Knave, Nabokov was presenting us with straightforward images of disgust, Despair is a much subtler exercise, in which the novel itself becomes a potential object of disgust. The numerous digressions pursued by Herman cause the text to leer and lurch in various directions, signaling a complete lack of control over the narrative and drawing attention to the fact that the central metaphor of the novel is one of mess and disorder. The repeated imagery of saliva becomes a metonym for the uncontainable, effluent and uncontrolled nature of Herman’s writing and the disgust associated with saliva is itself transferred onto the composition of the text. Nabokov goes to great lengths to underline these inherent qualities of Herman’s prose through the repeated convergences of spit and ink that run through the text, reducing Herman’s “bescribbled pages” (Nabokov 1966, 154) to nothing more than spittle-writing: The pen supplied by the State screeched and rattled. I kept thrusting it into the inkwell, into the black spit therein; the pale blotting paper upon which I leaned my elbow was all criss-crossed with the imprints of unreadable lines. (Nabokov 1966, 89)

The ink here becomes a glob of black spit out of which a sequence of random nonsensical words flows out, their fluidity underlined by the ease with which they metamorphose in and out of one another. This is the embodiment of “spittle writing”; it is bad writing incarnate and the lines are literally, as Nabokov writes, “unreadable.” The spittle element further emphasizes the lack of control which Herman has over his narrative: “meanwhile the consumptive pen in my hand went on spitting words: can’t stop, can’t stop, cans, pots, stop, he’ll to hell” (Nabokov 1966, 89). The pen is presented as literally diseased and Nabokov plays on the double meaning of consumptive—the pen hacks up words like a spluttering tuberculosis patient, but also consumptive as representing something destructive and decaying, capable of laying language to waste. That Nabokov chose to employ spittle as the principal metaphor in his exploration of formlessness is notable in that it similarly bears a strong

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parallel to the work of the French Surrealists expressed in Bataille’s Documents. In December 1929, Bataille began using the magazine as a vehicle for the creation of an alternative dictionary, for which he proposed the first entry to be the word informe, or formless. In his brief explication of the term, Bataille suggested that the informe was a means by which it would be possible to liberate the world, and more specifically our notions of beauty, from the strictures of form. Such a position deliberately stood as a direct challenge to classical notions of beauty, traditionally defined as something inherently connected to form. For, as Kant makes clear in the Critique of Judgement, beauty, in order to be beautiful, must be contained and that containment is form: “the beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in [that object] being bounded” (Kant 1790, 82). Bataille’s entry on the informe was preceded by two articles written by fellow Surrealists, Michel Leiris and Marcel Griaule; the subject of both articles was spittle.2 In his piece, entitled “Crachat: L’eau à la bouche” [“Spittle: Mouth Water”] (1929), Leiris attempted to overturn the traditional hierarchy of bodily parts by questioning the scandalous dual function of the mouth: what value can we attach to reason, or for that matter to speech, and consequently to man’s presumed dignity, when we consider that, given the identical source of language and spittle, any philosophical discourse can legitimately be figured by the incongruous image of a spluttering orator? (Faccini 1992, 30)

Leiris concludes: “spittle is finally, through its inconsistency, its indefinite contours, the relative imprecision of its colour, and its humidity, the very symbol of the formless ” (Faccini 1992, 30). It is precisely in this way that Nabokov’s novel Despair reduces much of the novel’s universe to spittle. Indeed, Herman perfectly embodies the image of the spluttering orator (at one point he completely drenches his wife during one of his passionate outbursts: “Lydia’s eyelids fluttered – I had quite bespit her – in the spouting of my speech…”) (Nabokov 1966, 166), and several of Herman’s digressions constitute extended asides on the subject of spit (for example, Herman informs the reader that he and his wife no longer kiss because he finds the sloppiness of kissing disgusting). Not only has the form of the novel itself been made a subject of disgust, but the language in which it is written has also seemingly been contaminated. The minor character Orlovius, for example, draws attention to

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this when he speaks in his broken English: “When I young was, I came upon the idea of supposing only the best (he all but turned “best” into “pest,” so gross were his lip-consonants)” (Nabokov 1966, 37). Not only do we once more find ourselves reluctantly drawn into the grotesque, spluttering lips of yet another character’s mouth, but we are also made to witness them turning something good (“best”) into something foul and pestilent (“pest”), which stands as a veritable symbol of the breaking down of language itself. The fact that these words are parenthesized away from the rest of the text only adds to the sensation that there is a risk of contamination at hand, a threat that this grossness might spill over into the rest of the text; and it is this sensation of overflow that remains central to all the images of ooze, effluvia and spill that govern the narrative.3 This passage, which comes at the beginning of the novel, stands as an early signal of the way in which language itself is tortured and mutilated by Herman’s narration, transformed into something unsavory, even disgusting. In Herman’s hands language is physically turned inside out and on itself, repeatedly being forced into unseemly situations and made to do unnatural things: “I liked, as I like still, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by the mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them unawares” (Nabokov 1966, 25). This rather violent vision of language alerts the reader to the fact that Despair is no longer merely an exploration of the visually disturbing or loathsome, but rather a novel which makes the reader bear witness to the creation of something disgusting itself. In this sense too it clearly anticipates Lolita, in which Humbert imagines his finished text as an everted corpse: “this then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies” (Nabokov 1955, 308). Humbert’s bold envisioning of the text as a decaying, mutilated body (which by more than coincidence mirrors his description of Charlotte Haze’s inverted corpse: “the top of her head a porridge of bones, brains, bronze hair and blood” [Nabokov 1955, 98]) both acknowledges the potential for disgust that exists in writing and simultaneously finds beauty in the “bright-green flies” circling the decomposing composition. In this sense Humbert is a far more consummate artist than Herman, who mutilates his text but can locate no beauty or artistic meaning in the mess he has created—either as a writer or a murderer. Such a reading is hinted at in the last lines of the final chapter, in which Herman’s narrative collapses entirely and he himself asks: “What on earth have I done?” (Nabokov 1966, 162) In the Russian original, this phrase is left much

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more deliberately ambiguous: “Qego , cobctvenno govop, natvopil” (Nabokov 1934, 246), where Nabokov artfully plays on the dual sense of “natvopil” which can be read as either “What have I done?” or more literally “What have I created?” The representation of the text as a decaying corpse is prefigured in the violent and repeated abuse of language that occurs in Despair, in which Herman physically tortures his work into being: “I smiled the smile of the condemned and in a blunt pencil that screamed with pain wrote swiftly and boldly on the first page of my work: ‘Despair’; no need to look for a better title” (Nabokov 1966, 156), suggesting that the novel is as much about the murder of fine prose as it is of his double Felix. This shifting focus toward a more textual manifestation of disgust in fact marks one of the ways in which Nabokov’s engagement with aversion becomes more sophisticated and subtler in his later fiction. In The Meaning of Disgust, Colin McGinn includes bad writing in a long list of things which disgust us morally, writing that moral disgust as a category “ranges from our reactions to, say, a particularly deplorable fraud to what we feel about a piece of shabby writing […]. Flinging a piece of shoddy writing across the room, so as to remove it from one’s sight, would be a clear case of intellectual or literary disgust” (McGinn 2011, 37). Appropriately enough, Herman is guilty of both crimes. He is the epitome of all that is morally grotesque and corrupt, which is one reason why, unlike Humbert Humbert, as Nabokov’s Foreword to the English translation tells us, “Hell shall never parole Herman” (Nabokov 1966, ix). As McGinn points out, “there are basically two points at which the disgusting may enter a (representational) work of art: as subject and as medium” (McGinn 2011, 198), or put another way, as content and as form. Nabokov’s experimentation with and investigation into aversive emotions and their relationship to aesthetics fundamentally charts just such an arc. This integration of repulsive imagery reached its apogee within Nabokov’s Russian works in King, Queen, Knave, almost every page of which is laden with unpleasant and sordid details, thanks in particular to the “chamber of horrors” that is Franz’s imagination, storing up images of disgust that are unleashed in a cascade at the merest hint of the presence of something repulsive. From the 1930s onwards, however, Nabokov moved away from such straightforward examinations of shocking and difficult imagery (which still persists in some form in each of his novels) first to explore the intricacies of moral disgust, particularly in the novel Kamera obskura (1933) [trans. Laughter in the Dark, 1938], and then later to a more

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committed focus on the formal nature of disgust, by delivering a sense of the unpleasant through the disintegrating form of the novel in Despair, the very medium of which becomes loathsome. The fact that these explorations were so frequently conducted through the incorporation of images associated with the mouth and with notions of taste underlines the degree to which Nabokov’s writing was always firmly rooted in the senses, investigating the literal ins and outs of which became a central aspect of his quest for artistic truth.

Notes 1. For the history of the gaping mouth as violator of classical aesthetics, see Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, 60–64. 2. Leiris and Nabokov would certainly meet three years after the publication Despair, when they both joined the editorial board of the French journal Mesures. See photograph taken in April 1937 in Brian Boyd’s The Russian Years. 3. In Teksty-Matreshki Vladimira Nabokova, Sergei Davydov convincingly demonstrates the importance of the novel’s symmetrical design (that is Herman’s plan to write his story in ten chapters). Davydov argues that the violation of Herman’s design in the inclusion of an eleventh chapter is the means by which Nabokov asserts his authorial authority, revealing the true creator behind the novel. It is also part of the inherent, repeated, and consistent ways in which Nabokov deliberately undermines the authority of form in this novel. See Davydov (2004, 59–60).

Bibliography Ades, Dawn, and Simon Baker (eds.). 2006. Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Adorno, Theodor. 2004. On the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful and Technique. In Aesthetic Theory. London: Continuum. Aikhenval’d, Iulii. 1928. Review: Korol’, dama, valet. Rul’, no. 2388 (3 October). Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bataille, Georges. 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoeckl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Boyd, Brian. 1990. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Davydov, Sergei. 2004. Teksty-Matreshki Vladimira Nabokova. St. Petersburg: Kirtsideli. Eliot, T.S. 1920. Dante. Reprint, in The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen, 1972. Faccini, Dominic. 1992. Critical Dictionary. October 60 (Spring): 30–31. Kant, Immanuel. 1790. Critique of Judgment. Reprint, in Critique of Judgement, trans. with an introduction, by Werner S. Pluhar; with a foreword by Mary J. Gregor. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. McGinn, Colin. 2011. The Meaning of Disgust. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Menninghaus, Winfried. 2003. Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb. Albany: State University of New York Press. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1928. Korol’, dama, valet. Reprint, St. Petersburg: Azbukaklassika, 2007. ———. 1934. Otchaianie. Reprint, St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2009. ———. 1955. Lolita. Reprint, in The Annotated Lolita, ed. with preface, introduction and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr. London: Penguin, 2000. ———. 1966. Despair. Reprint, London: Penguin, 2010. ———. 1968. King, Queen, Knave. Reprint, London: Penguin, 2010. ———. 1969. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Reprint, London: Penguin, 2000. ———. 1970. Mary. Reprint, translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny in collaboration with the author. London: Penguin, 2012. ———. 1982. Fyodor Dostoevski. In Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. and with an introduction by Fredson Bowers, 97–135. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

PART IV

Synesthesia and Multisensoriality

CHAPTER 15

An Introduction to Synesthesia via Vladimir Nabokov Jean-Michel Hupé

In the second chapter of Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s autobiography, he wrote: I present a fine case of colored hearing. Perhaps “hearing” is not quite accurate, since the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). (Nabokov 1966, 34)

Nabokov then goes on describing his colored alphabet with exquisite details (Nabokov 1966, 34–35; see Holabird 2009 for illustrations). Nabokov is referring to what was known in the scientific literature of the end of the nineteenth century as “colored hearing” (sounds triggering color experiences). These experiences then were the prototypical example of various subjective experiences later gathered within the umbrella term

J.-M. Hupé (B) Brain and Cognition Research Center (CerCo), University of Toulouse Paul Sabatier and National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Toulouse, France © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_15

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of synesthesia—etymologically, the conjunction of senses. But to most readers who are less knowledgeable than Nabokov, those descriptions may resemble some kind of hallucination, all the more so because Nabokov started by declaring he had always been “subject to mild hallucinations” (Nabokov 1966, 34), whether aural or optical. In this chapter, Nabokov’s “confessions” will be read through the prism of current research in neuroscience and cognitive science in the field of synesthesia. What kind of synesthete was Nabokov? Could his synesthesia have had some impact on his various abilities as a multilingual writer, a translator, an entomologist? Could it be related in any way with his creative ability? Should the knowledge about Nabokov’s synesthesia influence the reading of his books? Synesthesia can be defined as a “peculiar habit of mind” (Galton 1881, 85), in which, as a first approximate definition, “one attribute of a stimulus (e.g., its sound, shape, or meaning) [the inducer] may inevitably lead to the conscious experience of an additional attribute [the concurrent]” (Ward 2013, 50). Synesthesia refers to a group of particular subjective experiences sharing a common set of properties: synesthetic experiences are additional (they do not replace a given sensation, but add up to it), involuntary (they are not evoked at will and are not chosen), arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and they occur in constant associations (Hupé et al. 2012; Hupé and Dojat 2015). Synesthetic associations are also emotionally loaded with a feeling of evidence (Hupé 2012a). They are typically unidirectional, with the inducer triggering the concurrent experience. Phenomena considered as synesthetic experiences do not necessarily involve a conjunction of the senses, notwithstanding what etymology would suggest, or even the senses stricto sensu. For example, numbers can be imagined within a particular mental space or associated with gender or personalities. These two forms of synesthesia (according to our definition) may be the most frequently encountered (Flournoy 1893; Chun and Hupé 2013). Mirror-touch (the experience of tactile sensation on one’s own body when others are being touched) and ticker tape (the automatic visualization of spoken words or thoughts, as with a teleprompter) are other subjective peculiarities sharing many characteristics with synesthesia. They are often considered as such, though they lack two essential characteristics according to our earlier definition and thus should probably be considered apart, for they are minimally idiosyncratic and not arbitrary (Chun and Hupé 2013). The associations described by Nabokov correspond to what is known today as “grapheme-color” synesthesia, “grapheme” (understood as the visual form of letters, numbers or other symbols) being the

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inducer, and color the concurrent experience. It is the type of synesthesia that has been studied the most by cognitive psychology and neuroscience over the last 20 years, due to its relative high frequency—from 1% (Simner et al. 2006) to 4% (Simner and Holenstein 2007; Chun and Hupé 2013) of the population—and its suitability for empirical protocols. Since the nineteenth century, the identification of synesthetes has been based on subjective reports. Such identification is not straightforward because synesthetes may not realize that their associations are in any case special, or they may not mention them until they have an opportunity to talk about their subjective, inner world. The easiest way to find out whether someone is a synesthete consists in describing examples of synesthetic associations, and to observe whether those evoke some familiar experience, as recounted by Galton: every now and then I meet with persons who possess the faculty, and I have become familiar with the quick look of intelligence with which they receive my question. It is as though some chord had been struck with which had not been struck before, and the verbal answers they give me are precisely of the same type as those written ones of which I have so many. I cannot doubt of the authenticity of independent statements which closely confirm one another […]. (Galton 1881, 88)

A particularly striking property of those statements is often the precision of the synesthetic associations, as clearly exemplified in the text by Nabokov. Nowadays, researchers typically ask synesthetes to choose the color matching their synesthetic colors on a computer color picker. Synesthetes may take a very long time to choose the precise tint, until they are satisfied (when they do not complain about the limited range of colors on the computer screen), just like Nabokov when he writes that “today I have at last perfectly matched v with ‘Rose Quartz’ in Maerz and Paul’s Dictionary of Color” (Nabokov 1966, 35). Subjective reports, still the richest source of information on the phenomenon, are now complemented with objective tests based on the properties listed in the definition, like the constancy of the associations. The gold standard in the field, the test of genuineness (Asher et al. 2006), consists in having synesthetes produce a list of their associations, and in performing a surprise retest of these associations some time later, with a high level (defined statistically) of identical associations considered as ruling out memory strategies. This test is methodologically convenient for researchers but has some limitations:

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for example, some persons may have many memorized associations (like cross-stitchers who systematically associate numbers to colors of threads, see Elias et al. 2003), yet report no subjective experience of synesthesia. A contrario, others may report too few synesthetic associations to reach a convincing statistical level. The requirement of an arbitrary statistical criterion is especially problematic for children, because they seem to have fewer synesthetic associations, and their description modes are different from those of adults (Simner et al. 2009; Simner and Bain 2013; Garnier 2016; Basirat and Hupé 2020). Other methods have been tried, but, in fact, there is no definitive, objective test of synesthesia. For example, interference by the systematic associations of colors to letters and numbers can be measured by modified versions of the Stroop test, but longer delays to name the (objective) color of letters printed with a color different from the subjective synesthetic color show up only for synesthetes with strong associations (Ruiz and Hupé 2015). This lack of clear discontinuity of measures between synesthetes and non-synesthetes may lead to wonder whether all people have synesthesia, at least to some extent. Even though there is indeed a continuity of experiences between synesthetes and non-synesthetes, at least for some types of synesthesia (Price and Pearson 2013), and even though many people do not realize that they are making synesthetic associations before being asked about them, not all people have synesthesia. Recent estimates are however close to about 20% of the population who may have at least some weak form of at least one type of synesthesia (Chun and Hupé 2013; Rouw and Scholte 2016). Non-synesthetes are typically puzzled the first time they hear synesthetes describing their associations, wondering what it is like to be a synesthete (thus providing an argument in favor of not considering everyone as a synesthete). Subjective reports are indeed clear and consistent enough to assess that the subjective contents of the experience of synesthetes and non-synesthetes are different for some stimuli. Studying synesthetes could be considered as a promising entry in the objective analysis of subjective experience, which mirrors the complex question on the study of consciousness, as asked by Nagel in the title of his article, “What is it like to be a bat?” (Nagel 1974). Indeed a human who could objectively understand what it means or feels like to be probing the environment with echolocation, or a non-synesthete who would understand what the subjective experience of a synesthete is, would provide a major step forward

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in science, as it would suppress one of the major limitations of cognitive neuroscience. With color being the most often reported concurrent experience, ingenious psychophysical experiments were designed to test the similarity between the perception of real colors and that of synesthetic colors. The first published qualitative reports (Ramachandran and Hubbard 2001a) as well as the first quantitative ones (Palmeri et al. 2002) obtained on a couple of synesthetes suggested that for at least some synesthetes the perception of real colors and that of synesthetic colors were very similar. Those results were however not confirmed in many subsequent studies on larger groups of synesthetes (Hupé 2012a; see Chiou and Rich 2014 for a review). In addition, functional neuroimaging techniques (especially functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, fMRI) were used to reveal whether the neural networks of the visual system involved in the perception of real colors were also involved in the experience of synesthetic colors. Contrary to many claims and published results, no clear evidence of such involvement was demonstrated so far (Hupé et al. 2012; Hupé and Dojat 2015). The thorough analysis of this scientific literature revealed in fact the many pitfalls of MRI research (Hupé 2015). Even by applying recent machine learning techniques, Multivariate (multivoxel) Pattern Analysis (MVPA) did not reveal any evidence of shared patterns of brain activations by real and synesthetic colors, as well as no strong evidence of differences between synesthetes and controls (Ruiz et al. 2020). Future technological developments may allow some identification of the neural correlates of synesthetic experiences, since a different subjective experience must be somehow reflected in the brain (where else?). But we do not seem to possess yet the methodological and theoretical tools to observe it, and, until now, cognitive neuroscience is still bumping against the wall of subjective experience, leaving us with the richness but also the diversity and the inherent ambiguity of subjective reports. The diversity of possible subjective experiences considered as synesthetic leads to question whether synesthesia is a unique or multiform phenomenon. Indeed, the analysis of co-occurrence of synesthesia types revealed that even if considered as a unique phenomenon, synesthesia has several varieties (Novich et al. 2011). Moreover, even for a single variety like grapheme-color synesthesia, descriptions vary a lot from one person to the next. Some synesthetes experience those associations as anecdotal with a minimal impact on their life. They may even not be aware of making those associations unless paying attention to them. Some claim not

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“seeing” the colors associated to graphemes, even in their mind’s eye, but simply report that they “know” what the color is. Others, however, “see” the colors of letters, in their mind’s eye or even somehow attached to the printed letters when reading, for example like a kind of colored veil over the letter. For some, synesthetic associations can even be overwhelming, leading them to avoid reading. In face of such diversity, to decide on a unique phenomenon would require to find its cause at a neurological, genetic, or developmental level. There is no solid evidence so far that synesthesia is a neurological condition, meaning being due to a structural or functional brain anomaly, despite many claims over the last 20 years based on either weak or flawed empirical evidence (Hupé and Dojat 2015; Dojat et al. 2018). Even independently of the possible neurological causality of synesthesia, we do not have any objective marker of synesthesia based on neuroimaging techniques. Nabokov remarked that his mother was also a synesthete, suggesting it is a hereditary condition which could be expressed along different forms. Indeed, while his mother also associated colors to letters—“some of her letters had the same tint as mine” (Nabokov 1966, 35)—she also had a form of colored hearing proper—“she was optically affected by musical notes” (Nabokov 1966, 35). Synesthetic experiences can certainly not be entirely genetically determined, since most types involve written language that has to be learnt quite late in life. But, as for about any behavior, specific genetic patterns may favor or hinder the development of synesthesia. Genetic studies of families with multiple synesthetes indicate that synesthesia is unlikely to be explained by a single gene, since different potential regions of interest were found across studies and spanned up to hundreds of genes (Asher et al. 2009; Tomson et al. 2011; Gregersen et al. 2013; Tilot et al. 2018). A study on twins (raised together) suggested genetic influence since most twins had both synesthesia (Bosley and Eagleman 2015). However, for 6 out of 23 pairs of monozygotic twins recruited on the basis of one twin having spontaneously reported having synesthesia, the other twin did not have synesthesia, confirming one earlier observation conducted on one pair of monozygotic twins (Smilek et al. 2002). Even if genetic predisposition is necessary (which is not proven so far since twins were raised together) it is not sufficient for synesthesia. Moreover, the proportion of synesthetes among dizygotic twins was not very different from monozygotic twins: in 7 pairs out of 11 pairs of dizygotic

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twins only one twin was a synesthete. When considering same sex dizygotic twins, it was 1 pair out of 4 who had only one synesthete twin, which further suggests the strong influence of environmental factors. In the absence of definitive evidence for neurological or genetic causes, the most simple explanation for synesthesia involves learning (Witthoft and Winawer 2013; Witthoft et al. 2015), with children being exposed to associations, such as colored alphabets (Calkins 1893), or children inventing associations and remembering them all their life, even without remembering the origin of those associations. The sources of the associations may be multiple and change over the course of their acquisition (Ward and Simner 2003; Hupé 2012b; Hupé and Dojat 2015) during late childhood (Simner et al. 2009; Simner and Bain 2013; Garnier 2016). Synesthesia may thus be considered simply as “a special kind of childhood memory” (Hupé 2012a, b; see the last paragraph by Hupé and Dojat 2015 for a detailed account of this proposition). However, the memory hypothesis has not been favored by most researchers in cognitive science, at least until recently. An anecdotal report by Nabokov in Chapter 2 of Speak Memory may have been quite influential on neuroscientists. Nabokov recounts his first memory of synesthetic experience: To my mother, though, this all seemed quite normal. The matter came up, one day in my seventh year, as I was using a heap of old alphabet blocks to build a tower. I casually remarked to her that their colors were all wrong. (Nabokov 1966, 35)

This account is well known by twenty-first-century synesthesia researchers who read Dann’s early and thorough review of synesthesia, in which he devotes a whole section on Nabokov’s case (Dann 1998). This report is striking because Nabokov’s synesthetic associations seem to preexist the colored blocks, as if he had created them without the influence of the environment. However, surprisingly, Nabokov had told another anecdote a few pages before: The first day [the teacher Zhernosekov] came he brought a boxful of tremendously appetizing blocks with a different letter painted on each side; these cubes he would manipulate as if they were infinitely precious things, which for that matter, they were (besides forming splendid tunnels for toy trains). (Nabokov 1966, 28)

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This event happened during the summer of 1905, when Vladimir was 6 years old. In comparison with the other quote, one wonders why Nabokov does not complain nor make a remark about the colors of the letters. We do not know whether these cubes are the same as the cubes Nabokov was playing with one year later. Obviously, they could be the source of memorized color associations, similarly to what was found by Witthoft et al. (2015) on 6588 grapheme-color synesthetes who filled up their associations on an online website: 400 of them had 10 or more letters consistent with the popular Fisher Price color alphabet. The proportion rose up to 15% for children born 5 years or more after the beginning of its fabrication. Such a proportion of synesthetes showing a clear influence from the environment can only be underestimated since other color alphabets exist, as well as colored magnets and a whole series of children paraphernalia displaying colored letters or numbers. A question often asked to synesthetes is whether they consider their synesthetic associations as an advantage or not. For most synesthetes who reported to us, synesthesia would rather be a “neutral” condition. But many synesthetes enjoy their synesthetic associations; a few of them use them to remember phone numbers or dates, while even fewer are overwhelmed by an overload of meaning, especially if they possess several, multi-sensory types of synesthesia like in the extreme case of Shereshevsky (Luria 1968). As for Nabokov’s “mild hallucinations,” which for him may have included synesthesia or not, he declared that “by none [has he] profited much” (Nabokov 1966, 34). However, Nabokov obviously enjoyed his colored associations to letters, taking much pain to identify the exact tint, and even apologizing that “the confessions of a synesthete must sound tedious and pretentious” (Nabokov 1966, 34) to non-synesthetes. Moreover, he envied his mother’s visual associations to music: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds” (Nabokov 1966, 35). A further question is the possible relationship or influence of synesthesia on the other numerous gifts displayed by Nabokov, and in particular his creativity. Indeed, it was proposed that synesthesia may exist as a mechanism for the association of meaning (Wheeler and Cutsforth 1922), which humans use to acquire language and represent learned associations. It was further suggested that synesthesia may have developed to promote the expression of creativity (Ramachandran and Hubbard 2001b). The definition of synesthesia echoes that of metaphors, with the only difference that synesthetic associations are experienced as

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mandatory (they are not chosen at will like metaphors) and are not typically shared by the rest of the population. Yet poets and writers—and Nabokov here is a particularly good example—typically create new and audacious metaphors, so synesthetic associations could be somehow considered as personal metaphors (Hupé 2012a). In the same vein, Cytowic and Eagleman (2009) suggested that metaphors and synesthesia are fundamentally similar, if not contiguous, in the workings of the human brain. The easiest way to test the possible relationship between synesthesia and creativity seems to observe whether there is a higher proportion of synesthetes among artists. Such a relation was suggested by the high number of synesthetes among famous artists, musicians, and authors (see Dann 1998; Mulvenna and Walsh 2005). However, the satisfying method to establish a formal comparison is yet to be found, since there is no definitive criterion to decide who is an artist and who is not. Rothen and Meier used a proxy to tackle this question by probing grapheme-color synesthesia in art students and in controls recruited from a university’s anniversary event (Rothen and Meier 2010). They did observe a higher proportion of synesthetes in art students, but the small magnitude of the effect did not allow definitive conclusions (Chun and Hupé 2016), especially since synesthetes may be driven more often toward artistic careers (notwithstanding the questionable link between creativity and art studies). Another strategy consists in comparing the characteristics and abilities of synesthetes and non-synesthetes, in particular those supposed to be involved in creativity. The major difficulty consists in making the comparison “everything else being equal,” in particular by performing similar random sampling in both populations. Indeed, most synesthetes known by researchers are those who spontaneously reported to them, which represents an obvious sampling bias. The correct procedure is to recruit volunteers to participate in experiments and then test them all for synesthesia. Given the low percentage of synesthetes, such a procedure is particularly challenging and was performed in only a couple of studies. The other limitation of cognitive science is its ability to capture the complexity of individual personality and capabilities. Standardized questionnaires and tests were used, but they can only capture what they measure. Tests for creativity, for example, only capture specific abilities thought to relate to a more general creative ability. All those tests also rely on the willingness and motivation of subjects to perform the tasks at the moment of test. If considering the “white page” syndrome experienced by even the most creative writers, limitations of creativity lab-testing are obvious.

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Bearing those limitations in mind, Chun and Hupé (2016) sampled volunteers from a large pool of students and visitors to a museum (3743 total), who were asked to respond to an online screening survey on their “inner experience.” There was no mention of synesthesia at that stage for most subjects (Chun and Hupé 2013), to avoid recruitment biases (contrary to what was misreported by Hossain et al. 2018). Then, the online survey included some questions related to synesthesia. Those who did complete the survey (1017 people) could indicate if they were potentially interested in further participation. Among them, potential synesthetes (29) and controls (36) were invited to participate in lab experiments and fill up questionnaires, probing their cognitive abilities, personality and creative skills, with a total of 18 measures. Synesthesia was also verified with objective methods. Since some of these measures show some degrees of correlation (for example between cognitive indices and measures of creativity), the main analysis was to test whether synesthetes differed globally from non-synesthetes across all measures. This was the case, but the margins of error indicated that the effect size could be anything between very small and moderate. Synesthetes scored higher for the personality traits of absorption and openness, usage of mental imagery, and verbal comprehension. For creativity measures, they showed greater originality in verbal divergent thinking. These specific measures indicate which characteristics are the most likely to differ between synesthetes and controls, if there is any real global difference at all, while the covariance among measures leaves the possibility open that this pattern of possible association with synesthesia could be explained by differences on a single measured trait, or even a hidden, untested trait. Moreover, these results should be taken with caution since recruitment bias was impossible to rule out completely. In particular, the observed higher level of openness was also observed in studies where synesthetes were recruited based on self-referral. Finally, it was striking that, within the tested sample of subjects, differences between men and women were larger than between synesthetes and controls, illustrating the difficulty of accurate random sampling on small samples. All in all, those data suggested the absence of any strong association between synesthesia (as a whole) and any personality trait, cognitive faculty, or creativity (Chun and Hupé 2016). Rouw and Scholte (2016) also compared cognitive and personality measures (but not creativity) of synesthetes and controls from a random pool of 368 volunteers. Synesthetes (89) scored slightly higher than controls (107) on global “intelligence”—but the difference was

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not “statistically significant” when controlling the statistical risk for multiple comparisons—and higher on the following criteria: openness, neuroticism, the experience of emotions, and the inclination to fantasize. They scored lower on conscientiousness. A global analysis of all these inter-related measures was not performed and the magnitude of the potential difference between synesthetes and non-synesthetes was therefore not estimated. Also, no objective methods were used to verify synesthesia. Those results, even though they should also be taken with caution, therefore do suggest some differences between synesthetes and non-synesthetes, but of an unknown magnitude, leaving the question of causal directionality open. At this early stage of research in cognitive neuroscience on synesthesia, any attempt to try to naturalize the creative process of Nabokov on the basis of him having synesthesia seems unwarranted. Synesthesia, however, as one of many other characteristics of Nabokov’s mind, did certainly influence his writing: several characters in his novels do have synesthesia, considered as being a gift. By that we can conjecture the romantic influence of the synesthesia literature from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, as convincingly analyzed by Dann. Nabokov knew those texts very well, as demonstrated in his use of technical terms like “chromatisms” and in his knowledge of the history of research on synesthesia: “The first author to discuss audition colorée was, as far as I know, an albino physician in 1812, in Erlangen” (Nabokov 1966, 34). The source of this reference to a quite obscure monography whose primary subject was albinism (Sachs 1812) may only come from reading the academic literature on synesthesia (for instance Suarez de Mendoza 1890). Rather than considering synesthesia as a biological condition influencing creativity, scholars should certainly continue reading Nabokov within the continuity of his scientific sources.

Bibliography Asher, J.E., M.R. Aitken, N. Farooqi, S. Kurmani, and S. Baron-Cohen. 2006. Diagnosing and Phenotyping Visual Synaesthesia: A Preliminary Evaluation of the Revised Test of Genuineness (TOG-R). Cortex 42 (2): 137–146. Asher, J.E., J.A. Lamb, D. Brocklebank, J.B. Cazier, E. Maestrini, L. Addis, M. Sen, S. Baron-Cohen, and A.P. Monaco. 2009. A Whole-Genome Scan and Fine-Mapping Linkage Study of Auditory-Visual Synesthesia Reveals Evidence of Linkage to Chromosomes 2q24, 5q33, 6p12, and 12p12. American Journal of Human Genetics 84 (2): 279–285.

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Basirat, A., and J.M. Hupé. 2020. Synesthesia in Children with Difficulties in Written Language Learning. Consciouness and Cognition, in press. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.102951. Bosley, H.G., and D.M. Eagleman. 2015. Synesthesia in Twins: Incomplete Concordance in Monozygotes Suggests Extragenic Factors. Behavioural Brain Research 286: 93–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2015.02.024. Calkins, M.W. 1893. A Statistical Study of Pseudo-Chromesthesia and of Mental Forms. American Journal of Psychology 5: 439–464. Chiou, R., and A.N. Rich. 2014. The Role of Conceptual Knowledge in Understanding Synaesthesia: Evaluating Contemporary Findings from a ‘Hub-and-Spoke’ Perspective. Frontiers in Psychology 5. https://doi.org/10. 3389/fpsyg.2014.00105. Chun, C.A., and J.M. Hupé. 2013. Mirror-Touch and Ticker Tape Experiences in Synesthesia. Frontiers in Psychology 4: 776. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2013.00776. ———. 2016. Are Synesthetes Exceptional Beyond Their Synesthetic Associations? A Systematic Comparison of Creativity, Personality, Cognition, and Mental Imagery in Synesthetes and Controls. British Journal of Psychology 107: 397–418. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12146. Cytowic, R.E., and D.M. Eagleman. 2009. Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia. Cambridge: MIT Press. Dann, K.T. 1998. Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dojat, M., F. Pizzagalli, and J.M. Hupé. 2018. Magnetic Resonance Imaging Does Not Reveal Structural Alterations in the Brain of Grapheme-Color Synesthetes. PLoS One 13 (4): e0194422. Elias, L.J., D.M. Saucier, C. Hardie, and G.E. Sarty. 2003. Dissociating Semantic and Perceptual Components of Synaesthesia: Behavioural and Functional Neuroanatomical Investigations. Cognitive Brain Research 16 (2): 232–237. Flournoy, T. 1893. Des Phénomènes de Synopsie (Audition Colorée): Photismes, Schèmes Visuels, Personnifications. Paris: Alcan. Galton, F. 1881. Visualised Numerals. Journal of the Anthropological Institute 10: 85–102. Garnier, M.M. 2016. La synesthésie chez l’enfant: prévalence, aspects développementaux et cognitifs. Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès (HAL Id: tel-01724729, version 1). Gregersen, P.K., E. Kowalsky, A. Lee, S. Baron-Cohen, S.E. Fisher, J.E. Asher, D. Ballard, J. Freudenberg, and W. Li. 2013. Absolute Pitch Exhibits Phenotypic and Genetic Overlap with Synesthesia. Human Molecular Genetics 22 (10): 2097–2104. Holabird, J. 2009. Vladimir Nabokov Alphabet in Color. New York: Gingko Press.

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Hossain, S.R., J. Simner, and A. Ipser. 2018. Personality Predicts the Vibrancy of Colour Imagery: The Case of Synaesthesia. Cortex 105: 74–82. Hupé, J.M. 2012a. Synesthésie, expression subjective d’un palimpseste neuronal? Médecine/sciences 28 (8–9): 765–771. ———. 2012b. Synesthésies, illusions et subjectivité. Cerveau & Psycho (Novembre). ———. 2015. Statistical Inferences Under the Null Hypothesis: Common Mistakes and Pitfalls in Neuroimaging Studies. Frontiers in Neuroscience 9: 18. Hupé, J.M., and M. Dojat. 2015. A Critical Review of the Neuroimaging Literature on Synesthesia. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9: 103. Hupé, J.M., C. Bordier, and M. Dojat. 2012. The Neural Bases of GraphemeColor Synesthesia Are Not Localized in Real Color Sensitive Areas. Cerebral Cortex 22 (7): 1622–1633. Luria, A.R. 1968. The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory. New York: Basic Books. Mulvenna, C., and V. Walsh. 2005. Synaesthesia. Current Biology 15 (11): R399–R400. Nabokov, V. 1966. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. Nagel, T. 1974. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Philosophical Review 83: 435–451. Novich, S., S. Cheng, and D.M. Eagleman. 2011. Is Synaesthesia One Condition or Many? A Large-Scale Analysis Reveals Subgroups. Journal of Neuropsychology 5 (2): 353–371. Palmeri, T.J., R. Blake, R. Marois, M.A. Flanery, and W. Whetsell Jr. 2002. The Perceptual Reality of Synesthetic Colors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA 99 (6): 4127–4131. Price, M.C., and D.G. Pearson. 2013. Toward a Visuospatial Developmental Account of Sequence-Space Synesthesia. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7: 689. Ramachandran, V.S., and E.M. Hubbard. 2001a. Psychophysical Investigations into the Neural Basis of Synaesthesia. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 268 (1470): 979–983. ———. 2001b. Synaesthesia—A Window into Perception, Language and Thought. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (12): 3–34. Rothen, N., and B. Meier. 2010. Higher Prevalence of Synaesthesia in Art Students. Perception 39 (5): 718–720. Rouw, R., and H.S. Scholte. 2016. Personality and Cognitive Profiles of a General Synesthetic Trait. Neuropsychologia 88: 35–48. https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.01.006. Ruiz, M.J., and J.M. Hupé. 2015. Assessment of the Hemispheric Lateralization of Grapheme-Color Synesthesia with Stroop-Type Tests. PLoS One 10 (3): e0119377.

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Ruiz, M.J., M. Dojat, and J.M. Hupé. 2020. Multivariate Pattern Analysis of fMRI Data for Imaginary and Real Colours in Grapheme-Colour Synaesthesia. European Journal of Neuroscience, in press. https://doi.org/10.1111/ ejn.14774. Sachs, G.T.L. 1812. Historiae naturalis duorum leucaetiopum: Auctoris ipsius et sororis eius. Erlangen. Simner, J., and A.E. Bain. 2013. A Longitudinal Study of Grapheme-Colour Synaesthesia in Childhood: 6/7 Years to 10/11 Years. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7: 603. Simner, J., and E. Holenstein. 2007. Ordinal Linguistic Personification as a Variant of Synesthesia. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19 (4): 694–703. Simner, J., C. Mulvenna, N. Sagiv, E. Tsakanikos, S.A. Witherby, C. Fraser, K. Scott, and J. Ward. 2006. Synaesthesia: The Prevalence of Atypical Cross-Modal Experiences. Perception 35 (8): 1024–1033. Simner, J., J. Harrold, H. Creed, L. Monro, and L. Foulkes. 2009. Early Detection of Markers for Synaesthesia in Childhood Populations. Brain 132 (Pt 1): 57–64. Smilek, D., B.A. Moffatt, J. Pasternak, B.N. White, M.J. Dixon, and P.M. Merikle. 2002. Synaesthesia: A Case Study of Discordant Monozygotic Twins. Neurocase 8 (4): 338–342. Suarez de Mendoza, F. 1890. L’audition colorée: étude sur les fausses sensations secondaires physiologiques et particulièrement sur les pseudo-sensations de couleurs associées aux perceptions objectives des sons. Paris: Doin. Tilot, A.K., K.S. Kucera, A. Vino, J.E. Asher, S. Baron-Cohen, and S.E. Fisher. 2018. Rare Variants in Axonogenesis Genes Connect Three Families with Sound-Color Synesthesia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115 (12): 3168–3173. Tomson, S.N., N. Avidan, K. Lee, A.K. Sarma, R. Tushe, D.M. Milewicz, M. Bray, S.M. Leal, and D.M. Eagleman. 2011. The Genetics of Colored Sequence Synesthesia: Suggestive Evidence of Linkage to 16q and Genetic Heterogeneity for the Condition. Behavioural Brain Research 223 (1): 48–52. Ward, J. 2013. Synesthesia. Annual Review of Psychology 64: 49–75. Ward, J., and J. Simner. 2003. Lexical-gustatory Synaesthesia: Linguistic and Conceptual Factors. Cognition 89 (3): 237–261. Wheeler, R.H., and T.D. Cutsforth. 1922. Synaesthesia and Meaning. American Journal of Psychology 33: 361–384. Witthoft, N., and J. Winawer. 2013. Learning, Memory, and Synesthesia. Psychological Science 24 (3): 258–265. Witthoft, N., J. Winawer, and D.M. Eagleman. 2015. Prevalence of Learned Grapheme-Color Pairings in a Large Online Sample of Synesthetes. PLoS One 10 (3): e0118996.

CHAPTER 16

Neurological Synesthesia vs Literary Synesthesia: Can Nabokov Help Bridge the Gap? Marie Bouchet

“The confessions of a synesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings and drafts by more solid walls than mine are” (Nabokov 1966, 35), Nabokov thought in his autobiography Speak, Memory, but in fact the very precise evocation of his synesthesia he gives in that text launched many more or less erudite discussions of the neurological condition termed synesthesia among researchers, journalists, and even within families. Nabokov claimed to see letters in color, using the terms “colored hearing” or “audition colorée” (the French expression typically used in nineteenth-century texts about synesthesia), yet his synesthesia was rather a mix of morpheme-color association and grapheme-color association: I present a fine case of colored hearing. Perhaps “hearing” is not quite accurate, since the color sensations seem to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless

M. Bouchet (B) University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_16

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otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but the French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl. (Nabokov 1966, 34)1

Nabokov’s famous synesthesia has been the object of scrutiny by neuroscientists and psychologists (Cytowic and Eagleman 2009), and of researchers specialized in literature and philosophy.2 The texts in which Nabokov described his personal way of perceiving his surroundings have been abundantly commented upon; his fiction and prose have been scrutinized to trace his synesthesia in them. It is however crucial to distinguish between neurological synesthesia (the brain condition that Nabokov had) and “literary” synesthesia, or metaphorical synesthesia.3 Jean-Michel Hupé, one of the leading neuroscientists on the subject, defines the brain condition known as synesthesia as follows: Synesthesia refers to a family of particular subjective experiences sharing a common set of properties: synesthetic experiences are additional, involuntary (they are not evoked at will and are not chosen), arbitrary, idiosyncratic and constant associations. (see p. 242 of the present volume)

The way in which literary studies have used the term “synesthesia” therefore corresponds to a “looser” definition, less precise than the perceptive phenomenon defined above; it is simply used to describe the copresence of various sensory modalities within a given text, or a text fragment. This copresence can be seen in various degrees of closeness—in one paragraph, one sentence, one syntactic unit, from simple coordination to metaphor, via zeugmas or hypallages. Contrary to poets or writers that were called “synesthetes” while they were not (such as Charles Baudelaire, because of his famous “Correspondances ” poem4 ), Nabokov is a real synesthete. His “case” is therefore a very interesting one, as he is a writer whose neural synesthesia is established, and whose texts teem with examples of literary synesthesia—with, however, very few actual references to forms of neurological synesthesia. The aim of this chapter is therefore to see whether one can

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draw a parallel between Nabokov’s brain condition and his writing. If the connection can seem obvious on a general basis, this chapter aims at showing that the specific issue of synesthesia is not so self-evident, and is further complicated by the hypothesis, laid out by neuroscientists Cytowic and Eagleman, according to whom there is a basic similarity, if not continuity, between metaphor and synesthesia (Cytowic and Eagleman 2009, 175), provided the distinction between them is actually pertinent. The first part of this chapter will therefore examine the way in which literary synesthesia and metaphor are interwoven in a very specific context, that of erotic scenes in Nabokov’s texts. The heightened presence of sensory and sensual modalities in these texts indeed provides a fitting ground for such a study, all the more so as they often resort to intermedial techniques (ekphrasis , or other iconotextual forms5 ), which themselves rely on both pictorial and textual elements, thus mirroring the color-grapheme association to a larger scale. The second part of the study will then interrogate the pertinence of literary synesthesia as a stylistic tool of analysis, and formulate hypotheses as to the preeminence of the term in literary studies. Paradoxically enough, as Maurice Couturier underscores (see p. 175 of the present volume), Nabokov acquired worldwide fame because of the assumed risqué contents of Lolita, while no sexual intercourse (i.e., penetration) is actually described in the novel. Nabokov indeed prefers resorting to devices that privilege indirection or mediation to put desire into words, in erotic scenes where the tumult of the senses is paired with synesthetic associations of the senses. In Ada or Ardor, A Family Chronicle, the narrator Van Veen—one of the few Nabokovian characters to be a synesthete—claims: “Sounds have colors, colors have smells” (Nabokov 1969, 336). This formula, based upon anadiplosis, produces a mirror effect between aural elements (“sounds”) and olfactive ones (“smells”) that shows how complicated an issue the potential distinction between neurological and literary synesthesia is in Nabokov’s prose, as he lays down a precise syntactic system which itself echoes the correspondence between elements of the surroundings. The author has shown through his writings, his lepidopterological practice and his teaching6 that he was acutely sensitive to this type of correspondences in the sensible world. If Nabokov recommended his readers to read “with [their] brain and spine” (Nabokov 1973, 41), it is probably because synesthetic associations are part and parcel of the pleasure of writing and the pleasure of reading. In his 1975 seminal study of

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Nabokov’s synesthesia, Don Barton Johnson suggests that literary creativity is directly related to the writer’s condition, quoting The Gift to sustain his argument, as Fyodor, when asked by Koncheyev about the genesis of his poetry, answers that it all started: “when my eyes opened to the alphabet. Sorry that sounds pretentious, but the fact is, since childhood I have been afflicted with the most intense elaborate audition colorée” (Nabokov 1963, 74).7 Therefore, as Johnson contends, “literary creativity, which is the gift referred to in the book’s title, is linked to synesthesia” (Johnson 1975, 135). In his first analysis of Nabokov’s synesthesia, Johnson had also drawn attention to Nabokov’s poem “Voluptates Tactionum,”8 a piece written in English in 1951, and first published by The New Yorker, in which Nabokov imagined a sort of tactile TV set, or virtual reality device avant la lettre: When you turn a knob, your set Will obligingly exhale Forms, invisible and yet Tangible — a world in Braille. Think of all the things that will Really be within your reach! Phantom bottle, dummy pill, Limpid limbs upon a beach. […] Palpitating fingertips Will caress the flossy hair And investigate the lips Simulated in midair. See the schoolboy, like a blind Lover, frantically grope For the shape of love — and find Nothing but the shape of soap. (Nabokov 2012, 182)

The syntax deftly conjoins senses through seemingly impossible conjunctions (“exhale/Forms,” “invisible and yet/Tangible,” with an interior rhyme duplicating the uncanny association of “invisible” and “tangible”), and therefore perfectly matches literary synesthesia, in both form and content. Moreover, the piece contains some typical Nabokovian slashes at consumers’ society (with advertising exploiting teenage consumers’

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“blind” sexual drives to sell non-erotic items, such as soap). Yet, the “erotic possibilities of the invention” (Johnson 1974, 89) are indeed explored in the poem, through the tension between touch/tangible items and invisibility/evanescence, as evidenced in the rhyme “exhale”/“Braille,” or in the parallel binary structures “Phantom bottle, dummy pill”. Moreover, the poem echoes the very words that give Lolita its erotic texture (Nabokov was writing the novel at the time of the poem’s composition): the “Limpid limbs upon a beach” recall Annabel’s “seaside limbs and ardent tongue” (Nabokov 1955, 15), or Lolita’s “four limpid lovely limbs” (Nabokov 1955, 192)9 ; the “palpitating fingertips” echo the “palpitating point” (Nabokov 1955, 39) to which the twentyfive years between the Annabel episode and the discovery of Lolita taper, and also the “palpitating plage” (Nabokov 1955, 608) in “First Love,” the autobiographical short story evoking Nabokov’s meeting of little Colette/Claude Desprès on the Biarritz beach, also written at the same time as Lolita. But what is probably more interesting about this invented synesthetic device allowing people to feel without seeing is that it somehow symbolizes what literature does. In Lolita just like in any literary text, the magic of fiction makes the reader feel without seeing, and in the case of Nabokovian scenes of desire, the synesthetic workings of literature are obvious, as Nabokov favors to suggest the firing up of the senses through literary synesthesia over a literal description of the sexual act. Synesthetic reflexes are indeed typical of scenes of desire in Nabokov. One could recall Ada’s “plump, stickily glistening lips smil[ing]” (Nabokov 1969, 63) as she is eating her tartine au miel (in French in the original text10 ), a sensual expression in which the sweetness of honey (taste) is conjoined with its sticky texture (touch) and its golden glow (sight), and which is directly followed by an evocation of Van kissing Ada. Similarly, the fragrance of Lolita’s body is conveyed in colored terms— “that intoxicating brown fragrance of hers” (Nabokov 1955, 43). In fact, one of the elements allowing Humbert to reincarnate Annabel in Lolita is precisely their common smell,11 which “intoxicates” the narrator’s senses: “she smelt almost exactly like the other one, the Riviera one, but more intensely so, with rougher overtones—a torrid odor that at once set my manhood astir” (Nabokov 1955, 42). As suggested by the euphemism, Humbert’s acute sensitivity to nymphic fragrance instantaneously stimulates his sexual desire, as explained by his initial experience under the mimosa tree of the Mirana Hotel:

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I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder—I believe she stole it from her mother’s Spanish maid—a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim. (Nabokov 1955, 15)

Humbert’s erection is twice mediated, via a metonymy extending his desire to his five senses, and via the “filled to the brim” metaphor. As is often the case with nymphets, desire is awakened by the conjunction of womanly elements (the perfume stolen from the maid—smell), and a childish one (“her own biscuity odor”—taste, smell). For Humbert, the ambiguous beauty of nymphets can only be articulated via the intense memory of synesthetic perception: The Lolita whose iliac crests had not yet flared, the Lolita that today I could touch and smell and hear and see, the Lolita of the strident voice and rich brown hair—of the bangs and the swirls at the sides and the curls at the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary— “revolting,” “super,” “luscious,” “goon,” “drip”—that Lolita, my Lolita, poor Catullus would lose forever. (Nabokov 1955, 65–66, words in bold mine)

In the same vein, one should mention the scene in which Ada is sitting and painting an orchid, for it also perfectly illustrates the way sensory modalities are interlaced when an object of desire is depicted. Following a gradation that runs parallel to Van’s growing excitement, the scene combines sight, smell, and then culminates in the downy contact between his lips and Ada’s hair and nape, reflected in a warm alliteration in [h] sounds: Van […] could see down her sleek ensellure as far as her coccyx and inhale the warmth of her entire body. His heart thumping, one miserable hand deep in his trouser pocket—where he kept a purse with half a dozen tendollar gold pieces to disguise his state—he bent over her, as she bent over her work. Very lightly he let his parched lips travel down her warm hair and hot nape. (Nabokov 1969, 81, words in bold mine)

As David Packman noted, Nabokov’s way of dealing with eroticism radically differs from contemporary or preceding writers: Evidently, Nabokov wished to differentiate his own erotic writing from the far more explicit texts of Sade. Heinrich Müller [Ada, 111] is really

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Henry Miller, Nabokov’s contemporary. The rejection of Müller/Miller by Van and Ada marks the difference between Nabokov’s erotica and Miller’s graphic representation of sexual activity. […] [Uncle Dan’s collection of erotica] involves a parody of the graphic representation of sexual activity that Nabokov avoids in his own erotic texts. (Packman 1982, 100–101)

And indeed, after the intense scene of lightly brushing Ada’s nape with his lips, Van leaves the room to masturbate in the wings of the story, as the act itself is not described, only suggested. The synesthetic gradation at work in the text therefore permitted to conjure up an oblique image of desire, focusing more on the perception of the girl’s body—the source of excitement—rather than on the erotic consequences on Van. Thus, Van’s growing excitement as he brushes his lips against Ada is scanned by a gradation of superlative adjectives that end on the very impossibility of describing what he felt: It was the sweetest, the strongest, the most mysterious sensation that the boy had ever experienced; nothing in his sordid venery of the past winter could duplicate that downy tenderness, that despair of desire. (Nabokov 1969, 81)

The banality of the adjectives used here indicates the failure of words, and leads the narrator to an unexpected metaphor, “that downy tenderness,” which brings together tenderness (either a tactile sensation, or an intangible feeling) to the softness of down. The alliterative play on sibilants and alveolars [d] and [t], added to the repetition of the [st] sound, reflects the intensity of Van’s emotion, and illustrates what Maurice Couturier terms a “poerotic strategy” (Couturier 2014, IX). Regarding the reception of Nabokov’s works by his readers, one could posit that he seeks to conjure up in them the “aesthetic bliss” he called for in many of his statements. This “aesthetic bliss,” in which one hears the “bl” sound he claimed was the very source for Ada,12 seems to correspond to the notion of jouissance (bliss) as developed by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text, which he opposed to the notion of pleasure, and which implies “two systems of reading”: Whence two systems of reading: one goes straight to the articulations of the anecdote, it considers the extent of the text, ignores the play of language […]; the other reading skips nothing; it weighs, it sticks to the text, it reads, so to speak, with application and transport, […]: it is not (logical)

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extension that captivates it, the winnowing out of truths, but the layering of significance. (Barthes 1975, 12, my emphasis)

When it comes to describing the desire triggered by sensual beauty, Nabokov’s text exhibits the artistic complexity of the signifier, and therefore probably matches Barthes’s definition of the “text of bliss,” which produces its effect in an interstice: “the interstice of bliss occurs in the volume of the languages, in the uttering, not in the sequence of utterances” (Barthes 1975, 13). As stated earlier and illustrated above, Nabokov typically resorts to devices relying upon detour, indirection and mediation to put desire into words. Among these devices, he recurrently uses ekphrasis or pictorial references, and these iconotexts of desire are characterized by spectacular poetic features and literary synesthetic qualities. Using the detour of a painting for a scene of desire allows thus to intertwine the textual and the sexual in an acceptable form, as desire can be expressed without vulgarity thanks to the pictorial intermediary. When framed on a canvas, the sexual scene loses its anecdotal character, and is displaced within the realm of art, which makes it tolerable, and describable, just like any classical ekphrasis.13 In Ada, Van uses the ekphrastic technique to evoke one scene from Ardis the First, at a time when the two lovers had not yet realized that Lucette was watching them during their intimate moments. This fellatio scene on the brink of a waterfall is described via a pictorial reference: Van could not recollect whose picture it was that he had in mind, but thought it might have been attributed to Michelangelo da Caravaggio in his youth. It was an oil on unframed canvas depicting two misbehaving nudes, boy and girl, in an ivied or vined grotto or near a small waterfall overhung with bronze-tinted and dark emerald leaves, and great bunches of translucent grapes, the shadows and limpid reflections of fruit and foliage blending magically with veined flesh. Anyway (this may be a purely stylistic transition), he felt himself transferred into that forbidden masterpiece, one afternoon, when everybody had gone to Brantôme, and Ada and he were sunbathing on the brink of the Cascade in the larch plantation of Ardis Park, and his nymphet had bent over him and his detailed desire. Her long straight hair that seemed of a uniform bluish-black in the shade now revealed, in the gem-like sun, strains of deep auburn alternating with dark amber in lanky strands which

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clothed her hollowed cheek or were gracefully cleft by her raised ivory shoulder. (Nabokov 1969, 113–114)

Ada’s hair color is rendered in its most precise nuances, through jewelry metaphors (“gem-like,” “deep amber”) that echo the description of the painting itself (“bronze-tinted,” “emerald leaves”), but what is striking about this pictorial passage is that it seems to vindicate, first and foremost, the textual nature of the depiction, as the visual qualities of Nabokov’s prose shine through the precision of colors, and its aural qualities resound through the rich assonantic et alliterative features of the ekphrasis . This language of desire, which intermingles sensations, colors, and textures, proceeds to the metamorphosis of prose into poetry. A few lines later, it is a direct reference to the trompe-l’œil that is made: Through it the student of art could see the summit of the trompe-l’œil school, monumental, multicolored, jutting out of a dark background, molded in profile by a concentration of caravagesque light. […] 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, and accompanying the immemorial gesture of wringing them out by making wringing-out mouths—immemorial too. (Nabokov 1969, 114)

In this highly synesthetic passage, the explosion of colors echoes the turmoil of the senses. The painted image suddenly becomes animated in a sensual rustle: behind the pictorial vocabulary, the reader follows the progression of the action; from Van’s “detailed desire” to the “wringing-out mouths,” the fake ekphrasis —this painting does not exist—finally confesses its truth: the painter’s brush is in fact Ada’s mouth. To evoke the indescribable, Nabokov chose to animate an oil on canvas, to instill rhythm into a fixed image by replacing it with language, but not the language found in some art critic’s text—instead, a palpitating text, pulsating with sound effects, a text of bliss that celebrates the extraordinary abilities of the poetic signifier. One should also note that Nabokov structurally undermined this powerful synesthetic and poerotic scene with a counterpoint scene in which the strategy of transferring eroticism onto a canvas does not work, because of the guilt and shame that Van feels for what happened. It is the ménage à

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trois sexual scene imposed on Lucette by Van and Ada after their night at the Ursus restaurant, just a few hours after the two lovers were reunited: What we have now is not so much a Casanovanic situation […] as a much earlier canvas, of the Venetian (sensu largo) school, reproduced (in “Forbidden Masterpieces”) expertly enough to stand the scrutiny of a bordel’s vue d’oiseau. Thus seen from above, […] we have the large island of the bed illumined from our left (Lucette’s right) by a lamp burning with a murmuring incandescence on the west-side bedtable. The top sheet and quilt are tumbled at the footboardless south of the island where the newly landed eye starts on its northern trip, up the younger Miss Veen’s pried-open legs. A dew drop on russet moss eventually finds a stylistic response in the aquamarine tear on her flaming cheekbone. Another trip from the port to the interior reveals the central girl’s long white left thigh. […] The scarred male nude on the island’s east coast is half shaded, and, on the whole, less interesting, though considerably more aroused than is good for him or a certain type of tourist. […] Sounds have colors, colors have smells. The fire of Lucette’s amber runs through the night of Ada’s odor and ardor, and stops at the threshold of Van’s lavender goat. Ten eager, evil, loving, long fingers belonging to two different young demons caress their helpless bed pet. Ada’s loose black hair accidentally tickles the local curio she holds in her left fist, magnanimously demonstrating her acquisition. Unsigned and unframed. (Nabokov 1969, 335–337)

Various techniques to place a form of distance between narrator and narrative can be observed here. First, the perspective from above, and the use of two French expressions to veil the sexual nature of the scene (“bordel’s vue d’oiseau”14 ); then the narrator describes what happens in a manner as impersonal as possible: no intrusion of the first person is to be observed here, and the characters are barely named. Lucette is the “younger Miss Veen,” Ada is “the central girl,” and Van “the scarred male nude.” The two “young demons” are of course Van and Ada, the worthy children of Demon Veen. The insular image developed throughout the passage, especially through the orientation markers, contributes to the distance effect. And this time, the ekphrastic detour fails: the painting cannot be framed nor signed. Lucette’s torture prevents the derealization effect sought by Van. Despite the gem metaphor veiling Lucette’s tears, the narrator does not manage to obliterate his guilt nor Lucette’s suffering. In this instance, no sensual vertigo animates the text: as Géraldine Chouard pointed out,

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“in such circumstances the substitution of the real by an art reference becomes uneasy, or even impossible” (Chouard 1995, 153, my translation). It is therefore quite interesting to see that it is in that context of poerotic failure that the narrator placed the synesthetic principle quoted earlier: Sounds have colors, colors have smells. The fire of Lucette’s amber runs through the night of Ada’s odor and ardor, and stops at the threshold of Van’s lavender goat. Ten eager, evil, loving, long fingers belonging to two different young demons caress their helpless bed pet. Ada’s loose black hair accidentally tickles the local curio she holds in her left fist, magnanimously demonstrating her acquisition. (Nabokov 1969, 337)

Instead of producing “a tingle in the spine” through literary synesthetic effects like in the fellatio scene, Van asserts his neural synesthetic principle, and continues his erotic evocation, but it loses itself in clichés (fire, night, electrical tension through the pun on “amber”), or in vulgar animal imagery. The shift from the poerotic mode to a downright pornographic mode is subtly indicated in the slight variation on the Ada-and-Van poetic leitmotiv that runs through Ada (“our ardors and arbors”), with “Ada’s odor and ardor.” The shift from poetry to bodily smell can make us reconsider the synesthetic assertion “Sounds have colors, colors have smells,” and see in it a reflection of the very shift at work here, since in the previous excerpt the dazzling colors of the fake Caravaggio rustled with suggestive alliterations (“sounds have colors”), while here Ada’s dark night does have a smell, but almost no sound. When compared with the previously analyzed excerpt, this scene is curiously devoid of metaphors, and far less rich in assonances and alliterations. One could even go as far as saying that the shift from “A” (“arbors and ardors”) to “O” (“odor and ardor”) is significant; Johnson demonstrated how the letter “A” is essential in the novel, as it relates to the unique bond between the two sibling lovers by being the mirror image of “V.” Its replacement by “O” punctures the text with some kinds of orifice, and performs the shift to the pornographic down to the level of letters. The only sound effect to be noted here is a form of paronomasia between desire and cruelty, in the “ten evil, loving, long fingers belonging to two different young demons”; this sound effect is here not related to any other sensory modality, thus preventing any sensual synesthetic shiver. Finally, Van’s penis—for once explicitly designated by a

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strange metaphor—is reduced to a “local curio,” a mere object claimed by Ada. One should therefore wonder about the fact that the rare inclusion of neurological synesthesia15 in the text is made precisely at a moment when the senses of the reader are not, purposefully, stirred. Our first analyses of the conjunction of literary synesthetic devices and poerotic writing in scenes of desire are thus somehow countered by the analysis conducted above, which leads us to interrogate the validity of literary synesthesia as a tool for textual analysis, despite its popularity. Let us reexamine one of the first synesthetic metaphors analyzed earlier—“that downy tenderness”—which linked the intangibility of a sentiment to the softness of down. Since Van the narrator claims to be a synesthete, is the word “tenderness” “downy” for him, or is it simply an original metaphor juxtaposing a sentiment and a tactile sensation? This example is indeed not the only Nabokovian instance of play between abstract and concrete elements. One important excerpt from Lolita illustrates a similar tension: I would like to describe her face, her ways—and I cannot, because my own desire blinds me when she is near. I am not used to being with nymphets, damn it. If I close my eyes I see but an immobilized fraction of her, a cinematographic still, a sudden smooth nether loveliness, as with one knee up under her tartan skirt she sits tying her shoe. (Nabokov 1955, 44, my emphasis)

A typical Eros blinded by his desire, Humbert would like to describe Lolita (and symbolically possess her), but ends up describing his mental, fantasized image of her, the only one he can really master, like “a cinematographic still,” and even then, he can only describe a fragment of her: “a sudden smooth nether loveliness, as with one knee up under her tartan skirt she sits tying her shoe.” “Sudden smooth nether loveliness” is a very complex image, as it metamorphoses the abstract noun “loveliness” into a very concrete and very sensual part of the nymphet’s body, glimpsed under her skirt.16 Moreover, this image brings together, through syntax and alliteration, three very different adjectives, a spatial/visual one (“nether”), a temporal one (“sudden”), and a tactile one (“smooth”), and therefore produces a multisensorial effect. Yet one should refrain from calling this effect a synesthetic one, as it is due to syntactic and metaphorical work. Similarly, Nabokov often resorts to hypallages, especially in Lolita, a novel structured upon displacement on many levels. The recurrence of

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hypallages in the novel therefore aptly reflects the themes of exile and displacement, since this trope works on the displacement of one given adverb or adjective onto a noun or verb it does not logically qualify. Even though it is a fairly rare trope in literature, sometimes Nabokov places two of them in one description: […] she walked through dilating space with the lentor of one walking under water or in a flight dream. Then she raised by the armlets a copper-colored, charming and quite expensive vest, very slowly stretching it between her silent hands as if she were a bemused bird-hunter holding his breath over the incredible bird he spreads out by the tips of its flaming wings. Then (while I stood waiting for her) she pulled out the slow snake of a brilliant belt and tried it on. (Nabokov 1955, 120, my emphasis)

Through the elongated sentences of the excerpt, Nabokov creates a slowdown effect, in the diluted, aquatic space of the store, in which these intersensorial hypallages are paired with imagery taken from tales and legends (the vest compared to a firebird from the Russian folklore; the glossy snake). It is then sometimes difficult to distinguish between mere stylistic work and literary synesthesia, which are repeatedly associated in Nabokov’s prose: but is it because he was a synesthete, or because he was a poet? Could we posit, following the hypothesis of Cytowic and Eagleman, that the repeated association of metaphor and synesthesia comes from the fact that the human brain fundamentally functions by building metaphors/associations, and that synesthesia would only be one variation on this larger functioning principle? Such a hypothesis is actually developed by other cognition specialists, as Gabrielle Starr recalls: “This may be in part because multisensory imagery gives access not to something like the ‘real’ complexity of experience but to aspects of the ways our minds internally represent experiences and objects” (Starr 2010, 288). The vivid impressions triggered in the reader’s mind by Nabokov’s evocations could be explained by the high degree of reflexivity between his manner of producing images and the very manner the human brain produces images, thus creating the “aesthetic bliss”—aesthetic in the typical sense, but also, etymologically, of all the senses—his works aim for. A striking feature of Nabokov’s prose, noted by many a reader, is the power, the precision of his images—the visual ones17 of course, but not only them. This is not too surprising in an author who, when asked in

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which language he thought, answered “I don’t think in any language. I think in images” (Nabokov 1973, 14). Sight is indeed the primary sense, as shown in the fact that many Nabokovian villains, or, ironically, many voyeurs, are either blind or visually impaired.18 According to Roland Barthes, the gaze triggers the other senses in the perceptive act: As a locus for significance, the gaze provokes a form of synesthesia, a non-division of the (physiological) senses, that put their impressions in common, so that one can attribute, poetically, what happens to one to the other (“There are perfumes fresh as children’s flesh”): all the senses can therefore ‘look’, and, conversely, the gaze can smell, hear, touch, etc. (Barthes 1992, 280, my translation)19

Barthes quotes Baudelaire, a non-synesthete, but according to other philosophers, it is not necessary to be a synesthete for the multisensorial to resound powerfully within one’s perceptions of the sensitive world, or one’s reception of literary, filmic, or musical narratives. French philosopher Jean-Jacques Wunenburger suggests that any perception or production of signs implies the whole of the body: One has to take into account an actual corporeal atlas of images, because it is the whole body that takes part in semio-poetics, the production of signs and images, for the self or for others, which enrich the sensorial experience, or give it new expressional and communicational faculties. (Wunenburger 1997, 9, my emphasis and my translation)20

Thus, if Nabokov recommended his readers to read “with [their] brain and spine,” is it because he was a synesthete, or simply because he was aware of the fact that “the whole body participates in a form of semiopoetics?” One can say that Nabokov’s fiction displays a larger number of literary synesthetic metaphors than other writers, but such abundance cannot however prove the author’s neurological synesthesia, since no MRI or utterly explicit statement are available to do so. In point of fact, Nabokov’s prose is also denser in other literary tropes (alliterations, assonances, hypallages, etc.,) than other canonical texts. As Kevin Dann showed, using artistic synesthesia to prove the author’s neurological synesthesia mostly led to errors (sometimes willingly maintained by the artists themselves). Moreover, and more importantly, one needs to recall that “synesthetic experiences are additional, involuntary (they are not evoked at will and

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are not chosen, contrary to metaphors), arbitrary and idiosyncratic associations of sensory modalities” (Hupé, p. 242), as quoted in the introduction to this chapter. This means that no control can be exerted over them, while in Nabokov’s prose everything is minutely chiseled, complex, and extremely elaborate; there is nothing “involuntary” or automatic in his texts. In fact, he hated improvisation so much that he accepted interviews only if the questions were submitted to him in advance, so that he could prepare carefully crafted answers. Metaphors are indeed chosen, and if Cytowic and Eagleman use the word metaphor “metaphorically” to explain how the associative workings of the human brain operate, that term is actually quite ill-chosen, for in literature it corresponds to aesthetic choices that have little if nothing in common with brain connection. It is therefore interesting to see that the contiguity between synesthesia and metaphor as presented by Cytowic and Eagleman, however seductive an idea, rests upon a double misuse of the terms “synesthesia” and “metaphor.” One can nevertheless posit that the exceptional qualities of Nabokov’s descriptions are probably grounded on his extraordinary visual acuity, nourished by his entomological practice, which itself lay the foundations for his acute awareness of the complexity of the sensible world, and inspired the convoluted structures of his novels. It is therefore quite logical that Nabokov evoked neurological synesthesia only six times throughout his work (which could seem very little for someone whose mode of perception is synesthetic). Indeed the relative absence of neural synesthesia from his texts could be explained by the fundamentally idiosyncratic nature of the neurological synesthetic experience, which is essentially impossible to share (most synesthetes reading Nabokov’s description of his own colored hearing find all his colors to be “wrong”). Conversely, the tumult of senses, or desire, belong to a much more common and open field for the writer, where his uncommon sensorial sensitivity can be nurtured and shared. In his book on synesthesia, Kevin Dann repeatedly regrets the way synesthesia has been placed on a pedestal, as the way to transcend sensory categories, reason, or the behaviorist vision of humanity, while denying its most important features, the subjectivity, and idiosyncrasy of the synesthetic experience. The history of the conceptualization and reception of synesthesia over the centuries indicates a form of obsession with the idea of a union or synthesis of the senses, which one could relate to the ideal of a “union of the arts,” or “total spectacle,” as exemplified by the “World of

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Art” movement made famous by the creations of the Ballets Russes at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, the aesthetic principles of fusion of the arts and fusion of the senses had a strong influence on Nabokov during his childhood and youth.21 To conclude, or rather to open up perspectives from this idea, I would like to formulate a few conjectures that may explain the fascination for synesthesia and for the union of the senses that humankind has shown for centuries in the Western World. These hypotheses are but the beginning of a reflection, and take the form of two sets of questions. – Why has the union of the senses been so often considered as something desirable, or even superior? Is it a reflection of the functioning of the human brain, as suggested by Cytowic and Eaglemen, according to whom “the difference between the synesthetic and nonsynesthetic brain […] is not whether there is cross talk, but rather how much cross talk there is” (Cytowic and Eagleman 2009, 205)? Or is it simply due to some form of more or less conscious nostalgia for the way the human brain works in infancy, since some recent hypotheses in neurological synesthetic research postulate that all humans are synesthetes at birth, and maybe even during childhood? – How can one explain that the reader invariably notices when a text or statement resorts to more than one sense? Is it just a source of fascination, like a conjurer’s trick? Or an academic reflex inherited from literary studies? If these multisensorial texts reflect the way the brain works, do we find a form of comfort in them, or the same magnetic drive humans experience toward reflective systems (such as mirrors, doubles, twins, plays-within-the-play), in the fundamental tension between mimesis and poiesis inherited from the Greek? From this perspective, the sensorial whirlpool offered in Nabokov’s texts would be yet another reflection permitting never-ending selfinterrogations.

Notes 1. His description of the color of letters is so precise, in this excerpt and others, that artist Jean Holabird painted watercolors from Nabokov’s descriptions; they were published in Vladimir Nabokov, An Alphabet in Color (see Bibliography). Nabokov also mentions other types of synesthesia (color– sound, taste–color, color–taste, texture–color, color–texture…).

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2. See the analyses of Don Barton Johnson 1974 and 1975, Kevin Dann (Dann 1998, chapter 5), Boyd (2005), Lvovich (2012), and Lambert (2011). 3. It is sometimes called “pseudosynesthesia,” according to Hervé-Pierre Lambert (Lambert 2011). Don Barton Johnson already operated this important distinction between “artistic synesthesia” and “neurological synesthesia” in his 1974 study (Johnson 1974, 85). 4. The famous synesthestic lines of the 1857 poem run as follows: “II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants, Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies, Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens, Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.” Translation: “There are perfumes fresh as children’s flesh, Soft as oboes, green as meadows, And others, corrupted, rich, triumphant, Possessing the diffusion of infinite things, Like amber, musk, incense and aromatic resin, Chanting the ecstasies of spirit and senses” (Baudelaire 1974, 78). On the wrong assumptions or claims of synesthesia, see Kevin Dann (Dann 1998, 63). 5. See Liliane Louvel’s seminal study of the text/image relation, and her use of the term iconotext (Louvel 2011). 6. Nabokov was very attentive to the quality and accuracy of the translation of sensations and impression. He therefore was extremely annoyed by the translation of Madame Bovary that he had to use for his Cornell class: “the present translation, based upon that made by Eleanor Marx, a daughter of Karl Marx, is full of boners and couched in a style that is in the nature of an insult to Flaubert by its lack of artistic quality. The lady has not enough English, not enough French, not enough imagination or knowledge, and is blind, deaf and dumb in more senses than one” (New York Public Library, Berg Collection. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, m. b. Madame Bovary. Holograph and typescript of lecture notes, unsigned and undated. 56 p, my emphasis). 7. Koncheyev then compares Fyodor to Rimbaud, the author of a famous poem about colored vowels, and another non-synestheste. 8. For more analysis of this poem, see Léopold Reigner’s chapter in the present volume. 9. Humbert also uses the word “limbs” to metonymically evoke Lolita’s vagina during sexual intercourse, in a typical displacement strategy: “it would take hours of blandishments, threats and promises to make her lend me for a few seconds her brown limbs in the seclusion of the fivedollar room before undertaking anything she might prefer to my poor joy” (Nabokov 1955, 147). 10. See Julie Loison-Charles’s chapter for a reflection upon the importance of language in the expression of food-related contents.

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11. As Johnson pointed out “smells play a considerable role both as a descriptive device (usually associated with a character) and as a memory trigger technique” (Johnson 1975, 132). 12. “Actually, I don’t give a damn for incest one way or the other. I merely like the ‘bl ’ sound in siblings, bloom, blue, bliss, sable” (Nabokov 1973, 123). 13. After Leo Spitzer, Murray Krieger defines the ekphrasis as “the name of a literary genre, or at least topos, that attempts to imitate in words an object of the plastic arts” (Krieger 1992, 6). Nabokov frequently resorts to this device, especially in Lolita, Ada, but also The Enchanter and Look at the Harlequins! 14. The use of foreign words to veil sexual elements is typical of Nabokov (see Nabokov 1955, 277). Moreover the “vue d’oiseau” (bird’s eye view) could be seen as Nabokov’s own towering presence over the scene of torture of Lucette, whom Van indeed calls his “bird of paradise” at several points in the story. 15. One should recall that the other passage in which neurological synesthesia is mentioned relates the condition to mere madness: Van is about to visit a psychiatric ward to see Spencer Muldoon, a rare case of chromesthesia, who, even though blind from birth, can feel the different colors of a set of pencils. The strange case, inspired by actual cases recorded in the scientific treaties on synesthesia that Nabokov knew very well (see Pléiade edition of Ada in French, notes 1412–1416), dies before Van can see him. 16. See Roland Barthes: “Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? […] it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the opennecked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance” (Barthes 1975, 9–10). 17. Nabokov repeatedly said that he had chosen painting as his initial vocation: “I think I was born a painter, really!” (Nabokov 1973, 17). 18. Herman in Despair, myopic Humbert in Lolita, Kim in Ada, Albinus in Laughter in the Dark. 19. “Comme lieu de signifiance, le regard provoque une synesthésie, une indivision des sens (physiologiques), qui mettent leurs impressions en commun, de telle sorte qu’on puisse attribuer à l’un, poétiquement, ce qui arrive à l’autre (“Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfant”): tous les sens peuvent donc “regarder” et inversement, le regard peut sentir, écouter, tâter, etc” (Barthes 1992, 280). 20. “Il faut […] prendre en compte un véritable atlas corporel des images, parce que l’ensemble du corps participe à une semio-poïétique, à une production de signes et d’images, pour soi-même ou pour les autres,

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qui enrichissent l’expérience sensorielle ou lui confèrent des fonctions expressives et communicationnelles nouvelles” (Wunenburger 1997, 9, my emphasis). 21. See the studies by Nassim Balestrini and Susan Elisabeth Sweeney in the Bibliography.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R. Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. 1992. L’Obvie et l’obtus. Paris: Seuil. Balestrini, Nassim W. 1999. Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading and Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka. In Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing the Critical Boundaries, ed. L. Zunshine, 87–110. New York: Garland. Baudelaire, Charles. 1974. Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire, trans. Geoffrey Wagner. New York: Grove Press. Boyd, Brian. 2005. Nabokov’s Blues and His Drab-shoelace Brown, and His Weathered-Wood Black. Foreword to Vladimir Nabokov: Alphabet in Color, 4–9. New York: Gingko Press. Chouard, Géraldine. 1995. L’espace érotique dans Ada, or Ardor: ‘Nevada, Nirvana, Vaniada’. In L’Espace littéraire dans la littérature et la culture anglosaxonnes, ed. B. Brugière, 137–164. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Couturier, Maurice. 2014. Nabokov’s Eros and the Poetics of Desire. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cytowic, Richard, and David Eagleman. 2009. Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia. Boston: MIT Press. Dann, Kevin. 1998. Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Day, Sean. 1996. Synesthesia and Synesthetic Metaphors. PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness 2 (32). http://psyche.cs. monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-32-day.html. Holabird, Jean. 2005. Vladimir Nabokov, An Alphabet in Color. New York: Gingko Press. Johnson, Don Barton. 1974. Synesthesia, Polychromatism, and Nabokov. In A Book of Things about Nabokov, ed. Carl R. Proffer, 84–103. Ann Arbor: Ardis. ———. 1975. The Role of Synesthesia in the Work of Vladimir Nabokov. Melbourne Slavonic Studies 9–10: 129–139. Krieger, Murray. 1992. Ekphrasis, The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Lambert, Hervé-Pierre. 2011. La synesthésie. Vues de l’intérieur. Épistémocritique VIII: Printemps. http://www.epistemocritique.org/spip.php?article210. Accessed 4 July 2018. Louvel, Liliane. 2011. Poetics of the Iconotext, trans L. Petit. London: Ashgate. Lvovich, Natasha. 2012. The ‘Gift’: Synesthesia in Translingual Texts. L2 Journal 4 (2). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0k59250t. Accessed 4 July 2018. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1937. Despair. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. 1938. Laughter in the Dark. Reprint, New York: New Directions, 1991. ———. 1939. The Enchanter, trans. Dmitri Nabokov. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. 1951. Voluptates Tactionum. Reprint, Collected Poems. London: Penguin, 2012. 182. ———. 1955. The Annotated Lolita. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1995. ———. 1963. The Gift, trans. M. Scammell with the collaboration of the author. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. 1966. Speak, Memory. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. 1969. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Reprint, Novels 1969–1974: Ada, Transparent Things, Look at the Harlequins!, ed. Brian Boyd. New York: Library of America, 1996. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw Hill. ———. 1974. Look at the Harlequins! Reprint, Novels 1969–1974: Ada, Transparent Things, Look at the Harlequins!, ed. Brian Boyd. New York: Library of America, 1996. ———. 1995. The Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 2002. Packman, David. 1982. Vladimir Nabokov: The Structure of Literary Desire. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press. Ramachandran, Vilayanur, and Edward Hubbard. 2001. Synesthesia: A Window into Perception, Thought and Language. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (12): 3–4. ———. 2003. Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes. Scientific American 288 (May): 53–59. Seitz, John. 2005. The Neural, Evolutionary, Developmental, and Bodily Basis of Metaphor. New Ideas in Psychology 23: 74–95. Starr, Gabrielle. 2010. Multisensory Imagery. In Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. L. Zunshine, 275–291. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. 2002. Looking at Harlequins: Nabokov, the World of Art and the Ballets Russes. In Nabokov’s World: Volume 2—Reading Nabokov, ed. J. Grayson, A. McMillin, and P. Meyer, 73–95. New York: Palgrave. Ward, Jamie. 2003. State of the Art—Synesthesia. The Psychologist 16 (4): 196– 199. Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques. 1997. Philosophie des images. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

CHAPTER 17

Undulations and Vibrations, Tonalities and Harmonies: Nabokov, Acoustics and the Otherworld Sabine Metzger

Which role does the auditory play in Nabokov’s sensorium? Certainly not, to use Daniel Barenboim’s expression, that of the “neglected sense” (Barenboim 2006), as Nabokov’s claim “to think in images” (Nabokov 1973, 14) and his preoccupation with the visual in both his fictional and non-fictional writings seem to intimate. Far from derogating sound and hearing, his writings abound with sonic metaphors, and the akoumenal1 proves to be central not only to his aesthetic, but as well to his metaphysical concerns. Starting with the city’s noisy soundscape in Mary, Nabokov continuously examines sound’s acoustic properties, enquires into their impact and elaborates on sound as wave and vibration. As this chapter will argue, it is precisely the physical aspect of the akoumenal, from which its metaphysical dimension derives.

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Pythagorean Echoes When Adam Krug, the protagonist of Bend Sinister, speculates on the cosmos as a “prism or prison where rainbows are but octaves of ethereal vibrations and where cosmogonists with transparent heads keep walking into each other and passing through each other’s vibrational voids” (Nabokov 1947, 171–172), he plays with notions of a concept known as the “Harmony of the Spheres.” The idea that the universe is to be conceived of in terms of musical intervals and vibrations has its origin with Pythagoras of Samos, a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher of the fifthcentury BC. Pythagoras is said to have discovered the harmonious musical intervals—accidentally, as the legend has it, when, walking past a blacksmith’s shop, he perceived, in the midst of the din of hammer and anvil, sounds of perfect concord whose pitches were dependent on the hammers’ weight. His insight was confirmed by his subsequent experiments with a monochord, which made him conclude that the musical pitches produced by different string lengths correspond to mathematical ratios. This perfect concord of sound, however, he understood but as a reflection of the “harmony of the spheres,” a larger cosmic order, which itself obeyed the laws of mathematic ratios, and the harmonious sounds produced by man was regarded as merely an approximation of the harmonious sounds produced by the motion of the celestial bodies on their orbits which were conceived of as transparent spheres (James 1993, passim.; Godwin 1993, passim.; Blackstone 2011, 7ff.; Koestler 2014, 10ff.). Omnipresent and ever-present, the so-called “music of the spheres” was thought to be inaudible to the human ear, except to that of Pythagoras himself. That Nabokov has his protagonist resort to the notions of this ancient concept of the cosmos doesn’t situate him within the Pythagorean tradition, which Jamie James identifies as the “Great Theme” that, modified and expanded, has shaped cosmologies and music theories from Antiquity to the twentieth century.2 In fact, Krug dismisses his Pythagorean speculations by concluding: “Then we give a good shake to the telescopoid kaleidoscope […] and throw the damned thing away” (Nabokov 1947, 172). In a similar pejorative fashion, the narrator of “La Veneziana,” speaking about the monotony of life, belittles the equally uniform and never-changing music of the spheres as “the endless repetitions of a hurdy-gurdy” (Nabokov 1995, 106). Despite these dismissals, however,

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Nabokov alludes to the “Great Theme” in Speak, Memory, when he characterizes memory’s “supreme achievements” as “the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering into its folds the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past” (Nabokov 1966, 136). With harmonies and tonalities, he employs a terminology resonant of the Pythagorean tradition, as he does—even more explicitly—in his story “Sounds,” where Nabokov, regardless of his claim to “have no ear for music” (Nabokov 1973, 35),3 makes his narrator formulate his epiphany in terms of a “musical relationship” (Nabokov 1995, 14): And when I withdrew deep into myself the whole world seemed like that – homogenous, congruent, bound by the laws of harmony. I myself, you, the carnations, at that instant all became the vertical chords on musical staves. I realized that everything in the world was an interplay of identical particles comprising different kinds of consonance: the trees, the water, you … All was unified, equivalent, divine. (Nabokov 1995, 14–15).

The narrator describes what Nabokov elsewhere calls “cosmic synchronization” (Nabokov 1966, 173) which Alexandrov paraphrases as “providing a sense of transcendent unity between the self and all that exist” (Alexandrov 1991, 141). The musical terminology he employs does not hinge on conventional notions of music, such as, for example, “humanly generated sounds that are good to listen to, and that are so for themselves and not merely for the message they convey” (Cook 1998, 4). His emphasis is on “consonances” which obey the “laws of harmony” that permit to establish a nexus between the apparently unrelated “silvery spectres of rain” (Nabokov 1995, 14) and his lover’s “inclined shoulders” (Nabokov 1995, 14), between himself, his lover, and the carnations, and between the trees, the rain and his lover. The musical metaphors in “Sounds” echo the Pythagorean notion of music, however neither in its “esoteric” (Cook 1998, 32) implications, nor in its conceiving of music and the cosmos in terms of arithmetic relationships or ratios, but in a more general sense which Lee Blackstone formulates as a “vibrating scheme whereby the heavens, and even the concept of divinities, were connected via sound” (Blackstone 2011, 8). Pythagorean music, then, approximates Nabokov’s notion of “cosmic synchronization,” and is precisely on the grounds of Pythagorean music’s broader sense of postulating a nexus between the celestial and the terrestrial, between the bodily and the ethereal, that it provides Nabokov with apt metaphors for his own ethical, metaphysical

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and aesthetic issues and their relation to the transcendent realm of the “Otherworld” (potosturonnost ), which was, according to Vera Nabokov, the “main theme” of his works (Alexandrov 1991, 4). At the same time, however, Nabokov’s Pythagorean echoes are more than mere metaphors for linking what is apparently disparate. At stake is the nexus itself: “consonance” and “musical relationship” intimate that this link can be listened to, that it is sonorous and hence vibrational, and that the metaphysical cannot be divorced from the physical. The Otherworld has an acoustic dimension, and what finally underlies Nabokov’s musical metaphors, are the physical properties of sound and their potential, which he starts to examine as early as the beginning of his career as a novelist. The approach to his Otherworldly acoustics will therefore take a detour via the noises of Mary.

Mary ’s Noisy Soundscape Mary, Nabokov’s first novel, published in 1925, introduces the reader not only to the Berlin of Russian émigrés, but as well to the sonic environment of its protagonist. Frau Dorn’s pension where Ganin lives, is described as an unpleasant place, crowded and untidy, and “chiefly nasty because all day long and much of the night the trains of the Stadtbahn could be heard, creating the impression that the whole building was slowly on the move” (Nabokov 1970, 8), and Ganin “could never rid himself of the feeling that every train was passing, unseen, right through the house itself” (Nabokov 1970, 11). The noise of the Stadtbahn functions as the “keynote” (Schafer 1994, 9) to what R. Murray Schafer calls the “soundscape” (Schafer 1994, 8) of the neighborhood in which the pension is located. Mary does not celebrate noise as does, for instance, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo who, in his Arte del Rumore (1913) claims triumphantly: “Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born” (Russolo et al. 2012, 55). Nabokov reminds the reader of the etymological relationship between noise and nausea (Coates 2005, 644): noise in Mary is “disruptive,” chaotic,” “unwanted” (Kahn 2001, 20), “sound out of place” (Hendy 2014, viii), and “aural assault” (Hendy 2014, 84). Accompanied by “a pale cloud envelop[ing] the window” (Nabokov 1970, 92) and “heaving mountains of smoke [that] swept upward, blotting out the night sky […] [and] seemed to pass right through the house” (Nabokov 1970, 113), the din of the trains evokes the traditional association of noise and dirt (Kahn

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2001, 77), of noise and pollution. The noise of the Stadtbahn constitutes the soundscape of the underprivileged neighborhood in which Ganin’s pension is located—an area where the houses are equipped only with thin walls that expose the inhabitants not only to the noises from the outside, but also to those from the adjacent room: “Through the thin wall he could hear him [Alfyorov] shuffling across the floor, first near, then moving away, while Ganin lay there in anger. Whenever a train rattled past, Alfyorov’s voice blended with the noise, only to resurface again […]” (Nabokov 1970, 26). Mary contrasts the noises of the pension’s neighborhood with the sounds of the Russian countryside where Ganin spent the summers of his youth, without, however, resorting to the “urban prejudice” (Kelman quoted in Sterne 2013, 186) which renders Schafer’s concept of soundscape problematic.4 Mary is not concerned with the noises of the city per se, but with noise as part of the adversities of an emigré’s life, and the environment of the family’s country estate is neither the site of the “natural quiet” (Coates 2005, 652) envisaged in the agendas of National Parks or Rath’s “natural soundscape” that is shaped by “natural sounds” in the sense of “unintentional sounds, not made by humans” (quoted in Coates 2005, 639), nor is it the soundscape of village life,5 that seems to be evoked by the “[w]onderful sounds” (Nabokov 1970, 38) which enter convalescent Ganin’s sickroom from the manorial park: “twittering, distant barking, a creaking pump” (Nabokov 1970, 38). In fact, the countryside of Ganin’s villegiatura is cultured and cultivated, as the deserted “Alexandrine country mansion” (Nabokov 1970, 70)— neo-classicist architecture sonified—indicates. It is a rural setting that has imported urban elements, like the “opera bass from Petersburg” (Nabokov 1970, 54) instructing the choir of the village school, and whose soundscape is heterogenous: mingling the natural and the manmade, the rural and the urban, and juxtaposing the “humming telegraph pole” (Nabokov 1970, 57) to the sound of animals in the stables, the “steady roar of the sluice gates at the water mill” (Nabokov 1970, 69) to the voice of the opera singer, and the “whisper” (Nabokov 1970, 54) of a bicycle tire to the “particularly noisy” (Nabokov 1970, 82) rain. What is contrasted with the soundscape of Ganin’s noisy Berlin neighborhood is not the soundscape of rural Russia, but the soundscape of rural Russia in the summer of 1915 as perceived by a privileged youth who has fallen in love for the first time and leads otherwise an unencumbered life. Noise certainly functions as a social marker in Mary, as Leona Toker implies

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(Toker 1989, 36–37). Whereas Ganin in his shabby pension is tortured by the Stadtbahn’s din, in Laughter in the Dark Albinus’s daughter Irma listens, in her nocturnal sickroom, for “the friendly rumble of the electric train” (Nabokov 1960, 158). At a time when, with the increasing urbanization that was triggered by the industrial revolution cities grew noisier, silence has become, as Sophia Rosenfeld observers, a “commodity” and a “luxury” (Rosenfeld 2011, 323), available only to the affluent, who could, like Albinus, afford to live in an upper-class neighborhood, and catered for by a growing market of sound insulation devices. Above all, however, Mary enquires into noise as a material entity by emphasizing its physical qualities: “It would come in from the far side, its phantom reverberation would shake the wall, jolt its way across the old carpet, graze a glass on the washstand, and finally disappear out of the window with a chilly clang” (Nabokov 1970, 11). The novel is not only concerned with noise as loudness that, for instance, drowns Alfyorov’s singing, but rather with its intensity in terms of acoustic pressure. Mary foregrounds the impact, the momentum and the kinetic energy of the trains’ noise and examines its expansion. The narrator describes how the noise if the “black trains roar[ing] past ” (Nabokov 1970, 113) penetrates the building’s walls, slashes its way through Ganin’s room and leaves the impression of “pass[ing] right through the house” (Nabokov 1970, 113), thus emphasizing that, as Douglas Kahn contends, “vibrations always exceed the actual entities that emit them” and that “vibrating entities are always entities out of phase with themselves” (Kahn 2001, 71). Mary focusses on this vibrational excess by elaborating on the noise’s vibrations that, by virtue of their impact, cause to vibrate anything they strike. They “shake” (Nabokov 1970, 11) the wall and the window panes, make the house “quiver” (Nabokov 1970, 113), they “jolt” (Nabokov 1970, 11) the carpet and cause the glass and the washstand to “rattle” (Nabokov 1970, 92). The noise propagates itself and expands by this excess and forces its way through Ganin’s room by its vibrations and successive “reverberation” (Nabokov 1970, 11). Mary, then, addresses the “vibrational nexus” (Kahn 2001, 71), characterizing sound as such of which noise is, as Salomé Vögelin insists, the “amplified form” (Vögelin 2010, 65); and it is the potential of this concatenation of vibration and reverberation that Nabokov examines and expands in his subsequent novels.

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Expanding the Vibrational Nexus As Shelly Trower contends, “vibration appears to cross distances between things, between people, between self and environment, between the senses and society, promising (or threatening) to shrink or to break down such distances” (Trower 2008, 13). In The Gift , Nabokov elaborates on this mediating capacity of sound waves. When Fyodor paces up and down the nocturnal and “echoic” (Nabokov 1963, 56) street in front of his house in Berlin, he experiences what a moment later evolves into the coming into being of his first poem: High above [the street] milk-white lamps were suspended, each on its transverse wire, beneath the closest one a ghostly circle swung with the breeze across the wet asphalt. And this swinging motion, which had no apparent relation to him, with a sonorous tambourine-like sound nevertheless nudged something off the brink of his soul where that something had been resting, and now, no longer with the former distant call but reverberating loudly and closely by. (Nabokov 1963, 56)

Fyodor’s inspiration is triggered less by the sight of the “ghostly circle” cast on the wet asphalt by the streetlamp swinging in the “breeze,” but rather by the auditory impression of the “sonorous tambourine-like sound” that goes with it. Fyodor’s perception shifts from the visual to the auditory. The streetlamp’s swinging motion evokes the swinging of a tambourine’s drum skin—its vibrations—that in turn cause Fyodor’s eardrums to swing or to vibrate and stir up by their reverberations of “that something,” and make Fyodor articulate the still incoherent lines of the poem. What in fact prompts Fyodor’s inspiration is the “breeze” that sets into motion a process of successive vibrations and reverberations, and the breeze-inspired propagation of soundwaves that finally gives birth to Fyodor’s poem is resonant of an Aeolian harp. The Aeolian harp consists of a wooden box with a sounding board and two bridges across which strings are attached that are set into vibration by the wind—hence its name derived from the Greek god Aeolus. Known since Antiquity, the Aeolian harp was described by Athanasius Kirchner in his Musurgia Universalis (1650) and his Phonurgia Nova (1672). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the instrument serves, in particular in the writings of Hartley and Priestley, as a metaphor to explain the functioning of the nervous system (Trower 2009). For the Romantic poets—from Coleridge and Shelley to Tyutchev, from Wieland and

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Mörike to Emerson and Thoreau—the wind-harp becomes a metaphor for the poet’s mind. Shelley, in his “Defense of Poetry,” writes: “Man is like an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to an ever-changing melody” (Shelley 2009, 675). Coleridge, in his eponymous poem, employs the Aeolian harp as a metaphor for “the sensitive, responsive poet whose nerves or ‘strings’ are set into motion” (Trower 2009), hereby triggering his mental activity. Yet the breeze-inspired poem is not the only Romantic aural topos that Nabokov employs. Imaginatively reconstructing his father’s last expedition, Fyodor elaborates on “the boom of water in the gorge” (Nabokov 1963, 111) and the “furious roar” (Nabokov 1963, 111); Cincinnatus, in Invitation to a Beheading , expresses his being bodily seized by fear in terms of noise and vibration: “fear, never halting, rushes through me with an ominous roar, like a torrent, and my body vibrates like a bridge over a waterfall” (Nabokov 1959, 192). Nabokov’s thundering floods are resonant, for instance, of Wilhelm Heinse’s description of the Rhinefall at Schaffhausen that marks, according to Veit Erlmann, the beginning of “the Romantic ear” (Erlmann 2014, 151). In a passage deliberately renouncing punctuation, Heinse enthusiastically speaks of the water “roar[ing] through bone and marrow”: “It is a gigantic storm what thunderous booming what storm raging through my entire being” (quoted in Erlmann 2014, 151). Nabokov evokes and at the same time distances himself from the tropes of Romanticism. The “breeze” in The Gift is not the “divine breeze” of Coleridge’s “The Aeolian Harp” and its roaring waters have nothing of the “Holy! Holy! Holy” that Heinse exclaims (quoted in Erlmann 2014, 151), but rather affect the body by the sound they emit and whose waves propagate themselves like an electric current, “filling” “head and breast with an electric agitation” (Nabokov 1963, 111). The passage dealing with Fyodor’s poetic inspiration is dissociated from what Abrams, in his seminal study “The Correspondent Breeze,” calls “the persistent Romantic analogue of mind, the figurative mediator between outer motion and inner emotion” (Abrams 1957, 121). Fyodor’s inspiration is prompted not by the Romantic “wild wind” (Abrams 1957, 129)— having replaced the Sublime storm—but simply by a “breeze” and, in addition, a literal one. The passage in The Gift neither celebrates the British Romantics’ union between man and nature, nor does it allude to what Bidney calls Tyutchev’s “wind-harp pessimism” (Bidney 1985, 334).

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Instead, Nabokov focuses on the physical and physiological aspects of sound transmission in terms of their vibrational nexus. The Gift describes Fyodor’s capturing the breeze—or better: the breeze-triggered sound—as the sympathetic vibration of two membranes, of the tambourine’s tympan and Fyodor’s tympanic membrane, whose vibrations strike and set into motion the auditory apparatus of the middle and the inner ear. Rather than being the borderline between the outer and the inner, between the self and the other, as Derrida elaborates in his discussion of the “tympan” (Derrida 1982, x),6 Fyodor’s eardrum functions within this process as a “receptive zone” (Khesti 2011, 716, 721) acting as a link within the process of sound propagation. Inspiration becomes a concatenation of vibrations, “between membrane and brain” (Nabokov 1969, 221), as Van formulates in Ada, and the poem itself becomes their “reverberation” (Nabokov 1963, 56). What Nabokov preserves from the Romantic wind-harp, however, is an echo of its revolt against the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with the eye,7 as indicated by Fyodor’s “auditory turn,” by his shift from the visual to the auditory, and, above all, the emphasis on receptiveness and responsiveness. When Fyodor, “somnambulistically talking to himself” (Nabokov 1963, 56) articulates the first lines of his poem and is struck by the vibrations of “the next shadowy strophe, which was swinging yards away” (Nabokov 1963, 56), he does so on grounds of his capacity to engage in and to respond to the vibrational nexus. In front of the background of the implications of the Romantics’ wind-harp in The Gift it is significant that in Lolita Humbert, when tracing his ancestry, decries the “Aeolian harp” (Nabokov 1955, 9), the scholarly field of one of his maternal grandfathers. Humbert’s dismissing the wind-harp as an “obscure subject” (Nabokov 1955, 9) not only calls into question the literary scholarship he claims for himself, but equally foreshadows his inability to respond to Lolita’s needs as a child. Fyodor is endowed with what could be called the “fine ear” which he seems to share with his father who was distinguished by his ability “to hum a whole opera, from the beginning to the end” (Nabokov 1963, 178). Fyodor’s aural receptivity and responsiveness can thus be considered as an example of what Yuri Leving calls the “link between title theme and paternal legacy” (Leving 2011, 130). This paternal gift plays a significant role in the reconstruction of his father’s last journey, which he imagines not only visually but as well aurally. His visualizations of the expedition, emphatically introduced in each paragraph of his narrative by formulas like “I see” (Nabokov 1963, 110, 111), “I can

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now see” (Nabokov 1963, 112), or “I saw” (Nabokov 1963, 117) are interspersed with akoumena, such as thundering waterfalls, “babbling” (Nabokov 1963, 114) brooks, the “clatter of sliding stones” (Nabokov 1963, 112), “the labored, quickened breathing of the camels and the scrape of their broad hooves” (Nabokov 1963, 115), and the sounds of the Gobi fauna. Fyodor “conjure[s] up” (Nabokov 1963, 111) the Gobi Desert as a soundscape, where—to use Bernhard Krause’s terminology— “biophony” and “geophony” (Coates 2005, 656), the sound of living organisms and the sounds of the unanimated, merge into a symphonia in which the “clear ring of [the animals’] shoeing resounds above the ample noise of water” (Nabokov 1963, 112). The sounds of the expedition provide more than a backdrop to Fyodor’s narrative, since they turn him into a listener. When, speaking about a cataract in the Tyan-Shan mountains, Fyodor claims that “head and breast [are] filled with an electric agitation” (Nabokov 1963, 111), he reminds the reader that hearing is always bodily (Ihde 1976, 134–135; Levin 1989, 224; Vögelin 2010, 70), or, that the ear’s tympanic membrane is, as Roshanak Khesti puts it, “one of many surfaces through which the body receives vibrating sonic information” (Khesti 2011, 717). At the same time, however, his deliberate omission of the possessive articles raises the question: whose head and breast is he talking about and whose body is engaged in the vibrational nexus of the water’s noise? It is his father’s body that he imagines to resound with the water’s “furious roar” (Nabokov 1963, 111), or the body of Fyodor himself who imaginatively listens to the sounds that he imagines his father to have heard? Likewise, the “clear ring of [the animals’] shoeing” (Nabokov 1963, 112) rings both in Fyodor’s ears and in the ears of his father. Theodor Lipps’s assertion that “[t]he I that feels empathically in the tones is not an imaginative one, but a really felt I that in the successively emerging tonal totality experiences an inner story” (quoted in Erlmann 2014, 294) holds as well to Fyodor’s listening to the imagined symphonia of the expedition’s sounds. The Gift stretches the vibrational nexus by extending it to imagined sounds that, by virtue of what Georg Simmel has called the “supra individuality” (Simmel 2008, 286) of hearing, become the basis of a shared experience. As a listener, Fyodor becomes a participant in his father’s last journey. He leaves his stance of the spectatorial “I” who “sees” and shifts to the “we” (Nabokov 1963, 113, 114, 115) of the autodiegetic narrator. By engaging in the vibrational nexus of sounds that he imagines to strike his father’s ears, he becomes involved

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and is once again united with his father. Fyodor’s expansion of the vibrational nexus thus contributes to his “compensation of losses” (Connolly 2005, 144) that Julian Connolly identifies as one of the novel’s themes. Sound waves and their vibrations have not only the capacity to span distances spatially, between objects and objects, between objects—real or imagined—and selves. The vibrational nexus has a temporal dimension as well: by reverberations a sound persists and lingers on, thus prolonging the time span between its emission and its fading away. Consequently, vibrations have the potential to link the present with the past. Ada addresses this potential to span temporal distances and transforms it at the same time in what Charles Nicol calls both the “climax” of Van’s “Texture of Time” and of “the Van and Ada story” (Nicol 2003, 94), and as a “pivotal moment in Nabokov’s ability to see the novel as a whole” (Nicol 2003, 92). The phone call from Ada that Van receives in Mont Roux in 1922 is considered by Nabokov as “springboard” for his novel’s “leap into existence” (Nabokov 1973, 122), since it validates his protagonist’s theory of time: Now it so happened that she had never – never, at least, in adult life – spoken to him by the phone; hence the phone had preserved the very essence, the bright vibration, of her vocal cords, the little ‘leap’ in her larynx, the laugh clinging to the contour of the phrase, as if afraid in girlish glee to slip off the quick words it rode. It was the timbre of their past, as if the past had put through that call a miraculous connection […] That telephone voice, by resurrecting the past and linking it with the present […] formed the centerpiece in his deepest perception of tangible time. (Nabokov 1969, 555–556)

Ada’s voice is not a reverberation of the past that runs the risk of decaying and fading away. The phone call’s impact is due to the fact that it is an acousmatically8 disembodied voice to which Van listens. The telephone dissociates Ada’s voice from her body with its visible signs of aging, and “preserves” it as the voice of an adolescent: It is not a voice from the past, that speaks to Van, but the voice of the past. However, what “resurrects the past” and “links it with the present” are the adolescent voice’s idiosyncrasies, that constitute the “timbre of their past” (Nabokov 1969, 555). Jean-Luc Nancy describes timbre, etymologically related to tympanum (Nancy 2002, 42) as “the very resonance of the sonorous” (Nancy 2002, 40), as the “resonance of sound or sound itself” (Nancy 2002, 40).

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Resonance, Nancy insists, “is at once listening to timbre and the timbre of listening […]. Resonance is at once that of a body that is sonorous for itself and resonance of sonority in a listening body that, itself, resounds as it listens” (Nancy 2002, 40). Listening constitutes itself—or, as Nancy puts it, “opens up” (Nancy 2002, 40)—in timbre which unfolds between listener and sonorous body. Timbre turns sound into a communication, as distinct from mere transmission, and hence into a “sharing” (Nancy 2002, 41). The “timbre of their past” not only resounds in Ada’s voice, but as well in Van who listens to it. Unfolding between speaker and listener and engaging both in its nexus, it establishes the “miraculous connection” between present and past. Timbre turns time into a vibrant in-between and makes it “tangible” (Nabokov 1969, 556).

Otherworldly Undulations Nabokov’s inquiries into the vibrational nexus and his expanding it indicates that the potential of sound waves is closely related to his metaphysical concerns, such as “cosmic synchronization” (Nabokov 1966, 169) and the transcendent realm of the Otherworld. The idea that the auditory sense can serve as the gateway to a transcendent realm is not new. It has been articulated by a tradition that has silently persisted alongside with and despite Western thinking’s privileging of vision—its “ocularcentrism” (Levin 1989, 30)—from the Middle Ages via the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. Thinkers like Ambrose of Milan, Hrabanus Maurus, Charles de Bovelles, Francis Bacon, and Sören Kierkegaard have emphasized the affinity of the auditory sense with the spiritual (Sears 1991, 29, 31, 34; Gouk 1991, 103; Frangenberg 1991, 81; Ihde 1976, 57). David Hartley, for instance, writes in 1749: “The ear is of much more importance to us, considered as spiritual beings, than the eye” (quoted in Schmidt 2016, 31). Nabokov, however, does not attach any religious implication to the auditory, and his characters are not endowed with “spiritual ears” on which the exegetes of the psalms have elaborated (Sears 1991, 34). Quite the contrary, as has been shown in the previous sections, it is the physical properties of sound from which its metaphysical dimension derives. If, as Stefan Helmreich contends, waves are omnipresent and “the basis of the cosmos” (Helmreich 2010, 4) waves equally permeate what Nabokov calls “the Otherworld” that becomes thus accessible to the receptive and resonant ear.

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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight also explores and exploits the potential of sound waves in the narrator’s reconstruction of his brother’s life. V. claims to share “certain psychological affinities” (Nabokov 1992, 34) with Sebastian Knight, and that “Sebastian and I had some kind of common rhythm” (Nabokov 1992, 32). The vocabulary the narrator chooses for his closeness with his brother, such as “affinity” and “rhythm,” as well as the empathic impulse—Alexandrov speaks of “imaginative sympathy” (Alexandrov 1991, 147)—that guides his reconstruction of Sebastian’s last years and that finally amounts in his claim “I am Sebastian” (Nabokov 1992, 203), resounds with the terminology of Theodor Lipps. Lipps’ Einfühlungsästhetik abounds, as Veit Erlmann contends, with acoustic metaphors, and “variously glosses sympathetic empathy as echo, resonance, vibration, or simply ‘cosounding’” (Erlmann 2014, 292). Lipps compares, for instance, one’s inclination to become engaged into a matter to a cord that is attuned to certain vibrations (Lipps 1902, 159); he speaks of the “rhythm” of “psychic excitement” (Lipps 1903, 322), and he formulates “psychic life” or Seelenleben as a “vibrating system” and “its resonances” (Lipps 1883, 308). In a similar fashion, V. conceives of the soul in terms of waves or “undulations” (Nabokov 1992, 202). But despite these parallels, it would be an oversimplification, to equate V.’s becoming Sebastian at the end of the novel and Lipps’ notion of “practical empathy” which holds that “’other people’, psychologically speaking, are duplicates of my own self” (quoted in Erlmann 2014, 291), especially since Nabokov rejects the idea of the “duplicate” or Doppelgänger, as evoked by Lipps in this context, as “a frightful bore” (Nabokov 1973, 83). Rather than following Lipps’s theory of empathy in detail, the novel explores the potential of acoustic metaphors. That the soul can be conceived of in terms of waves and vibrations, that it “undulates,” and that it does so according to a rhythm, also implies that it can be listened to. To share somebody’s “rhythm” and to finally become one with it, then, requires a getting attuned to it on the grounds of an empathic listening. V.’s assertion to be Sebastian is therefore preceded by such an attunement, when he, in the hospital of St Damier, listens to a patient’s respiration that he takes to be Sebastian’s. The identity of the man sleeping on his sickbed in the adjacent room is obscured both by the darkness of the night and “a screen or something half around his bed” (Nabokov 1992, 200), and that he finally turns out not to be his brother is irrelevant to V., who nevertheless states: “those few minutes I spent listening to what I thought was his breathing changed my

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life completely as it would have been changed, had Sebastian spoken to me before dying” (Nabokov 1992, 202). V. listens to the “faint sound of breathing” (200), to the “the soft sound” (Nabokov 1992, 201), and to the “rhythm” (Nabokov 1992, 201) of the “gentle breathing” (Nabokov 1992, 201) which becomes “hardly distinguishable” (Nabokov 1992, 201) from his “own breath, as [he] sat and listened” (Nabokov 1992, 201). The listening experience that V. describes is again resonant of the mechanism of the wind-harp, with the exception that the “air-inmotion” (Abrams 1957, 113), to use Abrams’s expression, whose vibrations strike V.’s tympanic membrane, is not a “breeze” as in The Gift , but a “breath” to whose rhythm V. attunes himself by letting his own breathing co-sound with it. Owing to the synonymy of anima and spiritus, of psyché and pneuma, the rhythm of the breath to which V. attunes himself and to which he responds, is also the rhythm of a soul that “undulates” in the sleeper’s breathing—a soul that, exhaled and therefore disembodies, could be anybody’s and hence, also Sebastian’s. Since it is finally receptivity and responsiveness that matter, it is irrelevant to V. that the breath with which his own breath has become consonant and that the soul with which his own has become unanimous, were not his brother’s. If the “secret” (Nabokov 1992, 202) that is revealed to him in listening to the stranger’s breathing is “that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations” (Nabokov 1992, 202) and “the hereafter may be the full ability to live in any chosen soul” (Nabokov 1992, 202), it is a secret made accessible by receptive and resonant tympanic membrane of a wide-open ear. Nabokov’s allusions to Pythagorean music foreground sound as a vibrating force that, having the capacity to connect disparate entities, proves apt to embrace his aesthetic and metaphysical concerns. He enquires into the physical and physiological aspects of sound and sound transmission and expands the potential of vibrations to approximate his notion of “cosmic synchronization.” Nabokov stretches the vibrational nexus: Spatially, to encompass imagined sounds, and temporally, by making timbre a vibrant in-between that links past and present. His “otherworldly acoustics” are grounded in the listener’s receptiveness and responsiveness that turn the act of listening into an attunement to whatever undulates.

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Notes 1. Term suggested by F. J. Smith (1968, passim.) to avoid the paradoxical notion of “auditory phenomena.” 2. Pythagorean music shapes Plato’s cosmology, as outlined in the Timaios and the Republic, and was adapted to a Christocentric world picture by the church fathers like Clement of Alexandria in his Exhortation to the Greeks and Augustine in his De Musica. In the Middle Ages, Boethius, in his Institutione musica, reformulated Pythagoras’ concept in terms of musica mundana, musica intrumentalis, and musica humana. The Great Theme informed the theories of polyphonic music of Hucbald of Saint-Amend and Guido of Arrezzo and was revived during the Renaissance by thinkers like Vincenzo Galilei and Ioseffo Zarlino. Pythagoras’ theory of harmony was incorporated into the Elizabethan Great Chain of Being, and adapted by Kepler in his Harmonia mundi to fit into a heliocentric view of the world. Serving as the basis of Athanasius Kircher’s Baroque “doctrine of affections” (Godwin 1993, 263), it was discarded by the Romantics for its arithmetical approach and supplanted by the “human scale” (James 1993, 201), and was revived by Schoenberg and his followers. 3. Nevertheless, Nabokov’s writings abound with references to music whose complexities cannot be addressed within the framework of this chapter. That Nabokov’s statement can be contested has been shown by Simon Karlinsky, who convincingly argues that The Gift follows with its structure a “complex double Bach fugue” (Karlinsky 1963, 285). 4. That Schafer’s notion of soundscape is not unproblematic has been noted, for example, by Ari Y. Kelman who attests Schafer an “urban prejudice” and a “fundamental hostility to the way cities sound” (quoted in Sterne 2013, 187). Sterne underlines that “Schafer’s politics are anti-modernist and anticonsumerist” (Sterne 2013, 188) and driven by a “desire for aesthetic of purity” (Sterne 2013, 190). Peter A. Coates (2005, 640, 642) situates Schafer within the environmentalist agenda of the 1970s and speaks of an “ecologically driven interest in noise pollution.” 5. See for instance Alain Corbin’s study (1998). 6. For a discussion of Derrida’s tympan, see Veit Erlmann (2014, 47–48). 7. See Abrams (1957, 129f.) and Martin Jay (1993, 106) speaks of a “waning of the Enlightenment trust in sight.” 8. Acousmatic denotes sounds whose source cannot be seen. For the term acousmatic, see Pierre Schaeffer (1966, passim.), Michel Chion (1993, passim.), or Brian Kane (2016, passim). For acousmatic situations in Nabokov, see my “Dark Chambers: Nabokov and the Second Sense.” Paper delivered at the International Nabokov Conference, St Petersburg, July 2017 (publication forthcoming).

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Bibliography Abrams, M.H. 1957. The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor. The Kenyon Review 19 (1): 113–130. Alexandrov, Vladimir E. 1991. Nabokov’s Otherworld. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Barenboim, Daniel. 2006. The Neglected Sense. Lecture 2 of Reith Lectures 2006: In the Beginning There Was Sound. downloads.bbc.co.uk.mttp/radio4/ transcripts/2006041-reith.pdf. Bidney, Martin. 1985. The Aeolian Harp Reconsidered: Music of Unfulfilled Longing in Tjutchev, Mörike, Thoreau, and Others. Comparative Literary Studies 22 (3): 329–343. Blackstone, Lee. 2011. Remixing the Music of the Spheres: Listening to the Relevance of an Ancient Doctrine for the Sociology of Music. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 42 (1): 3–31. Bull, Michael, and Les Back (eds.). 2016. The Auditory Culture Reader. London, Oxford, and New York: Bloomsbury. Burnett, Charles et al. (eds.). 1991. The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century. London: The Warburg Institute. Chion, Michel. 1993. La voix au cinéma. Paris: Editions d’étoile. Coates, Peter A. 2005. The Strange Stillness of the Past: Toward an Environmental History of Sound and Noise. Environmental History 10 (4): 636–665. Connolly, Julian. 2005. The Major Russian Novels. In The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov, ed. J. Connolly, 135–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Nicholas. 1998. Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corbin, Alain. 1994. Village Bells: Sounds and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside, trans. M. Thom. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. 1972. Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Erlmann, Veit. 2014. Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality. New York: Zone Books. Frangenberg, Thomas. 1991. Auditus visu prestantior: Comparisons of Hearing and Vision in Charles de Bovelles’s Liber de sensibus. In The Second Sense, ed. C. Burnett et al., 71–94. London: The Warburg Institute. Godwin, Joscelyn (ed.). 1993. The Harmony of the Spheres: A Sourcebook of the Pythagorean Tradition in Music. Rochester: Inner Traditions International. Gouk, Penelope. 1991. Some English Theories of Hearing in the Seventeenth Century: Before and After Descartes. In The Second Sense, ed. C. Burnett et al., 95–114. London: University of London.

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Helmreich, Stefan. 2010. Waves. Insights 3 (18): 2–11. Hendy, David. 2014. Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening. London: Profile Books. Ihde, Don. 1976. Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. James, Jamie. 1993. The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science and the Natural Order of the Universe. London: Abacus. Kahn, Douglas. 2001. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kane, Brian. 2016. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Karlinsky, Simon. 1963. Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel Dar as a Work of Literary Criticism: A Structural Analysis. The Slavic and East European Journal 7 (3): 284–290. Khesti, Roshanak. 2011. Touching Listening: The Aural Imaginary in the World Music Culture Industry. American Quarterly 63 (3): 711–731. Koestler, Arthur. 2014. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. London: Penguin. Levin, David Michael. 1989. The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change, and the Closure of Metaphysics. London and New York: Routledge. Leving, Yuri. 2011. Keys to the Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Lipps, Theodor. 1883. Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens. Bonn: Max Cohen & Sohn. ———. 1902. Von Fühlen, Wollen und Denken: Eine psychologische Skizze. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Bart. ———. 1903. Leitfaden der Psychologie. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann. Metzger, Sabine. 2017. Dark Chambers: Nabokov and the Second Sense. Paper delivered at the International Nabokov Conference, St Petersburg, July 2017 (publication forthcoming). Nabokov, Vladimir. 1938. Laughter in the Dark. Reprint, New York: New Directions, 1960. ———. 1941. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1992. ———. 1947. Bend Sinister. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1990. ———. 1955. Lolita. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1988. ———. 1959. Invitation to a Beheading. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1989. ———. 1963. The Gift. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1988. ———. 1966. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov. Reprint, London: Penguin, 2000.

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———. 1969. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1990. ———. 1970. Mary. Reprint, London: Penguin, 2007. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1990. ———. 1995. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1997. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2002. Listening, trans. C. Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Nicol, Charles. 2003. Buzzwords and Dorophonemes: How Words Proliferate and Things Decay in Ada. In Nabokov at Cornell, ed. G. Shapiro, 91–102. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rosenfeld, Sophia. 2011. On Being Heard: A Case for Paying Attention to the Historical Ear. The American Historical Review 116 (2): 316–334. Russolo, Luigi, Francesco Balilla Pratella et al. 1913. The Art of Noise: Destruction of Music by Futurist Machines, ed. Candice Black, trans. Anna Battista et al. Los Angeles: Sun Vision Press, 2012. Schafer, Murray S. 1994. The Soundscape. The Tuning of the World. Rochester: Destiny Books. Schaeffer, Pierre. 1966. Traité des objets musicaux. Paris: Seuil. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. 2016. Hearing Loss. In The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. M. Bull and L. Back, 23–35. London: Bloomsbury. Sears, Elizabeth. 1991. The Iconography of Auditory perception in the Early Middle Ages: On Psalm Illustration and Psalm Exegesis. In The Second Sense, ed. C. Burnett et al., 19–42. London: The Warburg Institute. Shapiro, Gavriel (ed.). 2003. Nabokov at Cornell. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Shelley, Percy Busshe. 2009. The Major Works, ed. Z. Leader and M. O’Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simmel, Georg. 2008. Soziologie der Sinne. In Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, ed. A. Cavalli and V. Krech, 276–292. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Smith, F.J. 1968. Vers une phénoménologie du son, trans. E. Baer. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 73 (3): 328–343. Sterne, Jonathan. 2013. Soundscape, Landscape, Escape. In Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sounds as Mediated Cultural Heritage, ed. K. Bijsterveld, 181–194. Bielefeld: Transcript. Toker, Leona. 1989. The Mystery of Literary Structures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Trower, Shelley. 2008. Vibratory Movements. Senses and Society 3 (2): 133–136.

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———. 2009. Nerves, Vibration and the Aeolian Harp. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 54, https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ravon/ 2009-n54-ravon3401/038761ar/. Accessed 1 August 2018. Vögelin, Salomé. 2010. Listening to Sound and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Continuum.

CHAPTER 18

Vladimir Nabokov’s Musico-Literary Microcosm: “Sounds,” “Music,” and Nabokov’s Quartet Kiyoko Magome

Vladimir Nabokov’s perception of music has been referred to by himself, his son Dmitri Nabokov, and neurologists, such as Oliver Sacks, Richard E. Cytowic, and David M. Eagleman, and it reminds us of some of the characteristics of amusia. Amusia means “[a] condition in which there is the loss of a musical ability, such as the comprehension of music, the production of music, or the ability to read or write musical notation” (Oxford English Dictionary 1997). Interestingly, the characteristics Nabokov himself and the other people have mentioned concerning his inability to enjoy music didn’t prevent him from writing stories related to music but rather inspired him to create unique musico-literary devices. Dmitri Nabokov, who translated many of his father’s works from Russian into English, points out that “music, for which he [Vladimir] never professed a special love, often figures prominently in his writing (‘Sounds,’ ‘Bachmann,’ ‘Music,’ ‘The Assistant Producer’)” (Nabokov 2010, xiv). As his son’s words imply, Nabokov’s short stories effectively reveal several aspects characteristic of his musico-literary microcosm.

K. Magome (B) University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_18

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For example, while his early short stories like “Sounds” (written 1923) and “Music” (1932) make us imagine his way of perceiving sounds and music, Nabokov’s Quartet (1966)—consisting of “An Affair of Honor” (1927), “Lik” (1939), “The Vane Sisters” (written 1951), and “The Visit to the Museum” (1939)—attracts our attention in terms of his special interest not in music itself but in stage performances involving music as well as the musical form of a quartet. These works, spanning more than forty years of Nabokov’s career, give us a great opportunity to experience his rich musico-literary microcosm.

Nabokov and Music In his autobiography Speak, Memory, Nabokov recollects his father’s “very early, and lifelong, passion for the opera” and writes that “a melodious gene that missed me glides through my father […] to my son [Dmitri, an American opera singer]” (Nabokov 1966b, 138). While his expression suggests that he, unlike his family members, has neither passion nor talent for music, his and Dmitri’s words and neurologists’ analyses of them strongly stimulate us to focus on the relationship between Nabokov’s characteristic perception of music—the possibility of congenital amusia— and his exceptional literary talent. The neuroscientific research into congenital amusia is still in progress: “The neural causes of congenital amusia, a lifelong deficit in pitch and music perception, are not fully understood” (Norman-Haignere et al. 2016, 2986). In this condition, what we can do is to keep paying careful attention to the research in progress and neurologists’ interest in Nabokov, concentrate on examining his characteristic ways of perceiving and using music through our close reading of his literary works, and shed light on unexplored aspects of his rich, multidimensional microcosm. Naturally, neurologists have analyzed Nabokov’s perception of music by focusing on his autobiographical writing and his son’s comments on him rather than his imaginative literary works. Sacks, for example, was startled to find Nabokov’s following words: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones” (Nabokov 1966b, 22). Sacks analyzes: “I do not know what to make of this, for Nabokov is such a jester, such an ironist, that one is never sure whether to take him seriously. But it is

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conceivable, at least, that in the Pandora’s box of his multitudinous gifts there was, along with these, perhaps, a profound amusia” (Sacks 2008, 109–110). In the same book, Sacks also mentions Dmitri’s words that “his father could not in fact recognize any music” (Sacks 2008, 110) and later in an interview says even more clearly that Nabokov could not understand music (Sacks 2013, 150). Unlike Sacks, Cytowic and Eagleman refer to Nabokov, his mother, wife, and son several times as synesthetes. They explain that “‘synesthesia’ means ‘joined sensation,’ such that a voice or music, for example, is not only heard but also seen, tasted, or felt as a physical touch” and show examples: “Vladimir Nabokov, for example, experienced colors in response to the sounds of language, whereas his mother experienced colors in response to music” (Cytowic and Eagleman 2011, 1, 227). This passage is worth noting, for it highlights the fact that Nabokov, unlike his mother, responded not to “music” but to “the sounds of language.” Thus, neurologists’ interest in Nabokov’s perception of the world has directly or indirectly revealed the possibility of amusia. Interestingly, the words “sounds” and “music” Cytowic and Eagleman use in the above passage are the titles of two of Nabokov’s early short stories, which vividly reflect his characteristic perception of sounds and music and exemplify his rather straightforward ways of utilizing them as literary devices. In an interview Nabokov closely talks about music and implies its relationship with his literature: I have no ear for music, a shortcoming I deplore bitterly. When I attend a concert […] I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood […] take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians. My knowledge of music is very slight; and I have a special reason for finding my ignorance and inability so sad, so unjust: There is a wonderful singer in my family—my own son […]. I am perfectly aware of the many parallels between the art forms of music and those of literature, especially in matters of structure, but what can I do if ear and brain refuse to cooperate? (Toffler 1964)

It is clear that Nabokov had trouble in “follow[ing] the sequence and relationship of sounds” and “deplore[d] bitterly” his “inability” to enjoy music. The expression that “ear and brain refuse to cooperate” stimulates us to think about the possibility of congenital amusia as the neurologists

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do. However, Nabokov also maintains that he is “perfectly aware of the many parallels between the art forms of music and those of literature, especially in matters of structure,” which seems to mean that he could understand musical forms and structures based not on his auditory experiences but probably on theoretical explanations and/or visual images of them and even apply them to his literature. In fact, Nabokov uses musical terms like “counterpoint” in such expressions as “the ‘contrapuntal’ nature of fate” (Nabokov 1966b, 249). “Counterpoint” can be defined as “[t]he art of combining two or more melodic lines […]. Melodic and rhythmic shape are equally important in contrapuntal writing, where the ear must perceive the music both horizontally and vertically to absorb it fully: that is taking in both melody and harmony” (Headington 1980, 40). In addition to Nabokov’s direct references to “counterpoint,” scholars have analyzed his novels’ contrapuntal structures. While Simon Karlinsky relates the narrative structure of Dar [The Gift ] to “a complex double fugue [a contrapuntal structure]” (Karlinsky 1963, 285), Isabella H. Oppen closely examines the “structural similarities of the text [Pale Fire] with musical counterpoint” (Oppen 2018, 1). Therefore, we can think that Nabokov did have trouble in perceiving music but could understand musical forms and structures probably in terms of theories and/or visual images. The point is that in some of his short stories he effectively uses both his problems with sounds and music and his understanding of musical forms and structures, such as the form of a quartet and the contrapuntal structures like the fugue, creating a unique musico-literary microcosm.

Early Short Stories: “Sounds” and “Music” “Sounds” deals with the male narrator-protagonist’s affair with a married woman and his premonition that it will end soon. The story has three significant scenes where he gradually realizes how the world functions through the image of sounds interacting with each other for an instant. The first scene is the opening of the story, closely describing how the narrator-protagonist perceives the world: It was necessary to shut the window: rain was striking the sill and splashing the parquet and armchairs. With a fresh, slippery sound, enormous silver specters sped through the garden, through the foliage, along the orange

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sand. The drainpipe rattled and choked. You [his lover] were playing Bach […]. Abandoning the albums that lay on the table like velvet coffins, I watched you and listened to the fugue, the rain. A feeling of freshness welled in me like the fragrance of wet carnations that trickled down everywhere […]. I had a feeling of enraptured equilibrium as I sensed the musical relationship between the silvery specters of rain and your inclined shoulders, which would give a shudder when you pressed your fingers into the rippling luster. And when I withdrew deep into myself the whole world seemed like that—homogeneous, congruent, bound by the laws of harmony. I myself, you, the carnations, at that instant all became vertical chords on musical staves. I realized that everything in the world was an interplay of identical particles comprising different kinds of consonance. (Nabokov 1995, 16–17)

What attracts our attention most strongly is the active, flexible interactions among the narrator-protagonist’s senses of hearing, sight, and smell. First, he hears a mixture of “a fresh, slippery sound” which “enormous silver specters” of rain produce, the “rattl[ing] and chok[ing]” sounds coming from the drainpipe, and the Bach fugue played by his lover. In the next instant, he begins to express his simultaneous acts of watching and listening: “I watched you and listened to the fugue, the rain.” In addition, his senses of hearing and sight quickly interact with “[a] feeling of freshness […] like the fragrance of wet carnations,” or an image linked to his sense of smell. Their active “interplay” soon brings about “a feeling of enraptured equilibrium,” leading to his realization of the world. The point of his realization in terms of sounds and music is that while expressions concerning music, such as “the musical relationship,” “the laws of harmony,” “vertical chords on musical staves,” and “consonance,” appear one after another, the main focus is placed on sounds resounding “at that instant,” not the ordinary image of music developing beautifully in the passage of time and often attracting our attention to the dominant melodic line. In fact, “vertical chords” and “consonance” emphasize the image of several sounds of different pitch produced simultaneously and controlled by “the laws of harmony.” As noted in the previous section, the Bach fugue in this opening scene seems to represent contrapuntal music, especially its structure which Nabokov understood theoretically and applied to his literary works. What is worth noting here is that while counterpoint stimulates “the ear [to] perceive the music both horizontally

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and vertically,” descriptions of the opening scene gradually focus almost exclusively on the vertical relationships of the sounds. In other words, the implication is that the narrator-protagonist understands the world mainly through the image of sounds intertwining vertically with each other for a fleeting instant. His second realization of the world is like a perfect summary of the first one. In the scene, he and his lover visit their friend, and his realization happens: And suddenly it was supremely clear to me that, for centuries, the world had been blooming, withering, spinning, changing solely in order that now, at this instant, it might combine and fuse into a vertical chord the voice that had resounded downstairs, the motion of your [his lover’s] silken shoulder blades, and the scent of pine boards. (Nabokov 1995, 20)

As in the first scene, the focus is put on “now, at this instant,” “a vertical chord,” and the simultaneous interplay among “the voice,” “the motion,” and “the scent,” or that among the senses of hearing, sight, and smell. The narrator-protagonist’s third realization occurs when he is by himself. It [the feeling he experienced] was happy because it had a harmonious flow. It was happy as any movement or radiance is happy. I had once been splintered into a million beings and objects. Today I am one; tomorrow I shall splinter again. And thus everything in the world decants and modulates. That day I was on the crest of a wave. I knew that all my surroundings were notes of one and the same harmony, knew—secretly—the source and the inevitable resolution of the sounds assembled for an instant, and the new chord that would be engendered by each of the dispersing notes. My soul’s musical ear knew and comprehended everything. (Nabokov 1995, 25)

Again, the focus is even more clearly placed on the image of the world as “the inevitable resolution of the sounds assembled for an instant” like the “vertical chord” in the first and the second scenes. The importance of the “instant” is most strongly emphasized through the sense he has: “I had once been splintered […]. Today I am one; tomorrow I shall splinter again.” Thus, what the narrator-protagonist calls “[m]y soul’s musical ear” grasps the secret mechanism of the world in terms of the fleeting image of the “vertical chord,” or the simultaneously produced “sounds.” This realization leads to his premonition that his relationship with his

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lover will end soon. In this sense, the title “Sounds” effectively represents the whole story and a microcosm evoking in us the author’s actual sensory experiences by the early 1920s. “Music,” written in the early 1930s, probably reflects and reveals how Nabokov perceived music in most straightforward ways. In fact, Nabokov and Victor, the protagonist, are similar in responding to music. As noted earlier, in an interview Nabokov says: “I have no ear for music […]. When I attend a concert […] I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood […] take over […].” At the end of “Music,” Victor, like Nabokov, says, “I have no ear for music,” and the quick shift of his concentration from listening to music to watching “reflections of hands in lacquered wood” is also mentioned repeatedly in the story. “Music” describes how Victor enters his friend’s drawing room where Wolf plays the piano, finds his former wife there, remembers their relationship, and comes back to reality when the music ends. Just after entering the room, Victor begins to examine the guests there, and his eyes become fastened on the reflections of Wolf’s hands: “[…] in the lacquered depths of the open keyboard lid, the doubles of his hands were engaged in a ghostly, intricate, even somewhat clownish mimicry” (Nabokov 1995, 380). Victor’s interest not in music but in the reflections of the pianist’s hands is almost the same as what Nabokov says in the aforementioned interview. In the next scene, Victor’s—and probably Nabokov’s—characteristic way of perceiving music is described closely: To Victor any music he did not know—and all he knew was a dozen conventional tunes—could be likened to the patter of a conversation in a strange tongue: in vain you strive to define at least the limits of the words, but everything slips and merges, so that the laggard ear begins to feel boredom. Victor tried to concentrate on listening, but soon caught himself watching Wolf’s hands and their spectral reflections. When the sounds grew into insistent thunder, the performer’s neck would swell, his widespread fingers tensed, and he emitted a faint grunt. […] For a moment Victor tried to attend to the music again, but scarcely had he focused on it when his attention dissolved. (Nabokov 1995, 380–381)

The passage effectively explains Victor’s way of perceiving music by comparing his effort to understand it to one’s desperate attempt to make sense

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of “a conversation in a strange tongue.” In addition, while he repeatedly fails to “concentrate on listening,” the music Wolf plays metamorphoses into “the sounds [of] insistent thunder.” In this situation, Victor finds his former wife in the room, begins to recall his life with her, and feels that “the music [has] fenced them in and [has] become for them a kind of prison, where they [are] both fated to remain captive until the pianist cease[s] constructing and keeping up his vaults of sound” (Nabokov 1995, 382). Since music is a mere succession of sounds for Victor, it is understandable that each of the piano notes Wolf produces gradually changes into something like a small brick in his imagination, and the imaginary construction of such things as a “fence,” a “prison,” and “vaults” progresses around him. In fact, while more memories of their happy life come back to Victor, “[t]he barrier of sounds remain[s] just as high and impenetrable. The spectral hands in their lacquered depths continue to go through the same contortions” (Nabokov 1995, 383). In other words, Victor can live with his former wife again as if by magic only inside the “fence,” the “prison,” the “vaults,” and the “barrier”— the unique visual world made of sounds Wolf’s “spectral hands” keep producing. Toward the climax of the music, Victor remembers how his former wife cheated on him and revealed it to him, and when the music ends, “[t]he musical barrier dissolve[s]” (Nabokov 1995, 385). He then realizes: [T]he music, which before [has] seemed a narrow dungeon where, shackled together by the resonant sounds, they [have] been compelled to sit face-to-face some twenty feet apart, [has] actually been incredible bliss, a magic glass dome that [has] embraced and imprisoned him and her, [has] made it possible for him to breathe the same air as she; and now everything [has] been broken and scattered, she [is] disappearing through the door, Wolf [has] shut the piano, and the enchanting captivity [cannot] be restored. (Nabokov 1995, 385)

Again, the invisible constructions made of sounds for confining people appear and are understood more deeply as “incredible bliss,” but they are dramatically “broken and scattered” like blown-up buildings when the music ends. Interestingly, the end of the music is not the end of “Music.” A short scene like a coda follows, functioning as another important key to “Music.”

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He [Victor] was greeted by a man named Boke who said in a gentle voice, ‘I kept watching you. What a reaction to music! You know, you looked so bored I felt sorry for you. Is it possible that you are so completely indifferent to it?’ ‘Why, no. I wasn’t bored,’ Victor answered awkwardly. ‘It’s just that I have no ear for music, and that makes me a poor judge. By the way, what was it he played?’ ‘What you will,’ said Boke in the apprehensive whisper of a rank outsider. ‘“Maiden’s Prayer,” or the “Kreutzer Sonata.” Whatever you will.’ (Nabokov 1995, 385)

As already argued, “I have no ear for music” is both Victor’s and Nabokov’s words, suggesting their characteristic perception of music and the world. In addition, Boke’s comment on Victor’s surprising “reaction to music” prompts us to examine the unique world of this story more carefully. In fact, the two musical works Boke mentions at the very end of the story play significant roles. “The Maiden’s Prayer” is a popular piano piece composed by Polish composer Tekla B˛adarzewska-Baranowska, and as the title indicates, it makes us imagine a young woman’s chastity and her pure, religious heart (Sadie 2001, 452). The “Kreutzer Sonata” evokes totally different images. It can imply at least the following musical and/or literary works: “Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in A, Op. 47, composed in 1802-3 [and] dedicated to Rodolphe Kreutzer […]. [Leoš] Janáˇcek’s String Quartet No. 1, composed in 1923 […]. On the score Janáˇcek wrote ‘Inspired by L. N. Tolstoy’s Kreutzer-sonata’ […] published in 1890” (Arnold 1984, 1034). In other words, the “Kreutzer Sonata” can remind us of Beethoven’s violin sonata, Tolstoy’s novella influenced by it, and/or Janáˇcek’s string quartet “[i]nspiredy by” Tolstoy’s novella. Interestingly, all of them are related to troubles involving two men and one woman. For example, both Tolstoy’s novella and Janáˇcek’s string quartet deal with a wife’s affair with a violin player and her husband’s murdering her as a consequence of the betrayal. In other words, these works offer a striking contrast to what “The Maiden’s Prayer” represents. What is even more intriguing is that the music Wolf plays throughout the story cannot be either “The Maiden’s Prayer” or the “Kreutzer Sonata.” Indeed, its composer is a man because a guest says, “[T]hat’s the best thing he ever wrote” (Nabokov 1995, 385). This means that the music is not “The Maiden’s Prayer,” composed by a woman. In addition, the “Kreutzer Sonata” cannot be a piece for piano solo, which reveals that the music Wolf plays is something different. The

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question is why Nabokov put the titles of these two musical pieces in the last scene. One possible reason is that he wanted to utilize not the music itself but rather the images of the titles and the anecdotes of the two famous musical pieces in order to effectively arouse our imagination about the relationship between Victor and his former wife in the past. On another level, Nabokov’s strange reference to the two famous musical pieces through Boke’s—“a rank outsider[’s]”—voice may sound like the author’s secret message to us readers at the very end of “Music.” If so, Boke’s irrelevant remark, “‘Maiden’s Prayer,’ or the ‘Kreutzer Sonata.’ Whatever you will,” can be understood as the author’s indirect, playful confession that he is not good at telling the difference between musical pieces. The remark can also be the author’s kind advice for his readers, and it may sound like this: “Boke’s word ‘you’ doesn’t just mean Victor but includes you, the readers. You should pay careful attention not just to music itself in my story but rather to various elements intertwining with it, such as the titles of musical pieces, their famous anecdotes, and obsessive visual images like Wolf’s spectral hands and imaginary constructions made of sounds. They are important keys to my story.” Thus, Nabokov’s two early short stories, “Sounds” and “Music,” quietly convey to us how the author perceives the world in terms of sounds and music and expose us to new, stimulating ways to understand it through his literature.

Nabokov ’s Quartet as His Microcosm Unlike “Sounds” and “Music,” the four short stories published independently between the 1920s and the 1950s and confined to the frame of Nabokov’s Quartet in 1966 reveal different aspects of Nabokov’s musicoliterary microcosm. The four stories are similar in that all of them interact with such images of stage performances as operas, operettas, and plays involving music. In this sense, they can be regarded as Nabokov’s musical quartet, but the implication of the title Nabokov’s Quartet is more profound. The first story, “An Affair of Honor,” relates Anton Petrovich’s impending duel to the famous duel scene in Eugene Onegin, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s opera based on Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse and first performed in Moscow in 1879. In Act II of the opera, “[o]ut of boredom, at a ball at Madame Larina’s house he [Onegin] flirts with Olga [Madame Larina’s daughter], and is challenged to a duel by the jealous Lensky [Olga’s lover and Onegin’s friend]. In the duel Lensky is killed,

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and Onegin flees abroad” (Osborne 1983, 109–110). The main characters of Nabokov’s story are Russian expatriates in Berlin in the mid1920s, and when Petrovich happens to notice the affair between his wife Tanya and his friend Berg, he hears her “singing loudly in the bathroom” (Nabokov 1966a, 16). It is as if her “bewitching voice” takes Petrovich to the operatic world in the nineteenth century where he is supposed to duel with Berg (Nabokov 1966a, 17). Though Petrovich runs away at the last moment, his imagination concerning the impending duel is greatly influenced by the image of the opera: “Does one salute one’s opponent? What does Onegin do in the opera? […] The tenor Sobinov [Leonid Vitalyevich Sobinov, an acclaimed Imperial Russian tenor who played the role of Lensky] once crashed down so realistically that his pistol flew into the orchestra” (Nabokov 1966a, 31). This image is almost the same as what Nabokov remembered when he heard of his father’s impending duel as a child: “I saw stout Sobinov in the part of Lenski crash down and send his weapon flying into the orchestra” (Nabokov 1966b, 148). In addition to this depressing memory and image concerning Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, the fact that Nabokov hated that opera should also be taken into consideration in analyzing its role in this short story. He writes that he “loathed [the melody of] Vladimir Lenski’s wail” and also uses such expressions as “admir[ing] Pushkin on the strength of Chaykovski’s vile librettos” (Nabokov 1966b, 65, 205). Therefore, in many respects, Petrovich, who feels that he has “to be a good actor” (Nabokov 1966a, 36), looks like a bad one trying in vain to revive a traditional Russian duel in Berlin. The protagonist of the second story, “Lik,” is “a real Russian actor” (Nabokov 1966a, 49), playing the role of Igor, “an émigré Russian aristocrat [in France],” in southern France in the 1930s (Nabokov 1966a, 47). Though Igor in this story is a character of a French play, the name probably cannot but remind us of Prince Igor, the protagonist of Alexander Borodin’s opera, Prince Igor, especially after we analyze the interaction between “An Affair of Honor” and Tchaikovsky’s opera. Prince Igor, first performed in St. Petersburg in 1890, begins with the scene where Prince Igor leaves the world of Russians to fight against the Polovtsians (Osborne 1983, 252). In other words, at the beginning of the story, Lik’s identity as a Russian struggling outside his home is doubly emphasized by his role of Igor in the French play and the image of Igor in Borodin’s opera. Lik suffers from “an incurable heart ailment” and imagines

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his impending death on the stage, where “the toe of one foot [is] protruding from beneath the folds of the lowered curtain” (Nabokov 1966a, 50, 53). Though he has repressed his old memory of Russia, especially of his violent relative Koldunov, the person appears in his dreams as if “from behind a curtain” (Nabokov 1966a, 59). Finally, the two Russian émigrés begin to run into each other in southern France. For example, when Lik comes out of a shoe store by “[s]eparating the bead curtain” (Nabokov 1966a, 63), Koldunov is there. Thus, the word “curtain” keeps appearing, gives the whole story the image of a stage performance, and represents ambiguous borders between Lik’s and Koldunov’s lives, their lives in Russia and France, and life and death. What interacts with the image of the “curtain” is that of “the dark center”—“death,” “an exit into true reality,” “his [Lik’s] Russia […] so thickly clouded over,” and Lik’s bad “dreams” concerning Koldunov (Nabokov 1966a, 55, 57). In this structure, Koldunov compares life to a stage, and asks Lik, “Why have I been assigned the part of some kind of miserable scoundrel” (Nabokov 1966a, 67), and shoots himself: A crowd had gathered […]. Koldunov’s wife was sitting on a chair by the public fountain. Her forehead and left cheek glistened with blood, her hair was matted, and she sat quite straight and motionless, surrounded by the curious, while, next to her, also motionless, stood her boy, in a bloodstained shirt, covering his face with his fist, a kind of tableau. (Nabokov 1966a, 71–72)

Just as the word “Igor” at the beginning of the story stimulates us to think about its possible interaction with the famous Russian opera, the word “tableau” at the end of the story set in France reminds us not only of a painting but also of a characteristic of French opera. “Tableau” can be defined as follows: “In French opera, the equivalent of ‘scene.’ In general usage, a temporarily ‘frozen’ stage picture, as at the climax of an ensemble or finale” (Hamilton 1987, 355). In other words, unlike “An Affair of Honor,” even though “Lik” never deals with any kind of music directly, the effective implications concerning operas in the opening and ending scenes and the highly symbolic “curtains” repeatedly appearing between them have the power to make us imagine the whole story as Nabokov’s unique opera.

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“The Vane Sisters,” one of Nabokov’s most famous short stories, follows “Lik.” Unlike the first two stories, the main characters are not Russian expatriates in Europe but people in the United States; in fact, the male narrator-protagonist is “a Frenchman” teaching at a girls’ college in New England, and the Vane Sisters have ancestors who came “to a newer world” (Nabokov 1966a, 81). The story also often interacts with Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. For example, the name of the younger sister “Sybil Vane,” the narrator-protagonist’s student, reminds us of the actress “Sibyl Vane” in Wilde’s novel, who performs the role of Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with “a dreadful orchestra” but speaks her lines as musical instruments do, fascinating Dorian Gray. Wilde describes that her voice “sound[s] like a flute or a distant hautbois” and sometimes “[has] the wild passion of violins” (Wilde 1891, 50–51). Thus, in “The Vane Sisters,” the image of a stage performance involving musical elements can be evoked indirectly through the image of Wilde’s Sibyl. In this ambiguous musical juxtaposition, Nabokov’s Sybil, like Wilde’s Sibyl, commits suicide because of her affair with a man called “D.” During an examination given by the narrator-protagonist, Sybil predicts her suicide by writing as follows: “Death was not better than D minus, but definitely better than Life minus D.” (Nabokov 1966a, 79). “D.” clearly symbolizes “Death,” the grade “D minus” not just for the examination but also for the girl’s “Life” without her lover, and the initial of her former lover’s name. Interestingly, most of the implications of “D.” also function well in the life of Wilde’s Sibyl. After Sybil’s death, her elder sister Cynthia, a believer in spiritualism, begins to invite the narratorprotagonist to “little farces,” where Wilde appears as a ghost: “Oscar Wilde came in and in rapid garbled French, with the usual anglicisms, obscurely accused Cynthia’s dead parents of what appeared in my [the narrator-protagonist’s] jottings as ‘plagiatisme [sic]’” (Nabokov 1966a, 85). This passage, on one level, can be understood that Wilde’s ghost in the “farce” is angry with Nabokov for utilizing his character Sibyl as Sybil without permission. Thus, various interactions between Nabokov’s Sybil and Wilde’s Sibyl can gradually change “The Vane Sisters” into a mysterious stage performance involving vague musical elements in our imagination. Though this story has nothing to do with music on the surface, hybrid musico-literary elements actually lurk, waiting for us to activate them flexibly especially when it is put in the larger context of Nabokov’s Quartet.

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In the last story, “The Visit to the Museum,” the male narratorprotagonist, a Russian exile, visits a strange, maze-like museum in France, which somehow leads to “the factual Russia of today [the Soviet Union],” not his hometown in old Russia; finally, he is “arrested” there and “get[s] back abroad” (Nabokov 1966a, 103, 104). The story keeps intertwining with Jacques Offenbach’s operetta, Orpheus in the Underworld. The operetta, first performed in Paris in 1858, can be explained as “a burlesque on the Olympian gods and, incidentally, on the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice” (Ewen 1955, 372). Nabokov makes his story, the tragic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Offenbach’s comical operetta based on the myth interact with each other, creating a complex tragi-comical world existing on the border between reality and imagination, the past and the present, “Russia” and its outside, this world and the underworld. For example, the narrator-protagonist and an old custodian of the museum who keeps following him are described as a parody of Orpheus and Eurydice. Whether or not Orpheus can take his beloved wife out of the underworld without looking back at her is the main focus of the myth. However, in Nabokov’s story, the narrator-protagonist quietly followed by the custodian realizes that a portrait bears “a likeness to Offenbach” (Nabokov 1966a, 95) and turns around not for love but for a comical reason: “I felt a vinegarish breath near my shoulder, and turned to meet the custodian’s kindly gaze” (Nabokov 1966a, 96). In addition, after the narrator-protagonist meets the museum’s director M. Godard, who has “God” in his name, they, the custodian, and the other visitors—who are noisy, and at least some of them are drunk—begin to wander around “the unnecessarily spreading museum” (Nabokov 1966a, 100). This reminds us of the scene of the operetta where Orpheus, Jupiter, and the other gods on Mount Olympus go to the underworld and join a bacchanalian revelry there. In fact, some of us may even remember the famous, cheerful music of the scene while reading. In this chaotic museum, the narrator-protagonist finds himself standing near “a pool with a bronze Orpheus atop a green rock” and notices that the “aquatic theme” continues (Nabokov 1966a, 101). The combination between “Orpheus” and the “aquatic theme” makes us imagine the end of the myth of Orpheus where he is torn to pieces and floats down the river. This image effectively emphasizes the fragmented identity the narrator-protagonist realizes as an “exile” after getting out of the museum. In the snow, he is confused and starts “pulling out everything [he has] in [his] pockets, ripping up papers, throwing them into the snow,” and trying “to tear off

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and destroy [his] clothes, [his] linen, [his] shoes, everything, and remain ideally naked” (Nabokov 1966a, 104). Thus, like the other three stories, Nabokov doesn’t directly deal with music itself but indirectly and elaborately utilizes elements interacting with it. As examined above, all four stories are related to the images of stage performances involving music, and these independent stories are confined to the larger frame of a quartet. The frame of Nabokov’s Quartet works well because the image of a musical quartet—for example, the dynamic interactions among the four string players on the stage—and the relationships among the four stories make us feel their structural juxtaposition. The string quartet represents a well-balanced, dynamic microcosm with no clear center. The discourse made by four string players’ performance has the power to remind us of traditional views of the universe relevant, for example, to the Empedoclean idea of the four interacting elements—earth, fire, water, and air. The music performed by two violins, one viola, and one cello was born in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century as “the quintessential ‘music of friends’, an intimate and tightly constructed dialogue among equals, at once subtle and serious, challenging to play, and with direct appeal to the earnest enthusiast” (Bashford 2005, 4). In fact, the string quartet has “widely [been] regarded as the supreme form of chamber music” (Sadie 2001, 585). One marked characteristic of the string quartet is that unlike members of an orchestra, the four string players as “friends” and “equals” perform without a conductor, or a visible center controlling the whole discourse, and create a democratic microcosm as “the supreme form.” Nabokov’s Quartet is similar to the microcosmic discourse of the string quartet in that it makes the four stories interact with each other through such images as invisible, mysterious, and/or absent centers and keeps creating a sophisticated microcosm. For example, the image of an absent center repeatedly appears as that of the Russian exiles’ lost home in “An Affair of Honor,” “Lik,” and “The Visit to the Museum.” In “Lik,” “the dark center” represents not just “his Russia […] so thickly clouded over” but also mysterious things, such as “death,” his bad “dreams,” and “an exit into true reality,” and he doesn’t know where and how they exist. The rich symbolism of “D.” in “The Vane Sisters”—the character called “D.,” his lover’s “death,” “Dorian” and his lover’s “death” in Wilde’s novel carefully juxtaposed with Nabokov’s story, and the narrator-protagonist’s “dream”-like experiences like seeing Wilde’s ghost—stimulates us to feel that “D.” is scattered not just in the story but also outside it, weakening

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our sense of the center. In the last story, “The Visit to the Museum,” the strange, maze-like museum in France somehow leads to the Soviet Union, confusing the narrator-protagonist’s and our sense of spatiality and emphasizing the disappearance of Russia, an important center in the past. Thus, the four stories related to stage performances deal with the image of the center as something mysterious, scattered, invisible, or nonexistent but still keep developing the well-balanced, dynamic microcosm of Nabokov’s Quartet as the four string players of a musical quartet do on the stage. Another key to Nabokov’s Quartet can be found in the fact that Nabokov didn’t put the four stories in chronological order: “‘The Vane Sisters’ appears third in the book, even though in chronological order, it should be last” (Wagner-Martin 1999, 60). The special role Nabokov gives this famous story in the context of Nabokov’s Quartet is probably to universalize the main themes of the collection flexibly and—as the third movement of a string quartet often does—to create an atmosphere somewhat different from the last part, the climax of the quartet. For example, the relationship between “The Vane Sisters” and music is most indirect in Nabokov’s Quartet. While the other three stories interact with particular operas, operettas, and/or elements characteristic of them, “The Vane Sisters” doesn’t. On one level, this characteristic prevents all four stories from falling into the same pattern of juxtaposition between a short story and an opera/operetta, enriches the variations of musico-literary interactions, and activates the whole discourse of Nabokov’s Quartet. In addition, only this story focuses on a Frenchman in the United States, which conveys that Nabokov’s Quartet deals not just with Russians in Europe but rather with people outside their home countries. The third story flexibly relating the first two stories to the last one also seems to play the role of the viola in the string quartet as a key mediator between the two violins and the cello. After “The Vane Sisters,” the collection moves on to the last story, the climax of the quartet, where such themes common to the four stories as the identity of exiles and the image of the mysterious center are treated most dynamically through the complex interactions among Nabokov’s story, the tragic episode in Greek myths, and the comical scenes in Offenbach’s operetta. Thus, Nabokov fully utilizes both the visual images of stage performances involving music and the discursive image of musical quartets, creating Nabokov’s Quartet as his microcosm.

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Nabokov’s short stories related to music inspire us to experience the world in new, vivid ways. His musico-literary microcosm is unique because he effectively makes his literature reflect both his “inability” to enjoy music and his understanding of musical forms and structures. The two early stories “Sounds” and “Music” stimulate us to imagine how he perceived sounds and music and to feel the literary world greatly influenced by his auditory experiences. The four short stories in Nabokov’s Quartet direct our attention not to music itself but rather to visual images of various stage performances involving music, and the title of the collection implies Nabokov’s profound understanding of the structure and function of musical quartets as well as his elaborate technique to deal with the relationships among the four stories, revealing one aspect of his musico-literary microcosm. Music is an important key to understanding Nabokov’s literary microcosm.

Bibliography Arnold, Denis (ed.). 1984. The New Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bashford, Christina. 2005. The String Quartet and Society. In The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet, ed. Robin Stowell, 3–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cytowic, Richard E., and David M. Eagleman. 2011. Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia. Cambridge: MIT Press. Ewen, David (ed.). 1955. Encyclopedia of the Opera. New York: Hill and Wang. Hamilton, David (ed.). 1987. The Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia: A Comprehensive Guide to the World of Opera. New York: Simon and Schuster. Headington, Christopher. 1980. Illustrated Dictionary of Musical Terms. New York: Harper & Row. Karlinsky, Simon. 1963. Nabokov’s Novel Dar as a Work of Literary Criticism: A Structural Analysis. The Slavic and East European Journal 7: 284–290. Nabokov, Dmitri. 2010. Preface. In Collected Stories, by Vladimir Nabokov, xi–xv. New York: Penguin Books. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1966a. Nabokov’s Quartet. New York: Phaedra Publishers. ———. 1966b. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. ———. 1995. The Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 2002. Norman-Haignere, Sam V., Philippe Albouy, Anne Caclin, Josh H. McDermott, Nancy G. Kanwisher, and Barbara Tillmann. 2016. Pitch-Responsive Cortical Regions in Congenital Amusia. The Journal of Neuroscience 36: 2986–2994.

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Oppen, Isabella Healy. 2018. Musical Counterpoint in Thematic and Analytical Application in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Nabokov Online Journal 12: 1– 20. http://www.nabokovonline.com/uploads2/3/7/7/23779748/5_pale_ fire_and_counterpoint_oppen.pdf. Accessed 7 December 2018. Osborne, Charles (ed.). 1983. The Dictionary of Opera. London: Macdonald. Oxford English Dictionary. 1997. http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.tulips.tsukuba. ac.jp/view/Entry/240470?redirectedFrom=amusia#eid. Accessed 5 August 2018. Sacks, Oliver. 2008. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2013. The Soft Brain. In The Reversal of Intellect, ed. Mayumi Yoshinari, 127–167. Tokyo: NHK Publishing. Sadie, Stanley (ed.). 2001. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. New York: Macmillan. Toffler, Alvin. 1964. Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov. http://reprints. longform.org/playboy-interview-vladimir-nabokov. Accessed 5 August 2018. Wagner-Martin, Linda. 1999. ‘The VaNe Sisters’ and Nabokov’s ‘Subtle and Loving’ Readers. In Value and Vision in American Literature: Literary Essays in Honor of Ray Lewis White, ed. Joseph Candido, 47–63. Athens: Ohio University Press. Wilde, Oscar. 1891. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2003.

CHAPTER 19

‘Tactio Has Come of Age’: The Tactile Sense in Nabokov’s Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada Léopold Reigner

In the poem “Voluptates Tactionum,” published in the New Yorker in 1951, Nabokov heralds the coming supremacy of the tactile sense, from which may potentially come “a world in Braille”: Some inevitable day On the editorial page Of your paper it will say, ‘Tactio has come of age.’ (Nabokov 1951, 144)

These lines raise the issue of the importance of the tactile sense in Nabokov’s work. The obvious link between tactility and sensuality touches on the question of tactility in Lolita and Ada, two novels—written after “Voluptates Tactionum”—in which Nabokov describes the gradual progression of a sensual relationship, from the characters’ first visual perception of each other to the consummation of a sexual relationship where tactility plays a crucial role. The study of tactility in Ada may however bring to light other Nabokovian perspectives on touch, such as the connection between the tactile sense and time in Van Veen’s lecture on L. Reigner (B) English Department, University of Rouen, Mont-Saint-Aignan, France © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_19

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“The Texture of Time.” Likewise, John Shade’s poem in Pale Fire is filled with reflections on the possible associations between touch and the written word. The poem contains multiple references to the writer’s hands and the strenuous efforts made to take hold of words and give materiality, and therefore tangibility, to the composed text. Nabokov’s interest in the tactile sense seems to lie in part in the hidden materiality of intangible things or notions, and the possibilities of making them tangible. Twenty years before “Voluptates Tactionum,” in “Terra Incognita,” Nabokov designed a character whose inability to make a material and tangible connection with the text ends the short story he narrates.

Touch and Sensuality Nabokov’s Lolita is rife with references to all five senses, brought about by the narrator’s obsession with his own perception of his fictional surroundings. The first-person narrative also results in Humbert’s sensible experience being relentlessly described to the reader. In the novel, the five senses each make up one different step of the narrator’s seduction of the young girl; or rather, of the narrator’s progressively more intense infatuation with Lolita and the escalation of Humbert’s predatory behavior. The description of these steps showcases a hierarchy within the senses, starting with sight and ending with touch. In Ada, the narrator evokes such a hierarchy: “Smells can be very sudden, and in most people the ear and sense of touch work quicker than the eye” (Nabokov 1969, 550). Yet, Van’s first perception of Ada is through sight: A lady, who resembled Van’s mother, and a dark-haired girl of eleven or twelve, preceded by a fluid dackel, were getting out. Ada carried an untidy bunch of wild flowers. She wore a white frock with a black jacket and there was a white bow in her long hair. He never saw that dress again and when he mentioned it in retrospective evocation she invariably retorted that he must have dreamt it, she never had one like that, never could have put on a dark blazer on such a hot day, but he stuck to his initial image of her to the last. (Nabokov 1969, 37)

The “initial image” denotes not only Van’s first visual impression of Ada, but altogether his first perception of her, much like Frédéric Moreau’s quasi-fabulous initial image of Mme Arnoux in L’Éducation sentimentale: “What he then saw was like an apparition” (Flaubert 1869, 7). The visual

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sense is also the first sense experienced by Humbert when he encounters Lolita: I was still walking behind Mrs Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery—‘the piazza,’ sang out my leader, and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love, peering at me over dark glasses. (Nabokov 1955, 39)

While Humbert’s sense of hearing is taken over by Charlotte Haze’s singing out, the burden is lifted by the most prevalent sense in Nabokov’s work, sight. The prevalence of sight is not surprising considering the author claimed to think in images (Nabokov 1973, 14). The image of Lolita in the garden sparks Humbert and Lolita’s getting closer and closer to each other, through all five senses. After sight, comes hearing: Humbert Humbert is also infinitely moved by the little one’s slangy speech, by her harsh high voice. Later heard her volley crude nonsense at Rose across the fence. Twanging through me in a rising rhythm. (Nabokov 1955, 41–42)

What entrances Humbert is not merely Lolita’s language, but the tone of her voice. The gradual evolution of the senses carries on with smell: My darling, my sweetheart stood for a moment near me—wanted the funnies—and she smelt almost exactly like the other one, the Riviera one, but more intensely so, with rougher overtones—a torrid odor that at once set my manhood astir—but she had already yanked out of me the coveted section and retreated to her mat near her phocine mama. (Nabokov 1955, 42)

The hierarchy of the senses represented here seems to be based on closer and closer contact between Humbert and Lolita. Indeed, while sight is a sense which may be exercised even from afar, one must be closer to hear a person talk, and even more so to smell them. The interruption of Humbert’s perception in the last quote also illustrates his attempts to reduce the distance between himself and Lolita. While these attempts are eventually successful, as conveyed through the evolution of the senses, from more to less distant, interruptions are frequent and cause Humbert much

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frustration, an indication that his infatuation is one-sided. Unsurprisingly, the senses described are only experienced by one of the characters, Lolita being reduced to the object perceived by Humbert. One may expect touch to follow smell, and taste to close the seduction, being perhaps the most intimate and sensual sense. Yet, taste constitutes the next step, which indicates that touch is seen as the least distant sense and may also be the most sensual. Here is taste: Prying her left eye open to get rid of a speck of something. Checked frock. Although I do love that intoxicating brown fragrance of hers, I really think she should wash her hair once in a while. […] Held her roughly by the shoulders, then tenderly by the temples, and turned her about. “It’s right there,” she said, “I can feel it.” “Swiss peasant would use the top of her tongue.” “Lick it out?” “Yeth. Shly try?” “Sure,” she said. Gently I pressed my quivering sting along her rolling salty eyeball. “Goody-goody,” she said nictating. “It is gone.” “Now the other?” “You dope,” she began, “there is noth—” but here she noticed the pucker of my approaching lips. “Okay,” she said cooperatively, and bending toward her warm upturned russet face somber Humbert pressed his mouth to her fluttering eyelid. (Nabokov 1955, 43–44)

As we can see, the senses now intermingle, and the appearance of one sense does not interrupt Humbert’s perception of Lolita through the others. It should be noted that sight remains the most prevalent sense, occurring all throughout the seduction: There my beauty lay down on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs. (Nabokov 1955, 42)

Argus-eyed Humbert constantly observes Lolita and is on the prowl for an opportunity. Sight constitutes his main tool for predation in the beginning of the novel. But when Argus’ eyes are put to sleep, which occurs in Lolita through the coming of the night in the beginning, the tactile sense is all Humbert has to rely on: Warm dusk had deepened into amorous darkness […]. All the while I was acutely aware of L.’s nearness and as I spoke I gestured in the merciful

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dark and took advantage of those invisible gestures of mine to touch her hand, her shoulder and a ballerina of wool and gauze which she played with and kept sticking into my lap; and finally, when I had completely enmeshed my glowing darling in this weave of ethereal caresses, I dared stroke her bare leg along the gooseberry fuzz of her shin, and I chuckled at my own jokes, and trembled, and concealed my tremors, and once or twice felt with my rapid lips the warmth of her hair as I treated her to a quick nuzzling, humorous aside and caressed her plaything. She, too, fidgeted a good deal so that finally her mother told her sharply to quit it and sent the doll flying into the dark, and I laughed and addressed myself to Haze across Lo’s legs to let my hand creep up my nymphet’s thin back and feel her skin through her boy’s shirt. But I knew it was all hopeless, and was sick with longing, and my clothes felt miserably tight, and I was almost glad when her mother’s quiet voice announced in the dark: “And now we all think that Lo should go to bed.” (Nabokov 1955, 45–46)

The description is longer than that of the other senses, as Humbert closes the distance with Lolita and finally attains the most intimate and sensual contact yet, only to be interrupted once again, following the usual pattern in the first stage of his predation. This scene is a first try, the failed version of the masturbation scene which is to occur after more fictional time has passed in the novel. The appearance of the tactile sense as the last sense also indicates how important touch is for Humbert to attain sexual gratification, even though he hinted, earlier in the novel, at sight being enough: As I looked on, through prismatic layers of light, dry-lipped, focusing my lust and rocking slightly under my newspaper, I felt that my perception of her, if properly concentrated upon, might be sufficient to have me attain a beggar’s bliss immediately; but, like some predator that prefers a moving prey to a motionless one, I planned to have this pitiful attainment coincide with the various girlish movements she made now and then as she read, such as trying to scratch the middle of her back and revealing a stippled armpit—but fat Haze suddenly spoiled everything by turning to me and asking me for a light, and starting a make-believe conversation about a fake book by some popular fraud. (Nabokov 1955, 42)

Humbert’s plans are thwarted by Charlotte and it is therefore not known whether sight would have indeed been sufficient for him to reach “this pitiful attainment.” However, his self-characterization as a predator, who

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wishes for his prey to stir and budge, implies that, like the average predator, Humbert would pounce on Lolita at the nearest opportunity. Even as Humbert believes sight “might” be enough, the tactile sense is present, imagined, and from this fancied contact would likely come the gratification. A strong link between what is the most important sense, sight, and the last sense in the progression, touch, is visible. Touch is first subservient, since it could be imagined through the mere observation of Lolita, but becomes the most important sense as soon as sight is taken away, for example in obscurity, as in the first example of Humbert touching Lolita. Humbert even expresses precisely this sentiment at the end of the novel: “Thomas had something. It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality” (Nabokov 1955, 306). Interestingly, this idea comes to Humbert in relation to his dumb showlike struggle with Quilty, an occurrence of the tactile sense being the last resort after the elimination of all other senses, including hearing: We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other’s arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us. […] I was all covered with Quilty—with the feel of that tumble before the bleeding. (Nabokov 1955, 298/306)

Ironically, Humbert’s most reciprocal tactile contact is with his abhorred double rather than with Lolita. Still, Humbert touching Lolita signals the true first step in the transgression which the novel mainly deals with. Until then, Humbert’s predation may have remained known only to himself. Touch constitutes a point of no return, a last resort as well as an entry point into the characters’ monstrous relationship. The hierarchy of senses in Ada is different from what can be seen in Lolita, although Van’s perception of Ada also begins with visual perception. Soon after the “initial image,” Van catches more and more glimpses of Ada. Sight, as in Lolita, is very prevalent, but smell soon makes an appearance: Ravishment – because of her pale, voluptuous, impermissible skin, her hair, her legs, her angular movements, her gazelle-grass odor, the sudden black stare of her wide-set eyes, the rustic nudity under her dress. (Nabokov 1969, 59)

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The smell is present through the “gazelle-grass odor,” even though sight is the main instrument of perception. Soon after, Van perceives Ada’s voice through the sense of hearing and is enchanted both by her mastery of language and the rhythm of her speech: Her spectacular handling of subordinate clauses, her parenthetic asides, her sensual stressing of adjacent monosyllables (‘Idiot Elsie simply can’t read’) – all this somehow finished by acting upon Van, as artificial excitements and exotic torture-caresses might have done, in an aphrodisiac sinistral direction that he both resented and perversely enjoyed. (Nabokov 1969, 61)

The first appearances of the tactile sense are awkward for the two narrators, and they have to resort to other, preliminary senses: It was the children’s first bodily contact and both were embarrassed. […] ‘Why did you cry?’ he asked, inhaling her hair and the heat of her ear. She turned her head and for a moment looked at him closely, in cryptic silence. (Nabokov 1969, 86)

The beginning of their sensual contact mixes the last two senses, taste and touch, through the mutual observation of lips and mutual tactile contact that is the act of kissing: The hugest dictionary in the library said under Lip: ‘Either of a pair of fleshy folds surrounding an orifice.’ […] Their lips were absurdly similar in style, tint and tissue. Van’s upper one resembled in shape a long-winged sea bird coming directly at you, while the nether lip, fat and sullen, gave a touch of brutality to his usual expression. Nothing of that brutality existed in the case of Ada’s lips, but the bow shape of the upper one and the largeness of the lower one with its disdainful prominence and opaque pink repeated Van’s mouth in a feminine key. During our children’s kissing phase (a not particularly healthy fortnight of long messy embraces), some odd pudibund screen cut them off, so to speak, from each other’s raging bodies. […] Endlessly, steadily, delicately, Van would brush his lips against hers, teasing their burning bloom, back and forth, right, left, life, death, reveling in the contrast between the airy tenderness of the open idyll and the gross congestion of the hidden flesh. […] ‘I’d like to taste,’ he said, ‘the inside of your mouth. […]

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‘I can lend you my tongue,’ she said, and did. A large boiled strawberry, still very hot. He sucked it in as far as it would go. He held her close and lapped her palate. Their chins got thoroughly wet. ‘Hanky,’ she said, and informally slipped her hand into his trouser pocket, but withdrew it quickly, and had him give it himself. No comment. (Nabokov 1969, 102)

Different organs are associated with different senses. During the kissing phase, the tongue is the organ of taste, but the lips are tactile, perceiving contact and texture but possessing no taste buds. The shape of the lips is measured and appreciated through the eyes, as well as the brain. Observation and knowledge are allies in the reciprocal appreciation of Van’s and Ada’s lips. Touch here is merely one aspect of sensual contact, and even precedes taste, serving as a method of teasing the upcoming appearance of taste, as Van softly rubs his lips against Ada’s. The tactile sense, in this case, is almost innocent, while the tongue represents taste as the “hidden flesh” initiating true sensual and sexual contact. The ending of the passage, however, mentions another organ, perhaps the most obvious instrument for the experiencing of the tactile sense: the hand. The sexual contact hinted at through Ada’s withdrawing her hand and the “No comment” note made by the narrator foreshadow the first sexual act which will occur between the characters during the Burning Barn scene, as well as indicate that, after all, touch may remain the main sense of sexual contact. More importantly, touch is also the first stage of Van and Ada’s sensual relationship, in a passage which once again links tactility to blindness: After the first contact, so light, so mute, between his soft lips and her softer skin had been established […] nothing seemed changed in one sense, all was lost in another. Such contacts evolve their own texture; a tactile sensation is a blind spot; we touch in silhouette. (Nabokov 1969, 98)

Following the kissing phase, Van inspects Ada’s face with his hand, as if he was a blind man. Once again, touch is a substitute for sight, and the subsequent description may be taken as Van seeing Ada through touch: He learned her face. Nose, cheek, chin – all possessed such a softness of outline (associated retrospectively with keepsakes, and picture hats, and frightfully expensive little courtesans in Wicklow) that a mawkish admirer might well have imagined the pale plume of a reed, that unthinking man

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– pascaltrezza – shaping her profile, while a more childish and sensual digit would have liked, and did like, to palpate that nose, cheek, chin. (Nabokov 1969, 103)

Palpation is a unique sensation, which allows Van to experience Ada’s “softness” and the outline of all the elements of her face. Touch is both a substitute for sight, and a way into a more intimate perception of Ada’s body. This is why hands are so important in Ada, as demonstrated by the description of mutual, quasi-incestuous, tactility as Van and Ada explore each other’s hands: He discovered her hands […] The pathos of the carpus, the grace of the phalanges demanding helpless genuflections, a mist of brimming tears, agonies of unresolvable adoration. He touched her wrist, like a dying doctor. A quiet madman, he caressed the parallel strokes of the delicate down shading the brunette’s forearm. He went back to her knuckles. Fingers, please. (Nabokov 1969, 104–105)

Van fondles Ada’s fingers with his own so that the perception is reciprocal, unlike Humbert’s touching of Lolita. Only Van’s perception is conveyed, but Ada’s fingers also possess tactile corpuscles, and therefore she is perceiving Van’s fingers as well. Sight is ever present, with the mention of “the delicate down shading” Ada’s forearm, but in this passage touch is prevalent. Van and Ada are feeling each other’s texture through tactility, although the texture may be imagined through sight. The hand also plays a role in the characters’ first sexual encounter, and texture is the word Ada uses during this act: ‘Touch it quick,’ he implored. ‘Van, poor Van,’ she went on in the narrow voice the sweet girl used when speaking to cats, caterpillars, pupating puppies, ‘yes, I’m sure, it smarts, would it help if I’d touch, are you sure?’ ‘You bet,’ said Van, ‘on n’est pas bête à ce point’ (‘there are limits to stupidity,’ colloquial and rude). ‘Relief map,’ said the primrose prig, ‘the rivers of Africa.’ Her index traced the blue Nile down into its jungle and traveled up again. ‘Now what’s this? The cap of the Red Bolete is not half as plushy. In fact’ (positively chattering), ‘I’m reminded of geranium or rather pelargonium bloom.’ ‘God, we all are,’ said Van. ‘Oh, I like this texture, Van, I like it! Really I do!’ (Nabokov 1969, 119)

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Tactility is almost humorously portrayed as a desperate sense, the indispensable agent of sexual contact, and Ada’s index finger represents such tactility.

Touch and Time in Ada The tactile sense in Nabokov is not limited to the last stage of consummation in two characters’ relationship. Much like other senses, it is evoked throughout Van Veen’s essay “The Texture of Time.” Indeed, although sight and hearing are mentioned with much more regularity, the title of the essay itself refers to something which may be perceived both through sight and touch. At first, it seems time is not associated with touch, contrary to space: Space is related to our senses of sight, touch, and muscular effort; Time is vaguely connected with hearing (still, a deaf man would perceive the ‘passage’ of time incomparably better than a blind limbless man would the idea of ‘passage’). (Nabokov 1969, 542)

Touch and sight are once more closely connected. The blind man must touch to perceive, so that the blind limbless man is deprived of both sight and its desperate substitute. One of the facets of tactility in Nabokov’s work is certainly the ability to replace sight when, for whatever reason, it is unavailable. But the unavailability of tactility may also reveal much. Indeed, the impossibility of grasping time is what makes it a worthy subject of discussion for Van Veen: “Movement of matter merely spans an extension of some other palpable matter, against which it is measured, but tells us nothing about the actual structure of impalpable Time” (Nabokov 1969, 542). Van Veen aims to make time palpable: My purpose in writing my Texture of Time, a difficult, delectable and blessed work, a work which I am about to place on the dawning desk of the still-absent reader, is to purify my own notion of Time. I wish to examine the essence of Time, not its lapse, for I do not believe that its essence can be reduced to its lapse. I wish to caress Time. (Nabokov 1969, 536–537)

He evokes such a time with an adjective relating to tactility: “Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time” (Nabokov 1969, 539). In the course of

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the essay, time becomes more and more palpable as Van Veen expresses how close to contact with time he is, despite its impalpability: 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. I wish to do something about it; to indulge in a simulacrum of possession. I am aware that all who have tried to reach the charmed castle have got lost in obscurity or have bogged down in Space. (Nabokov 1969, 537)

The linking of possession with touch is clear, and recalls the appearance of the tactile sense in the last stage of sexual consummation. To grasp is to possess, as well as to feel texture with one’s fingertips. Still, the quest to grasp time and feel its texture is all but hopeless: Why is it so difficult – so degradingly difficult – to bring the notion of Time into mental focus and keep it there for inspection? What an effort, what fumbling, what irritating fatigue! It is like rummaging with one hand in the glove compartment for the road map – fishing out Montenegro, the Dolomites, paper money, a telegram – everything except the stretch of chaotic country between Ardez and Somethingsoprano, in the dark, in the rain, while trying to take advantage of a red light in the coal black, with the wipers functioning metronomically, chronometrically: the blind finger of space poking and tearing the texture of time. (Nabokov 1969, 537)

Once again, the absence of sight is linked to the necessity of tactility, so that in a way the finger is always blind, replacing sight when the need arises. Yet, contrary to space, time remains elusive in the day as well as in darkness. The idea of a blind hand rummaging in vain for some concrete object is a recurring one in Nabokov, and it is present in the poem “Voluptates Tactionum”: See the schoolboy, like a blind Lover, frantically grope For the shape of love—and find Nothing but the shape of soap. (Nabokov 1951, 144)

The tactile sense is also one of failed possession, when the character or the poet perceives “everything except” the object they long for, feeling only “the shape of soap.” Time is to Van Veen what love is to the schoolboy. Finally, Van Veen finds the secret of the texture of time in the “Tender

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interval,” the gap between beats of rhythm rather than the beats themselves. The adjective which characterizes this interval, like the title of the essay, is yet another reference to tactility, and allows the narrator to triumph and finally grasp the texture of time: “We have suggested earlier that the dim intervals between the dark beats have the feel of the texture of Time” (Nabokov 1969, 548). The decision to italicize “feel ” is in no way superfluous. The word pokes out of the text as the typographical separation almost creates an impression of three-dimensionality for the reader, as Julie Loison-Charles explains regarding Nabokov’s use of different languages in Vladimir Nabokov, ou l’écriture du multilinguisme: La typographie est essentielle dans l’écriture du mot étranger. Elle est un signalement visuel d’une différence qui arrête et attire le regard du lecteur, notamment quand l’italique est employé. Cette inclinaison du mot fait ressortir ce terme de l’ensemble du texte et agit tel un trou noir attirant le regard vers lui. Le mot est à la fois mis en avant (puisqu’il se détache du reste) et mis à distance (l’italique souligne la différence par rapport au reste du texte). Il ressort comme un relief du texte, couture visible sur le tissu qu’est le texte. […] Par son relief, le visuel peut donc évoquer le toucher, le mot étranger inscrivant une espèce de dos-d’âne ralentissant la lecture sous la forme d’un tissage plus épais, plus dense de la tapisserie textuelle, voire d’une pièce rajoutée. (Loison-Charles 2016, 75)

If the typographical device lends an aspect of tactility to foreign languages in Nabokov’s work, then the use of italics for “feel ” constitutes a specific effort to make the term tactile to the reader, to try and achieve a materiality of the written word similar to the “world in Braille” alluded to by Nabokov in “Voluptates Tactionum.” The italics constitute an attempt to convey not just the idea but the very texture of time so the reader may feel it themselves.

Touch and Text Precisely, tactility is very much linked to the work of the writer in Nabokov. In Pale Fire, John Shade begins Canto Four with an exposition of two methods of composing: I’m puzzled by the difference between Two methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,

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A testing of performing words, while he Is soaping a third time one leg, and B, The other kind, much more decorous, when He’s in his study writing with a pen. (Nabokov 1962, 55)

John Shade describes writing as a blind poet grasping at words, a task during which the author frantically attempts to find the right word. Method A has the writer use only his mind, and try out different sounds, while method B is a process of writing and rewriting which inscribes the writer’s attempts on the page. In his article for the Saturday Review, “Inspiration,” Nabokov describes his own method. After “a prefatory glow,” Nabokov describes an image that must be rendered onto the page: The shape of the new impact is indeed so definite that I am forced to relinquish metaphors and resort to specific terms. The narrator forefeels what he is going to tell. The forefeeling can be defined as an instant vision turning into rapid speech. If some instrument were to render this rare and delightful phenomenon, the image would come as a shimmer of exact details, and the verbal part as a tumble of merging words. The experienced writer immediately takes it down and, in the process of doing so, transforms what is little more than a running blur into gradually dawning sense, with epithets and sentence construction growing as clear and trim as they would be on the printed page (Nabokov 1973, 309). Two stages of writing are described. First, the conception of the image in the author’s mind, and then the composition of the text, which aims at reproducing the image as faithfully as possible. Nabokov describes the process in an interview to the Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature in 1966: “I am the perfect dictator in that private world insofar as I alone am responsible for its stability and truth. Whether I reproduce it as fully and faithfully as I would wish, is another question” (Nabokov 1973, 69). The image of that private world, that is the idea, must be clear in the author’s mind to obtain a clear text, according to Boileau’s axiom “Whatever is well conceived is clearly said,/And the words to say it flow with ease”1 (Boileau 1815, 6). Yet, there is a middle stage in Nabokov’s description of inspiration, one that occurs as the imagination stage ends and the composing stage begins, and the two overlap in the author’s mind. Indeed, the “tumble of merging words” which comes as the image has been perfected, seems to fit method A as it is described by John Shade:

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But method A is agony! The brain Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain. […] Why is it so? Is it, perhaps, because In penless work there is no pen-poised pause And one must use three hands at the same time, Having to choose the necessary rhyme, Hold the completed line before one’s eyes, And keep in mind all the preceding tries? (Nabokov 1962, 55–56)

According to this method, the poet attempts to find le mot juste, to use a Flaubertian intonation, using only his mind, and foregoing the pen. Memory, imagination and composition must perform at the same time. This method is purely cerebral and bears no element of physicality. No marking of ink settles a text in the process of being built, and so the image and the words mix in the writer’s mind and are ever-changing. In method B, on the other hand, the writer is aided by the pen’s materiality: In method B the hand supports the thought, The abstract battle is concretely fought. The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar A canceled sunset or restore a star, And thus it physically guides the phrase Toward faint daylight through the inky maze. (Nabokov 1962, 55)

The differences between the two methods may be similar to the differences between sight and touch. The perception of sight occurs solely in the brain. The eyes perceive information which is sent to the brain, and this information is reassembled into a picture. With touch, information is sent to the brain, but the materiality of the object perceived is felt more intensely. Likewise, the materiality of the pen helps the poet lend a material aspect to the image in his mind. The “abstract battle” is made visible, through the appearance of the words in ink, but also tangible, through the feeling of the pen being wielded. The two methods, however, are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and could be different stages of one method of composing. Stage A is the conception of an image in the author’s mind. Stage B, which would be method A, is the initial assembling and testing out of words in the author’s mind, while stage C, which is method B, is the writing and rewriting of words in order to compose a text which is as faithful as possible to the image in the author’s mind.

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The purpose of such a method of composing would be to materialize the image conceived by the author. “Life is a message scribbled in the dark,” (Nabokov 1962, 35) writes John Shade. This may be a metaphor for the author’s text, and it is again less than surprising that the sentence is written in italics. All readers are blind when it comes to the image in the author’s mind. The text is the author’s message, which must possess materiality in order to be tangible and perceived by the reader. Nabokov’s description of his own synesthesia shows a clear link between words and texture: […] the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of the weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivorybacked hand mirror of o take care of the whites. (Nabokov 1966, 21)

While all these letters are linked to a specific color, their descriptions convey a unique texture as well. “Weathered wood” evokes shades of grey and brown but also conjures up the coarse surface of time-worn wood. Likewise, polished ebony certainly shines, but it is also smooth to the touch. Vulcanized rubber is a shade of black, but evokes either a generally smooth, slightly grain surface, or the uneven pattern of rubber tires with sipes and voids. The association of letters with texture is very similar to Braille. The Braille alphabet has no colors of course, but each letter is associated with a specific tactile feeling. In “Voluptates Tactionum,” Nabokov mentions Braille as he describes the inevitable materiality of imagined objects in the future: When you turn a knob, your set Will obligingly exhale Forms, invisible and yet Tangible—a world in Braille. (Nabokov 1951, 144)

The evocation of tangible forms seems a defense of material writing. “We have too much things and not enough shapes”2 (Flaubert 1980, 298). Flaubert wrote to express his frustration at the conventional tendency to instill social or political ideas in works of art, when the smallest idea,

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well-conceived by the writer, could lead to the most sonorous sentence. Nabokov goes even farther, arguing for the possible materiality of forms, which could be so perfected as to become things. Lending materiality to thought is the author’s work during the composition phase of writing. While the pen “physically guides the phrase,” the phrase itself must be physical. Such physicality is expressed by John Shade, who describes the “mot juste” as a bird, fluttering over the writer and eventually landing on his hand after the author has laid down the pen: Too weary to delete, I drop my pen; I ambulate—and by some mute command The right word flutes and perches on my hand. (Nabokov 1962, 56)

The blind hand is not only rummaging through time but, in the case of the writer, through words. It is a tactile search in which the pen plays the part of the hand and becomes a tactile organ. It may be discarded or left unused, as in method A, and then the writer rummages with imaginary hands in his mind. Unless the right word suddenly appears, and initiates contact with the idle writer. If the writer fails, the text remains immaterial. This is the fate of the narrator in “Terra Incognita” as his reality fades away and he vainly attempts to write something down in his notebook: My last motion was to open the book, which was damp with my sweat, for I absolutely had to make a note of something; but, alas, it slipped out of my hand. I groped all along the blanket, but it was no longer there. (Nabokov 1931, 303)

In the same way Van fails to grasp the road map, the narrator of “Terra Incognita” is unable to maintain any kind of longstanding tactile contact with the text, and is left with nothing but an empty and ever-reaching hand. This image represents the very failure of tactility. The reader is faced with the same struggle as the writer, the text being an elusive object whose materiality must be grasped. The ending of “Terra Incognita” showcases Nabokov’s lasting interest in the tactile sense and the failure of tactility, from the beginning to the end of his writing career. While not the most important sense in Nabokov’s work, touch is clearly interesting to Nabokov in its relationship to sight, and constitutes the last stage in the author’s description of the gradual discovery of one character’s body by another. But Nabokov goes

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farther, exploring the tangibility of metaphysical notions. The connection between tactility and writing, developed in John Shade’s poem, strikes at the heart of an author’s resolve: to materialize their incorporeal thoughts into a perceptible text. Nabokov’s poem, “Voluptates Tactionum,” heralds a future in which conceived thoughts and ideas will take shape, and become tangible objects which the viewer, or reader, will be able to take hold of, and feel: Think of all the things that will Really be within your reach! Phantom bottle, dummy pill, Limpid limbs upon a beach. (Nabokov 1951, 144)

Notes 1. “Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement,/Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément ”. 2. “Nous avons trop de choses et pas assez de formes ”.

Bibliography Boileau, Nicolas. 1815. L’Art poétique. Paris: ed. Aug. Delalain. Charles, Julie-Loison. 2016. Vladimir Nabokov ou l’écriture du multilinguisme. Mots étrangers et jeux de mots. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest. Flaubert, Gustave. 1869. L’Éducation sentimentale. Reprint, Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1972. ———. 1980. Correspondance II. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1931. Terra Incognita. In The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1997. ———. 1951. Voluptates Tactionum. In Collected Poems. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2012. ———. 1955. Lolita. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2000. ———. 1962. Pale Fire. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2011. ———. 1966. Speak Memory. Reprint, London: Everyman’s Library, 1999. ———. 1969. Ada or Ardor. Reprint, New York, Vintage International, 1990. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. Reprint, New York: Vintage International 1990.

CHAPTER 20

Embodied Memories in Ada, or Ardor and Speak, Memory Nathalia Saliba Dias

Memory is a hallmark of Vladimir Nabokov’s oeuvre, a theme that spans both his Russian and American phases. Since the 1990s, when the metaphysical approach to his works became fashionable, scholars have tended to interpret Nabokov’s “almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty” (Nabokov 1966, 50) in light of the European high modernist “cult of time” (Louria 1974; Sicker 1987; Alexandrov 1991; Foster 1993). During this period, numerous authors searched for individual timelessness, aesthetically elaborating their memories as a response to historical contingency, of which Joyce’s epiphanies, Woolf’s moments of being and Proust’s involuntary memories are the most famous examples. Nevertheless, the discussion of time in Nabokov’s work exceeds the categories of transcendence or artistic consciousness. In Speak, Memory (1966) and Ada, or Ardor (1969), he also pays attention to other more “mundane” aspects of memory, investigating it as a bodily and sexual phenomenon in which one sense is particularly highlighted: touch.

N. Saliba Dias (B) Berlin, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_20

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Ada, or Ardor ’s Erotic Texture Shortly before dying, Van Veen, the protagonist of the novel, wonders about the meaning of life. He says that memory is “a complex system of those subtle bridges which the senses traverse […] between membrane and brain” (Nabokov 1969, 174). Analyzing this short passage, one might conclude that, for Van Veen, memory is not simply an intellectual construction, nor is it an abstract form of consciousness; rather, it is a bridge formed between membrane (in all likelihood evoking the female hymen) and brain. The encounter between these spheres—the incest of the body and the mind—is the very essence of memory, he suggests. In order to understand Van Veen’s ideas, it is worth considering Proust’s notion of embodied memories and Elizabeth Freeman’s theory of Erotohistoriography. In the famous madeleine-tea scene, Marcel explains how the feeling of wet crumbs on his palate has awoken forgotten memories from his remote childhood, and these long-past physical sensations are described with rich sensorial details as if Marcel can feel them again in his body (Proust 1913, 60). According to Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, such images of bodily remembrance are present in the works of Proust and many other writers, but it was only at the end of the twentieth century that psychoanalysis and cognitive science finally began to pay attention to sensory and motoric processes of memory (Leuzinger-Bohleber 2015, 24).1 Freeman’s erotohistoriography is also interested in the body as a fundamental part of mnemonic processes; her approach, however, emerges out of the context of queer theory and the turn to affect. Freeman’s concept is not only concerned with memories that emerge “on” the body, in which past events are recuperated like lost objects as Proust illustrates, but with the instatement of the body “as” a method of history (Freeman 2010, 95–100). Freeman’s hypothesis makes more sense in the light of Fredric Jameson’s famous claim that “history is what hurts” (Jameson 1981, 102), meaning that history is what refuses desire and, in a Freudian-Marxist frame, results in trauma and repression. In opposition to these traditional methods of historicization, based on negative feelings, she describes erotohistoriography as renewed attention to enjoyable bodily sensations that also make historical content intelligible. Freeman observes that the body is not only the means by which the historian gets in touch with the historical archive but also, thanks to muscular memory, is itself a kind of archive that molds historical content. Moreover, this

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bodily archive is by no means exclusively composed of traumas: in it are also idylls, utopias, erotic scenes, and memories of touch. Applying erotohistoriography to Ada, or Ardor, one might say that the whole narrative is organized around Van Veen’s erotic and bodily memories: “[H]e knew how agonizing and how absurd it was to put all one’s spiritual fortune on one physical fancy” (Nabokov 1969, 387). Minor interactions, such as Ada’s hair lightly touching his neck, are re-lived over and over, not only in his mind but also through his body, and these re-enacted touches, Van says, “invariably proved to be beyond the dreamer’s endurance and like a lifted sword signaled fire and violent release” (Nabokov 1969, 37). Van alludes here to his bodily memories, making a vague reference to ejaculation (“violent release”) after he remembers the touch of Ada’s hair on his skin. These memories are not merely abstract and rational, but are experienced physically and also produce physical results. More than that, these memories are simultaneously a form of sexual pleasure (“violent release”) and also a vehicle for pain (“a sword”) because they contain the memories of joy already obliterated. Nabokov confirms in one interview that it was only in Ada, or Ardor that he came to stress touch and texture in its full potential: “[M]y creature [Van Veen] distinguishes between text and texture, between the contents of time and its almost tangible essence. I ignore that distinction in my Speak, Memory and was mainly concerned with being faithful to the patterns of my past” (Nabokov 1973, 121). One possible conclusion that can be drawn from this interview is that, from 1951 to 1969, Nabokov, through his character Van, came to emphasize the idea of texture instead of patterns, which means that he changed his emphasis from the repetition of thematic lines to concrete physical sensations.2 If touch and texture became a more prevalent trope in Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, in earlier works he had already described his process of writing and reading in terms of bodily encounters and even “hand jobs,” signalling his interest in the parallels between intellectual and physiological experiences. When he changed from writing in Russian to writing in English, he felt as if he were “learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion” (Nabokov 1973, 54), showing that he understood literary composition to be a manual process as well. Leland De La Durantaye also observes how Nabokov’s notion of readership indulges in a “phenomenology of the spine” (Durantaye 2007, 54)—what Delage-Toriel calls Nabokov’s “epistemophilic project” (Delage-Toriel 2015, 25)—emphasizing bodily contact between authors and readers.

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This becomes more evident when Nabokov urges his students to wrestle with an author or to caress or “fondle the details” of a book (Nabokov 2002, 1) in search for a “tingle of the spine:” “[A] wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle […] with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual” (Nabokov 2002, 6). These ideas promote readership as a “mastery of the body” in terms of sporting or loving relationships, conjures Delage-Toriel (Delage-Toriel 2015, 26). Just as writing is an embodied process for Nabokov, in Ada, or Ardor time and memory are also defined as physical sensations, more specifically, pleasure and pain. In Texture of Time, the treatise embedded within the novel, Van describes his attempt to understand time precisely in terms of touch and texture, as the title of his essay already indicates. He says: I wish to caress Time […] 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. I wish to do something about it; to indulge in a simulacrum of possession. (Nabokov 1969, 420)

Van wants to “caress Time” and to “delight sensually” in it as in a sexual encounter. His desire for the erotic touch of time diverges, however, from conventional forms of sexuality as it takes place between a subject and an (inorganic) thing (time’s texture), which he imagines as a malleable material, one with cascading folds. Evoked here as a cold, gray gauze, Van’s definition of the essence of time alludes to the popular Einsteinian metaphor of the fabric of time and space. On top of this, the opposition between the warmth of the skin and the coldness of the thing it touches completes a scene in which the “simulacrum of possession” invokes the techniques of bondage. In Van’s imagination, getting in touch with time can be unconventionally erotic. This scene is overlaid with a succession of images that fortify this impression. In a kind of gothic parody, Van calls time a “charmed castle,” in which he “got lost in obscurity” on a dark and rainy night (Nabokov 1969, 420). He queerly defines his exploration of time as “degradingly difficult” (Nabokov 1969, 420) and as a physical torment, which means he is struggling to understand time’s meaning. Next, he compares his philosophical troubles with “rummaging with one hand in the glove compartment for the road map,” “poking and tearing the texture of time” (Nabokov 1969, 421). In this passage, Van’s philosophical attempt

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to understand time has something in common with a gothic scene of persecution, a spectacle frequently reenacted in sadomasochistic practices. In other words, Van traces a parallel between sadomasochism and philosophy via the sort of pain-pleasure dynamic these practices both entail. Nevertheless, it is not only in Texture of Time that erotic touch is evoked. When Van and Ada go through the past together, as the writers and editors of their historical archive, they also simulate physical contact paragraph after paragraph as ghosts of both textual intimacy and sexual intercourse. In Van’s description of Ardis Manor, for example, the mouth and hands are employed as tools of historical recreation: “You could clip and kiss, and survey in between, the reservoir, the groves, the meadows, even the inkline of larches” (Nabokov 1969, 41). In Van’s erotohistoriographical methodology, the documentation of the landscape is to be scrutinized with the tools of certain sexualized body parts, in particular the mouth, thumb, and index finger. Nabokov had already noted the importance of the index finger as a part of his entomological studies. He describes with sensual detail the particular pleasure he derives from pinning the bodies of moths and butterflies: “the soaking, ice-cold absorbent cotton pressed to the insect’s lemurian head; the subsiding spasms of its body; the satisfying crackle produced by the pin penetrating the hard crust of its thorax” (Nabokov 1966, 87). Here, Nabokov manipulates the body of moths and butterflies with a “satisfying” pleasure and the textures involved in his manipulations of the insects (soaking, cold, and hard) trigger a sensual response in the reader as well. One might say that, for Nabokov, the interlocking manifestations of touch, sound and texture are effective forms of memory, knowledge, and historical consciousness. An elderly Van explains, for example, that he no longer remembers the license plate of his car, but he can feel, nevertheless, the asphalt under the front tires as if they were parts of his body (Nabokov 1969, 424). This tactile structure, in opposition to Nabokov’s traditional emphasis on the eyes and patterns, highlights a change in perspective from the male gaze into the realm of touch. Elizabeth Grosz explains that according to the Cartesian separation between mind and body, the former is given hierarchical superiority3 ; it is connected to a male practice to the detriment of the nature of the body, which is commonly read as female. The visualmental model implies that the mind treats the body merely as a locus, while touch, on the other side, considers the body in its spatiality, giving materiality and agency to the body in exchange for reality. This emphasis

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on the materiality of the body, continues Grosz, frequently takes erotic meaning. In her words: “The surface of the body, the skin, moreover provides the ground for the articulation of orifices, erotogenic rims, cuts on the body’s surface, loci of exchange between the inside and the outside, points of conversion of the outside into the body, and of the inside out of the body” (Grosz 1994, 36). Elizabeth Freeman also confirms this, in her reading of French feminism, saying that female sexuality, anal eroticism, and sadomasochism multiply and spatialize pleasure onto the body, aligning touch and texture with play and intimacy, in opposition to male sexuality, which is, often, centered on the member (Freeman 2010, 49). In Renu Bora’s analysis of Henry James’ sensual evocations, he also claims that texture takes erotic meaning because it explores tactile sensations in order to index the qualities of an object. This means that texture depends on mutual shaping, in time and space, of the parts involved (Bora 1997, 95). This emphasis on touch as an erotic experience is present throughout Ada, or Ardor, but is particularly evident in Van’s memories of his love affairs. At a young age, on a visit to an antiquary, Van touches a single humid rose (a common symbol for the vagina), which stands among the artificial ones placed in a vase to trick the eyes. Even before he meets the girl responsible for this trick, he is already in love with her (Nabokov 1969, 31–32). In the famous breakfast scene, Ada spreads her fingers and licks the honey off them for Van’s visual delectation (Nabokov 1969, 64). On another occasion, Ada bends over a table to make “tactile magic” (Nabokov 1969, 91–92) out of a towering house of cards. Van leans over her in anticipation of her sitting in his “hot hard hand” once the cards fall. Immediately after this comes to pass, Van runs to his room to masturbate (Nabokov 1969, 92). This scene is repeated in the library: Ada watches the burning barn from the library window; as soon as it collapses, she sits in his hands (Nabokov 1969, 95). Later, in a bed where they have just had sex, the couple “manipulates” their servant’s photo album, a scene in which the metonymic connection between the movement of the index finger that presses the photographs and their early sexual practices is highlighted (Nabokov 1969, 313). Despite this abundant presence of tactility and texture, Jenefer Shute has discussed striptease in Lolita and Ada, or Ardor emphasizing sight, not touch, as a literary technique in both novels. She explains that the rich descriptions of the body in these novels produce a voyeuristic equivalence between the gaze of the male reader and the male protagonist,

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who observe together the female body being undressed (Shute 2003, 116). Her analysis is unquestionably accurate, especially when it concerns the male gaze over the female body. Touch, on the other hand, is not only centered in the female object of desire, but it also aligns Van’s memories, his masturbations and his writing-reading process. As Leland De La Durantaye has already pointed out, both writing and autoeroticism require fantasy and solitude and might be considered “hand jobs” (Durantaye 2007, 68). Just as they were for Rousseau and Joyce, hand jobs are central to Van’s intellectual formation. At a young age, Van masturbates to Catullus’s lesbians “as soon as the kerosene lamp had left the mobile bedroom in his black nurse’s fist” (Nabokov 1969, 57). The penis in Van’s hand is transposed into the candle in his nurse’s, forming a continuum between the solitary sexual act and mobile shuffling of pages. “[T]here is nothing more splendid than lone thought,” he proclaims elsewhere (Nabokov 1969, 423). Solitary pleasures are also projected onto the reader, who probably will read Van’s memoir with a “secret tingle” in the secluded corner of the library where pornography is kept (Nabokov 1969, 173). In light of this constant association between masturbation and the writingreading process, it makes sense that Van writes about his torrid affair with his sister when he can no longer enact it. He projects, then, an image of the masculine reproductive member onto his pen, aligning his hands with his member and also suggesting that writing is a form of male signification. On the penultimate page of the book, the protagonist says that the rhythm of Ada, or Ardor “proceeds at spanking pace” and, before the reader can take breath, the writer “spilled us, another attractive girl” (Nabokov 1969, 460). Note again the imagery of hands, pain, and ejaculation, which mimics the tempo and sexual energy of the text, evoking again a sadomasochistic scene. Nabokov’s insistence on sadomasochism is directly related to his interest in textures. This sexual practice, more than others, applies the surface of leather, latex, and feathers on the surface of the body to enhance sexual pleasure. One could even say that Nabokov also evokes the wet and messy (WAM) version of sadomasochism, called “sploshing,” in which a double portrait of gluttony and lust is used to enhance bodily sensations. In the practice of sploshing, food and beverage are spread over the skin to play with the texture, temperature, and sound produced by the contact of the skin with these materials.

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Nabokov not only explores texture in the opposition between warm and cold or cotton and crush, but his multiple references to hamburger, milk, tea, honey, sugar, whisky, candied fruits, cakes, beer, and cinnamon are all elements that invite the reader into “sploshing” with the text. As in sadomasochistic practices, this novel plays with the reader’s bodily response. We are first struck by the difficulties of reading this text. With its many puns, literary games, and layers of literary styles, the narrative is so densely constructed that the reader frequently experiences discomfort. However, the pain of deciphering these codes is alleviated by the aesthetically pleasing and smooth passages of the text. Just as in a masochist’s behavior, the same hand that produces pain also produces relief. In other words, the writer might also be a dominatrix. It is as though Nabokov wants to tell us that he is impenetrable. Like the protagonist, the reader is also somewhat castrated, unable to smoothly penetrate the text. As a result, s/he needs first to caress the words and sources and to touch the assemblage of fetishizing material (art, clothing, furniture, sources, architecture, and concepts) in order to engage with it, a hermeneutic-erotic technique that is reinforced by the parallels between the textual corpus and the human corpus.

Speak, Memory: The Fantasy of the Womb According to Nabokov, Speak, Memory was a new kind of autobiography, one which lands somewhere between the record of life and a novel. The fictional aspect of his autobiography comes in part from the temporal structure of the text, since Nabokov has organized his life based on thematic trails instead of pure chronology (Boyd 1991, 149). He insists, right from the beginning, that “the true purpose of autobiography” is the evolution and repetition of a theme, suggesting that his artistic abilities should be above any interpretation of individual life (Nabokov 1966, 12). Nevertheless, Nabokov also claims that in Speak, Memory he is investigating the “muscles of sinuous memory” (Nabokov 1966, 238). Nabokov’s sensuous memories, he says, connect the events of his life through an “Eden of visual and tactile sensation” (Nabokov 1966, 9), pointing to the fact that his memories might be more personal than he actually desires. Nabokov confirms his ability to describe embodied memories by saying that he is an “ardent memoirist with a rotten memory; […] [w]ith absolute lucidity I recall landscapes, gestures, intonations, a million sensuous details,” meaning that he is able to map several sensorial facts but not

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chronological or logical ones (Nabokov 1990, 140, my emphasis). “Sensuous” here does not mean erotic, since Speak, Memory is almost devoid of sexual content. What abounds in his autobiography, as I will demonstrate, is the description of embodied memories that invoke tenderness: his love for his mother and sense of security within the sphere of home. In the opening scene, for example, Nabokov describes life as a shiny spot between two dark cracks, which are, according to him, pre-birth and death, respectively. His early life in Russia, however, provides a temporal inversion of this scheme, being described as a pre-birth moment through a sequence of images that evoke a warm, humid and secure place. In other words, Nabokov actualizes a fantasy of the womb in/through the narration of his childhood, which could symbolize the feminine space of origin. Caroline Rupprecht explains that in French feminism, caves and cathedrals came to represent a mysterious locus of female otherness, marked by timelessness. In her words, “womb-like spaces can be experienced from within or externally, suffocating or liberating, closed or accessible, a point of new beginning or a space one wants to crawl back into - the possibilities are numerous precisely because the womb is a space that is, by definition, out of sight,” depending, therefore, on the author and the historical period (Rupprecht 2013, 3). In Nabokov’s autobiography, the imagery of the womb regrads internal places that have been revisited over and over again. Nabokov and his sister liked to snuggle in the nooks of the rooms because they felt “so warm and secure” (Nabokov 1966, 76). He also found “fantastic pleasure” in building tunnels or tents at home, crawling around the room until he found the lighted exit (Nabokov 1966, 8). He also observed the colored lights of his St. Petersburg’s street through the window of his mother’s warm room (Nabokov 1966, 19). These memories might not bear any logical connection with one another, but they are described by a common feeling, at once tactile and delicious, of being protected in a warm and dark spot. His early memories, therefore, as he confirms throughout the text, are all anchored in this “sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth;” a symbol of motherly love and protection (Nabokov 1966, 52). Frequently, Nabokov could achieve this feeling on summer days with a drizzle. Humidity, warmth, and sunlight compose Nabokov’s tactile paradise: the image of his mother on a mushroom hunt on a wet day surrounded by dripping trees (Nabokov 1966, 24), his strolls with Tamara on rainy days around Vyra (Nabokov 1966, 157), and his first

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poetic composition after a rainy storm (Nabokov 1966, 164). The “damp moss, rich earth and rotting leaves” form a perfect ground not only for the blooming of nature but also for Nabokov’s intellectual and sensual growth (Nabokov 1966, 24). Nabokov evokes the womb-like feelings even further, describing life as a suffocating but rather delightful experience—a “delicious panic,” he says (Nabokov 1966, 8). He “gropes” for the exit of human time into clear timelessness, but he feels a wall. He beats his fists against it while he writes, but time is a spherical prison (the placenta?) (Nabokov 1966, 6). When Nabokov describes his timeless world, he paints it in a radiant and mobile medium, in which “excited bathers share shining seawater” with other creatures, suggesting an almost ecological view of being in utero with others (Nabokov 1966, 7). He continues building this image, saying that the cosmos could be held inside of a kangaroo’s pouch (Nabokov 1966, 9), and, later, he talks about his childhood happiness as “fissures” in time and “missed heartbeats,” gently invoking the moment of birth (Nabokov 1966, 164). In this light, Nabokov’s idea of “cosmic synchronization”—described as “[a] sense of oneness with sun and stone” (Nabokov 1966, 103)—can also be considered a form of pregnancy, when humans temporally commingle with others through the female biological apparatus. The whimsical aspect of Nabokov’s imagery of the womb is that it evokes a form of inside-out time (as if being alive entailed consciousness during gestation) and an expectation to be reborn after death, linking Nabokov’s notions of human time with female cyclic time. At times, Nabokov’s investment in tenderness is extended into the memories of his mother, in which mouth plays a particularly important role: he relives the fondness that his lips used to feel kissing his mother’s veiled cheek after she returned from a stroll. This memory, he says, “flies back to me with a shout of joy out of the snow-blue, blue windowed (the curtains are not yet drawn) past” (Nabokov 1966, 20). Later, he re-enacts this experience in Saint Petersburg, when he presses his lips “against the thin fabric that veiled the windowpane” of his mother’s room and he “would gradually taste the cold of the glass through the gauze” (Nabokov 1966, 61). It is clear that, on both occasions, Nabokov is protected inside the house while his mouth detects the cold outside, suggesting again a warm womb-like feeling of security that is deliciously reassuring.

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Femininity here is classically combined with touch, tenderness, and pleasure, but the female body is more often disembodied in its presentation as “Mother Nature:” rain, soil, and sun (Nabokov 1966, 173).4 Linda Anderson explains that William Wordsworth’s semi-biographical poem The Prelude (1850) projects a disembodied and pre-sexual mother onto nature, eliminating, therefore, the notion of female otherness. For Anderson, Wordsworth’s biography presents the heroic quest of the poet trying to separate himself from the mother, paradoxically opening up an insurmountable desire to return to the maternal source of origin (Anderson 2001, 58). If one were to apply this psychoanalytical interpretation to Speak, Memory, a similar desire might be observed. Nabokov idealizes his motherland’s natural landscapes as a place outside time, where he experienced a sense of idyll up to the point of his forced emigration. His constant wish to return to his past in his motherland, therefore, might underscore a masculine desire for control over the female body through the reconstruction of this inaugural place, the childhood womb. Facing the impossibility of this regression, Nabokov tries to reconstruct these feelings of tenderness and security in adult life, finding in his writings, butterflies and memory a surrogate for his lost childhood idyll. The focus of this chapter, however, is not to investigate Nabokov’s psychological drives, his urges, and motivations. The goal of this essay is to observe how he resorts to his embodied memories (textures, touch, and bodily feelings) as a way of reconstructing his past. Just like in Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of Erotohistoriography, Nabokov uses the body as “a tool to effect, figure, or perform that encounter” between past and the present (Freeman 2010, 95), presenting his own history as an archive of bodily sensations, also invoking the pleasures of writing and reading his past. Paying attention to texture and the materiality of touch, as Eve Sedgwick explains in Touching Feeling (2003), might be a promising way to shift our attention from epistemology and pure psychoanalysis to affect and phenomenology (Sedgwick 2003, 17). Moreover, the analysis of touch not only draws attention to Nabokov’s bodily experiences, but it also stresses the fact that words and other medias carry texture in themselves. In Speak, Memory, the opposition between internal darkness/protection and external light/mystery is transposed then into Nabokov’s own process of writing when he construes his memories for the reader. In other words, he makes us feel as if we (readers) are in a dark spot, peering like spectators in the cinema at the luminous screen

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of his past, replaying again the womb-like feeling at the level of the discourse. As many scholars have already commented, the imagery of cinema is present from the very first page. Nabokov introduces his hazy past as an old and ragged movie through which he and we can observe his mother waving at him in a coffin-like baby carriage, connecting his birth with his death (Nabokov 1966, 5). The past then opens itself like a curtain before the reader’s eyes, establishing a connection between his mother’s veil and the screen through which we see his past. When Nabokov moves into the presentation of his family in Chapter Three, his rhetoric changes from movies to paintings, photography, and blazons. The reader is guided through a museum of portraits, dates, and names in which Nabokov presents the main physical features of his relatives on both sides of his family as if he were observing paintings in a long, receding corridor. At other moments, Nabokov invites us to participate in his staged past like in a theater: “[C]ome out to meet me as I re-enter my past,” he says (Nabokov 1966, 59). He presents characters along the way and even personifies his memory as if it were a character in a metafictional play: “A large, alabaster-based kerosene lamp is steered into the gloaming. Gently it floats and comes down; the hand of memory, now in a footman’s white glove, places it in the center of a round table” (Nabokov 1966, 70). This spectacle of Nabokov’s adolescence ends only when the Bolshevik revolution “turned off the lights” (Nabokov 1966, 128). Using these figurative techniques, Nabokov is not only directing his past but also dramatizing the means by which we access his memory, evoking warm tactile feelings. In Chapter Eight, the media changes again, this time from theater to “magic slides” in a homely projection (Nabokov 1966, 114). The tactile climax of this chapter occurs when Nabokov touches slides brought by a tutor for a didactic presentation: Now that I come to think of it, how tawdry and tumid they looked, those jellylike pictures, projected upon the damp linen screen (moisture was supposed to make them blossom more richly) but, on the other hand, what loveliness the glass slides as such revealed when simply held between finger and thumb and raised to the light — translucent miniatures, pocket wonderlands, neat little worlds of hushed luminous hues! In later years, I rediscovered the same precise and silent beauty at the radiant bottom of a microscope’s magic shaft. (Nabokov 1966, 125)

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This passage combines several elements that should be highlighted. First, he evokes a sense of dampness and the luminous projection that opposes the darkness over the slide or the microscope. Beyond that, the inversion of scales here evokes a child’s viewpoint (close to the floor or close to the rocks on the beach) when looking at small things (Nabokov 1966, 112).5 Not only that, Nabokov connects his childhood slides with his microscope’s observations in adult life, suggesting that both experiences are linked by a common bodily experience. It is intriguing that among so many bodily descriptions, eroticism, and sexual pleasure is so obviously avoided. Even when Nabokov presents to the reader his sexual awakening, it is presented in terms of the discomfort that he felt close to women, which made him sexually aroused (“clammy consciousness”) and yet puzzled (Nabokov 1966, 159). Nabokov explicitly says he had a problem with trite aspects of the female body, especially concerning dirt, and also felt uneasy with the sexual feelings generated by looking at the bodies of women: “I soon noticed that any evocation of the feminine form would be accompanied by the puzzling discomfort already familiar to me” (Nabokov 1966, 157). He describes these moments as romantic agitations, and although these passages are sexually charged, they are not exactly erotic because Nabokov disguises sexual content as poetic creation, clearly refraining from the discussion of desire. Darkness, warmth, and protection have given to Nabokov a sense of comfort and identity, connecting the events of his childhood with that of his adult life through bodily recollections. In Speak, Memory, therefore, he not only outlines his intellectual process to become an author, but he also presents his maturation in terms of sensuous and embodied experiences; while the reader enjoys the book with a “pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual” (Nabokov 1980, 6).

Notes 1. Since Aristotle, Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber explains, memory has been considered a receptacle in which information is stored like a wax tablet. Today, however, one can no longer think about memory in those terms. She explains that memory is a function of the whole organism, embodied in complex ways (Leuzinger-Bohleber 2015, 25). 2. Nabokov’s opposition between text, texture and content, in this passage, might have been borrowed from John Crowe Ransom, a specialist in New Criticism, who has defended the study of poesy and prose through texture and not content or argument. For him, texture consists of the organic

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essence of the text, the sensuous and concrete aspects of the poem, such as sounds, imagery and rhyme. 3. Elizabeth Grosz explains that in the traditional Western dichotomy between body and mind, inherited from Christian and Cartesian thought, the “body sensations, activities and processes become ‘lower-order’ natural and animal phenomena […].” This historical discredit of the body, continues Grosz, refuses to “acknowledge the distinctive complexities of organic bodies, the fact that bodies construct and in turn are constructed by an interior, a psychical and a signifying view-point, a consciousness or perspective,” which means that the body is an epistemological construction as much as it is a biological one (Grosz 1994, 8). 4. The original name of Speak, Memory—“Speak, Mnemosyne”—indicates more explicitly the importance of the mother’s presence, as Mnemosyne means memory, the mother of the muses. 5. The exercise of observing something small is particularly pleasurable for Nabokov and tends to awaken his memory. This can be observed in the crystal ornament of a penholder: “One held it close to one’s eye, screwing up the other, and when one had got rid of the shimmer of one’s own lashes, a miraculous photographic view of the bay and of the line of cliffs ending in a lighthouse could be seen inside. And now a delightful thing happens. The process of recreating that penholder and the microcosm in its eyelet stimulates my memory to a last effort” (Nabokov 1966, 112).

Bibliography Alexandrov, Vladimir. 1991. Nabokov’s Otherworld. Princeton; NJ: Princeton University Press. Anderson, Linda. 2001. Autobiography. New York: Routledge. Bora, Renu. 1997. Outing Texture. In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. E. Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke University Press. Boyd, Brian. 1985. Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness. Reprint, Christchurch: Cybereditions, 2001. ———. 1991. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006. Nabokov, Time, and Timelessness: A Reply to Martin Hägglund. New Literary History 37 (2): 469–478. ———. 2011. Stalking Nabokov. New York: Columbia University Press. Delage-Toriel, Lara. 2015. Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man: Nabokov’s Evolving Body Paradigm. Cosmo: Comparative Studies on Modernism 3: 21–32. Durantaye, Leland De La. 2007. Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Elizabeth, Freeman. 2005. Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography. SocialText 23: 57–68. ———. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press. Foster Jr., John Burt. 1993. Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gates, Katherine. 2000. Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex, Expanded Edition. Reprint, New York: Powerhouse Cultural Entertainment, 2017. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act. New York: Cornell University Press. Leuzinger-Bohleber, Marriane. 2015. Embodied Memories, Trauma and Depression. London: Karnac. Louria, Yvette. 1974. Nabokov and Proust: The Challenge of Time. Books Abroad 48 (3): 469–476. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1966. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2000. ———. 1969. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1971. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1990. ———. 1980. Lectures on Literature. Reprint, New York: A. Harvest Book, 2002. Proust, Marcel. 1913. In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way. Vol. 1. Reprint, New York: The Modern Library, 1992. Rupprecht, Caroline. 2013. Womb Fantasies: Subjective Architectures in Postmodern Literature, Cinema and Art. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, and Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press. Sicker, Phillip. 1987. Practicing Nostalgia: Time and Memory in Nabokov’s Early Russian Fiction. Studies in the 20th Century Literature 11 (2): 257. Shute, Jenefer. 2003. ‘So Nakedly Dressed’: The Text of Female Body in Nabokov’s Novels. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook, ed. Ellen Pifer, 111–120. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 21

‘A Tactile Sensation Is a Blind Spot’: Nabokov’s Aesthetics of Touch Lara Delage-Toriel

The first sense to develop in the womb, touch is nowadays considered by the likes of psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu or philosopher Michel Serres as man’s primary medium, our first tongue, as it were, essential to our protection and survival.1 As Ashley Montagu has observed, the extensiveness of the entry under “touch” in the Oxford English Dictionary—“by far the longest entry” (Montagu 1978, 102)—is proof enough of the imprint left by the tactile experience on Western modes of representation. Yet it has traditionally been relegated to the dregs of our culture; from Aristotle to Hegel, thinkers have long placed it on the side of animality, thus largely excluding it from intellectual and artistic fields, with consequences to be gaged by the fact that renowned “tactile” artists are few and far between in comparison with sound or visual artists. As a cultural historian, Constance Classen suggests that the omission of “tactile data,” even within such fields as the history of the body or the history of medicine, is less a conscious choice than the result of “a general, unspoken consensus among academics” (Classen 2012, xi–xii). Literary criticism is no exception to the rule, as it has generally dwelt at far greater length on the visual—notably

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ekphrastic—and musical or acoustic aspects of literary works than on their tactile dimension.2 As an academic, Vladimir Nabokov did however spur his students to engage with literary works in a properly tactile manner, as is apparent in the following precept from “Good Readers and Good Writers”: “in reading, one should notice and fondle details” (Nabokov 1982, 1). The second verb may of course be dismissed as a merely metaphorical flourish to be expected from this kind of writer, were it not for the testimony of one of his former students which confirms his tactile sensibilities with regard to textual detail: “‘caress the details,’ Nabokov would utter, rolling the r, his voice the rough caress of a cat’s tongue, ‘the divine details!’” (Wetzsteon 1970, 245). The evocativeness of Nabokov’s mimetic performance illustrates the degree to which he believed reading to be a sensuous experience. His conclusion to “Good Readers and Good Writers” pays particular homage to the physiology of tactility when it ranks the spine, the seat of the “telltale tingle,” (Nabokov 1982, 6) above the brain or the heart as key to an adequate appreciation of literary masterpieces. “Telltale tingle”: the onomatopoeic coinage is also there to remind us that tactile sensation plays an essential role in transmitting the narrative thrust of such masterpieces. Indeed, in Nabokov’s eyes—or should we say his spine—, this tingle “really tells you what the author felt and wished you to feel” (Nabokov 1973, 41). In Nabokov’s book, tactility thus seems a prime enabler of reciprocity: readers touch texts as texts touch them, physically as well as affectively and intellectually. Like skin, the written page acts as an interface, an interbody one might say, between the reader and the writer’s inner and outer worlds. It is then no wonder that Nabokov draws upon the very concrete image of the embrace to qualify his ideal in writing: “up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever” (Nabokov 1982, 2). A few nuances must nevertheless be brought to this postcard landscape; there is some measure of wishful thinking in the author’s assumption that the permanence of the book conditions the state of the relationship between author and reader, since much of the survival of a work depends on its readership, on the reader’s continued desire to tend toward it, fathom its depths, probe its contents, and sometimes handle it, as in my present attempt, in order to hand at least some part of it on to others. This is where the particular nature of touch may allow for a fruitful

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reflection on the ways in which literary texts both work and are worked upon. Indeed, the sense of touch is distinct from the other senses in that it has a reflexive quality. In touching, we are simultaneously active and passive; as we touch we become tangible. Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to this in Le Visible et l’invisible as “recroisement,” or “crisscrossing”: my hand, while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand, for example, if it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of what it is also a part. Through this crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorporate themselves into the universe they interrogate, are recorded on the same map as it; the two systems are applied upon one another as the two halves of an orange. (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 133–134)

Let us then venture an analogy with those other two halves described earlier on: the text as membrane which both touches and is touched by the reader; by extension, the text as an interbody in which reader and writer interrogate each other, and map each other out. Reading as both active apprehension and affective subjection. The contradictory nature of skin may likewise serve as a paradigm for the fluctuations in such crisscrossings. As Didier Anzieu writes, the skin is “both permeable and impermeable, superficial and profound, truthful and misleading […] The skin is both solid and fragile” (Anzieu 1989, 17). In the following pages, I shall examine the impact of this contradictory nature and the manifold qualities of touch it might induce in one’s reading experience of Nabokov. Let us start with stanzas 2 to 6 of “Voluptates Tactionum,” a poem in which touch features as the main protagonist. […] When you turn a knob, your set Will obligingly exhale Forms, invisible and yet Tangible—a world in Braille. Think of all the things that will Really be within your reach! Phantom bottle, dummy pill,

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Limpid limbs upon a beach. Grouped before a Magnotact, Clubs and families will clutch Everywhere the same compact Paradise (in terms of touch). Palpitating fingertips Will caress the flossy hair And investigate the lips Simulated in midair See the schoolboy, like a blind Lover, frantically grope For the shape of love—and find Nothing but the shape of soap. (Nabokov 1970, 166)

Within the boundaries of the poem, Nabokov takes on the role of a mythographer, parsing the fads of his day and the way in which scientific research was altering post-World War II consumer society, somewhat like Roland Barthes six years later, when chronicling for example the advent of plastic and the ensuing abolition of the usual hierarchy between substances—“the whole world can be plasticized,” writes the young Barthes, “and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas” (Barthes 1988, 99). Here, it is as if the whole world can be tactilized. Nabokov thus mocks the persuasive marketing strategies employed by industrial design, with its growing use of tactile titillation, following the creed, “Don’t think affordances, think temptation” (Djadjadiningrat, Overbeeke and Wensveen 2002, 9). For instance, the second to last stanza draws from the codes of amorous rapture by presenting a miniature blazon of the female body, while resorting to coarsely textured plosive and sibilant alliterations that parody the hyperstimulus of haptic appeal. “Make it snuggle in the palm,” to borrow from the title of an essay in which business professors Sheldon and Arens stated as early as 1932 the crucial importance of tactile satisfaction to subliminally lure the consumer: “merchandise designed to be pleasing to the hand wins an approval that may never register in the mind, but which will determine additional purchases” (Sheldon and Arens 2005, 427). By highlighting the predominantly haptic power of television over its purely visual appeal, Nabokov anticipates pronouncements that Marshall McLuhan, the high priest of pop culture and media, would make in 1969:

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Unlike film or photograph, television is primarily an extension of the sense of touch rather than of sight, and it is the tactile sense that demands the greatest interplay of all the senses. The secret of TV’s tactile power is that the video image is one of low intensity or definition and thus, unlike either photograph or film, offers no detailed information about specific objects but instead involves the active participation of the viewer. […] The viewer, in fact, becomes the screen, whereas in film he becomes the camera. […] The immediate interface between audile-tactile and visual perception is taking place everywhere around us. (McLuhan 1969, 74)

McLuhan warns against the threat of this media revolution, calling it an “environmental Blitzkrieg” (McLuhan 1969, 74) against which the only shelter is a close examination of its mainsprings. Nabokov’s own protective device against the risk of referential illusion caused by the blurring of perceptual boundaries is the scathing irony with which he laces his verse. Stanza 4 is a concentrate of Nabokovian vitriol in which one recognizes his elitist aversion to the passive credulity of mass culture, notably through the grating alliteration in the “k” phoneme which bespeaks the crudeness of Magnotactic idolatry. There is a clear division here between the benighted crowd that can only “clutch” at the same vulgar compact and the happy few who may afford to “fondle” the details of true beauty. Another instance of irony may be found in the imitation of the perlocutionary ploys of advertising discourse in “Think of all the things that will Really be within your reach!” (Stanza 3)—the author’s trick lies in the lexical indigence of the internal rhyme, “think”/“things”, “really”/“reach”, that emphasizes the clichéd cheapness of the ideal to which it refers. Finally, the delusions of the soap lover in the last stanza may be aptly contrasted with the tactile delights afforded by poetic inspiration in Pale Fire: Now I shall speak… Better than any soap Is the sensation for which poets hope When inspiration and its icy blaze, The sudden image, the immediate phrase Over the skin a triple ripple send Making the little hairs all stand on end As in the enlarged animated scheme Of whiskers mowed when held up by Our Cream. (Nabokov 1962, 56)

Here, the recourse to the consumer product is tinged positively since its haptic mainspring is poetically recuperated: there is a controlled use of the

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image by the persona as it is integrated within a quirky concetto combining the banal and the lyrical. Conversely, the Magnotact’s magnetized viewers are paragons of the bad reader, contemporary exemplars of bovarysm, as they are unable to maintain a certain intellectual distance between themselves and the object that affects them. Feeling and enjoying that telltale tingle, for Nabokov, should not prevent the “good” reader from remaining “a little aloof, a little detached when reading” (Nabokov 1982, 6). Thus, the intercourse between reader and writer that is figured in the image of the mountaintop embrace requires a mediating space that is left free from individual appropriation or impingement. This necessary distance conditions the possibility of an encounter, the confrontation with the other. It is a distance which, according to neurologist Erwin Straus, even the closest form of contact cannot abolish: Communication is not a direct, immediate relation between two persons, but mediated through reference to the other which remains the same for me and for you. […] Communion demands distance which continues even during the most perfect forms of togetherness, of nearness, of the “we.” (Straus 1963, 178)

By encouraging the illusion of tangible immediacy, Magnotactic attraction abolishes this distance. This flaw may be read as a pointed indictment of the poshlost Nabokov found inherent to popular culture and its gaudy garbs. Nevertheless, a comparable pitfall awaits the lover of fine arts in “La Veneziana,” in which young Simpson falls for the portrait of a young lady attributed to Sebastiano del Piombo: The Venetian girl stood half-facing him, alive and three-dimensional. Her dark eyes gazed into his without the sparkle, the rosy fabric of her blouse set off with an unhabitual warmth the dark-hued beauty of her neck and the delicate creases under her ear. A gently mocking smile was frozen at the right corner of her expectantly joined lips. Her long fingers, spread in twos, stretched toward her shoulder, from which the fur and velvet were about to fall. And Simpson, with a profound sigh, moved toward her and effortlessly entered the painting. A marvelous freshness immediately made his head spin. There was a scent of myrtle and of wax, with a very faint whiff of lemon. […] With a sidewise smile la Veneziana gently adjusted her fur and, lowering her hand into her basket, handed him a small lemon. Without taking his eyes off her now playfully mobile eyes, he accepted the yellow

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fruit from her hand, and, as soon as he felt its firm, roughish coolness and the dry warmth of her long fingers, an incredible bliss came to a boil within him and began deliciously burbling. (Nabokov 1995, 110–111)

Ekphrasis is here taken to an extreme since the painting is seemingly deprived of its heterotopic aspect to merge with the diegetic space. Indeed, the adjectives (“alive and three-dimensional”) as well as the verbs depicting the girl’s gestures (“stretched,” “adjusted,” “lowering,” “handed”) all animate her. That the space of the painting is not arrested in time is also signaled by the adverb “expectantly” and especially the verbal phrase “were about to fall,” which creates a sense of imminence, a future lurking beyond the frame of the present, but also announces the impending fall of Simpson, who receives not an apple but a lemon and who not only cancels heterotopia by dint of his tactile gaze, but also transgresses, or trespasses upon, a normally impassable limit by penetrating the painting. The tactility of this gaze may be sensed through the way in which it strokes the young lady’s features, garments, and environment, brings into relief their temperature, moisture, relief, and texture, with terms such as “unhabitual warmth,” “marvelous freshness,” “roughish coolness,” “dry warmth,” “delicate creases,” “fur,” “velvet,” “firm.” Erotic tension is first palpable in the tantalizingly kissable lips (“her expectantly joined lips”), but also in the mobility of hands which reminds the viewer of the lady’s own ability to touch before they actually do reach out to Simpson. At this point, the description very briefly lapses into a slight confusion between hand and fruit, as though both could be similarly consumed. Indeed, grammatically speaking, “its firm, roughish coolness” could have two referents, the fruit or the hand, although the contrasting temperatures then make the fruit more likely a candidate. In any case, the erotic titillation afforded by sight and scent finally comes to a head with this ultimate point of contact, hand against hand, which unsurprisingly triggers an alliterative ejaculation in “b”: “an incredible bliss came to a boil… and began deliciously burbling.” Here the loss of distance is not only physical but also mental and emotional: Simpson literally loses his footing as he is “without any awareness of a floor beneath his feet,” (Nabokov 1995, 111) his reason falters in a thymic excess for which he will be symbolically punished by being thrown out of the hortus conclusus of the painting. Whereas the parodic counterpoint in “Voluptates Tactionum” elicited an ironic form of tangibility and thus a distancing from the fascination

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of the blind lover, here the sensuousness of the description sketches out the contours of the desired figure with such delicacy that in the very instant of reading, it is liable to deceive readers, both intellectually and perceptually, thanks to its more immersive form of tangibility. A third type of “embrace” bonds Nabokov to his readers in his later “postmodern” works, one which plays upon the tension between the seductions of sensuous immersion and a resistance that pricks one’s curiosity, thus provoking both discomfort and the urge to read on. Maurice Couturier has written about the “poerotic mode” as “a fusion of the pornographic, the comic and the ironic modes” in such a manner that the Nabokovian text “generates powerful desires and paralyzes the reader’s critical judgment” (Couturier 1996). I would like to contend that rather than a paralysis, Nabokov often raises readers’ critical acumen and achieves this notably when spurring their haptic sensitivity to his fiction. Particularly striking are moments in which the narrative folds onto itself, the skin of the text thus offering a complexity and depth of surface that stimulates the impulse for “close reading,” or should we say, haptic reading. Reading then becomes a skin-to-skin experience, which is not to say a mindless one, quite the contrary. If we bear in mind Michel Serres’ comments on the skin, this experience becomes fundamental to the life of the mind: I touch one of my lips with my middle finger. Consciousness resides in this contact. I begin to examine it. It is often hidden in a fold of tissue, lip against lip, tongue against palate, […] skin on skin becomes conscious, as does skin on mucus membrane and mucus membrane on itself. Without this folding, without the contact of the self on itself, there would truly be no internal self, no body properly speaking, coenesthesia even less so, no real image of the body; we would live without consciousness; slippery smooth and on the point of fading away. (Serres 1985, 22)

A critical reading of Nabokov calls forth this reflexive attitude, this awareness of one’s separateness in the moments of closest proximity, this “expeausition,” (Nancy 2000, 33) as Jean-Luc Nancy has it—the skin being a site of “ex-pression, ex-tension, ex-cretion, ex-scription, and existence” (Robert 2010, 89). Perhaps the most intense and eloquent instance of this skin-toskin experience can be felt in the famous episode of the Burning Barn in Ada, which combines the narrative of Van and Ada’s first sexual encounter and a metanarrative duologue between the two

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characters in their nineties. In the same way as young Ada and Van’s bodies are entwined—“(their reciprocal positions had become rather muddled by then)” (Nabokov 1969, 119)—the narrative levels slip into one another to an extent which requires a sharp reading eye, all the more so when there are no diacritical marks to signal direct speech and thus distinguish character from narrator. For example, aging Ada’s reminiscence suddenly gives way to young Van’s response: I remember wanting so badly to ask you for a bit of purely scientific information, because my sidelong glance— Not now, it’s not a nice sight right now and it will be worse in a moment (or words to that effect). (Nabokov 1969, 118)

It is only retroactively, thanks to the distancing parenthesis, that the reader is able to trace the narrative shift that separates these three presences. Moreover, tactility is foregrounded not only by the story’s erotic event (in which a highly aroused Van implores Ada to “touch it quick” and his false ingénue cousin, “in order to explain, tactfully, tactually, […] belly-danced against him” before making her first “fingertri[p] up [his] Africa” [Nabokov 1969, 119]), but also by the metanarrative handling of this event, which prevents readers from falling for the charming fallacies of fiction. Ada in particular acts as a dissident voice, “retouching” Van’s version, and it is a tellingly tactile detail that Nabokov refers to her “late hand” (Nabokov 1969, 118, 119) as a pointed reminder of the physicality of her aging presence. The folds of the narrative skin thus become a particularly rich ground for transitivity and mediation, requiring fine proprioceptive skills on the readers’ part if they are to negotiate its labile boundaries and enjoy its humorous deflations of erotic tumescence, without losing their footing. Nabokov skirts the risks of a pornographic evocation by diverting us from a direct and unmitigated experience of pleasure, but also by clothing Van’s penis in a veil of linguistic modesty. Throughout their duologue, Van and Ada repeatedly refer to “it,” a “neutral” deictic which in actual fact entices the reader to penetrate the diegetic space so as to coincide, as it were, with his characters’ perception. The verbal veil, rather than a screen, becomes a nexus, a point of contact that establishes the reader’s complicity with the writer’s erotic thrust. The transgression is indeed double: by crossing the text’s diegetic borders through the haptic performance of our imagination, we collude in the writer’s subversion of literary codes.

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The “tactual” intricacies of Ada had already been suggested a little earlier on in the narrative, during the Shattal tree incident, when Van first grazes Ada’s skin with his lips: Such contacts evolve their own texture; a tactile sensation is a blind spot; we touch in silhouette. Henceforth, at certain moments of their otherwise indolent days, in certain recurrent circumstances of controlled madness, a secret sign was erected, a veil drawn between him and her—[…]. (Nabokov 1969, 98)

The statement “a tactile sensation is a blind spot” is particularly revealing of these intricacies, since, in order to define touch, it resorts to another sense, sight, or rather the absence thereof. Indeed, a blind spot is, anatomically, the spot on the retina which is insensible to light. One might therefore infer that tactile sensation must be read as a vanishing point rather than a site of revelation. Moreover, Nabokov manipulates lexical contiguity so as to provoke a kind of hermeneutic striptease. Indeed, the veil that is meant to mark out the border between the two bodies is also the site of a semiotic exchange which instead of withholding the reason for the veil—Van’s erection—displays it by displacing it onto a verb, thus making the “secret” shine forth. The veil is hence a labile alibi thanks to which the text spins a web of sense, in both senses. Consequently, the veil offers the necessary distance whereby may be tallied the extent of desire—that of Van as well as that of the reader. Besides, it is worth noticing how, once again, the narrative’s convoluted syntax produces the effect of a veil as it delays the reader’s hermeneutic grasp of the scene: the dash is immediately followed by a parenthesis inclosing a brief metatextual and digressive exchange between Van and Ada (about the extinction of the ardillas, one of which, like Lucette, eavesdropped on their lovemaking), before the sentence resumes its diegetic course proper. As Erwin Strauss notes, distance is indeed “a spatio-temporal form of sensing” insofar as distance, as a phenomenon, “is not sensed; sensing unfolds [through] distance” (Strauss 1963, 379; 384). A remarkable instance of this unfolding through distance may be found in the evocation of Nabokov’s mother in Speak, Memory: I watched, too, the familiar pouting movement she made to distend the network of her close-fitting veil drawn too tight over her face, and as I write this, the touch of reticulated tenderness that my lips used to feel when I kissed her veiled cheek comes back to me—flies back to me with

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a shout of joy out of the snow-blue, blue-windowed (the curtains are not yet drawn) past. (Nabokov 1966, 32)

In this eloquently lyrical passage, the act of writing is intimately bound to tactile remembrance, which the dentals articulate in a striking way, especially in the polysyllabic “reticulated tenderness.” This phrase is a perfect embodiment of Duns Scotus’ haecceitas, which James Wood defines in How Fiction Works: The medieval theologian Duns Scotus gave the name ‘thisness’ (haecceitas ) to individuating form. […] By thisness I mean any detail that draws abstraction towards itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centres our attention with its concretion. […] By thisness, I mean the moment when Emma Bovary fondles the satin slippers she danced in weeks before at the great ball at La Vaubyessard, ‘the soles of which were yellowed with the wax from the dance floor.’ (Wood 2008, 54–55).

The persistence of the veil’s sensation is one such “puff of palpability,” able to flesh out a past both lost and synesthetically regained, through sound, color as well as touch. The passage is all the more distinctive in that the autobiography grants precious few instances of physical contact, even among close relatives, as I have shown elsewhere.3 The most significant depictions of tactile sensation are associated with Nabokov’s Swiss governess, who takes him “completely aback by patting [his] cheek in sign of spontaneous affection” (Nabokov 1966, 82) when she first arrives in the household. It is indeed one of the many unwitting betrayals of her foreignness that she is blissfully unaware of the proxemic codes that govern the Russian aristocracy in which Nabokov was raised: “before her time no stranger had ever stroked my face” (Nabokov 1966, 82). Against the brash touch of Mademoiselle, the mother’s veiled skin appears as an enduring model for the kind of tact with which Nabokov would later seek to embrace his readers, through the netting of his own textual lacework. “Writing, reading, a tactful affair,” (Nancy 2000, 76) writes Jean-Luc Nancy in Corpus, to underline the infra-linguistic dimension underlying the act of writing as much as that of reading. Writing (about) fiction: a quest for an adequate contact, a thoughtfulness of tact that adopts the world’s ever-shifting motion without oppressing or tampering with it, intent as it is on giving the world a chance to touch us in return; a chance that, as it unfolds, may move us poetically.

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Notes 1. See Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego and Michel Serres in the bibliography. 2. Sarah Jackson’s Tactile Poetics (2015) was the first book-length literary study to examine the relationship between touching and writing. 3. See Lara Delage-Toriel in the bibliography.

Bibliography Anzieu, Didier. 1989. The Skin Ego, trans. C. Turner. New Haven: Yale University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1988. Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers. London: Paladin. Classen, Constance. 2012. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Couturier, Maurice. 1996. The Poerotic Novel: Nabokov’s Lolita and Ada. Zembla. Translation of Chap. 5, Roman et censure, ou la mauvaise foi d’Eros. Paris: Champ Vallon. http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/coutur1.htm. Accessed 15 September 2018. Delage-Toriel, Lara. 2017. Speak, Mademoiselle: Nabokov’s Authorial Position Revisited. In Nabokov’s Women: The Silent Sisterhood of Textual Nomads, ed. Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, 209–226. London: Lexington. Djadjadiningrat, J.P., C.J. Overbeeke, and S.A.G. Wensveen. 2002. Beauty in Usability: Forget About Ease of Use! In Pleasure with Products: Beyond Usability, ed. W.S. Green and P.W. Jordan, 7–16. London: Taylor & Francis. Jackson, Sarah. 2015. Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1969. A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysics of Media. Playboy, March, 53–74. Montagu, Ashley. 1978. Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, 2nd ed. New York: Harper & Row. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1962. Pale Fire. Reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. ———. 1966. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. ———. 1969. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. New York: McGraw-Hill. ———. 1970. Poems and Problems. New York: McGraw-Hill. ———. 1973. Strong Opinions. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1990. ———. 1982. Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace. ———. 1995. The Collected Stories. Reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Corpus, trans. R. D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Robert, William. 2010. Trials of Antigone and Jesus. New York: Fordham University Press. Serres, Michel. 1985. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. M. Sankey and P. Cowley. Reprint, London: Continuum, 2008. Sheldon, Roy, and Egmont Arens. 2005. Make It Snuggle in the Palm: The Commodification of Touch. In The Book of Touch, ed. Constance Classen, 426–428. London: Bloomsbury. Straus, Erwin. 1963. The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience, trans. J. Needleman. London: Collier-Macmillan. Wetzsteon, Ross. 1970. Nabokov as Teacher. TriQuarterly 17 (Winter): 240– 246. Wood, James. 2008. How Fiction Works. Reprint, London: Vintage, 2009.

Index

A Ada, or Ardor, 6, 8, 70, 73, 75, 166, 176, 184, 188, 192, 224, 257, 272, 331–334, 336, 337 Ada, 9, 30, 31, 168, 184–189, 201, 259–261, 263, 264, 286, 314, 318–321, 333, 335, 336, 356 Lucette, 31, 187, 262, 264, 265, 272 Van, 30, 31, 142, 144, 184–189, 195, 201, 202, 232, 261, 264, 265, 272, 285, 328, 332–337, 354–356 aesthetics, 2, 5, 7, 9, 53, 54, 56–58, 60, 61, 63–65, 110, 158, 160, 164, 176, 183, 188, 189, 192, 219, 224–228, 230, 236, 237, 267, 269, 270, 275, 278, 288, 347 anxiety, 5, 36, 38, 43, 46, 48–50, 58, 59, 61, 66, 201

B Barthes, Roland, 4, 108–110, 112, 114–118, 175, 261, 262, 268, 272, 350 Bend Sinister, 75, 113, 180 blindness, 125, 128, 129, 132, 320 blind, 21, 24, 102, 132, 134, 183, 200, 215, 221, 259, 266, 268, 271, 272, 320, 322, 323, 325, 327, 328, 354, 356 blur, 127 lose, 197 without seeing, 259 body, 5, 7, 17, 29, 36, 37, 42–44, 50, 53, 63, 64, 78, 79, 81, 118, 124, 127, 130–132, 136, 160, 162, 163, 179, 181, 185, 187, 195, 200, 210, 217, 230, 232, 235, 242, 259–261, 266, 268, 272, 282, 284–286, 321, 328, 332, 333, 335–337, 341, 343, 344, 347, 350, 354 bodily, 4, 7, 35, 38, 42, 55, 60, 64, 158, 159, 162, 163, 167, 184,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Bouchet et al. (eds.), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7

361

362

INDEX

231, 232, 234, 265, 277, 282, 284, 319, 331–333, 337, 338, 341, 343 corporeal, 5, 35, 42, 49, 55 corporeality, 39 C childhood, 3, 4, 15, 16, 21, 28, 39, 73, 82, 89–91, 93, 96–99, 102, 103, 118, 119, 149, 153, 158, 168, 201, 212, 247, 258, 270, 332, 339–341, 343 child, 17, 26, 30, 46, 66, 90, 91, 93, 95, 101, 103, 113, 127, 177, 180, 182, 184, 208, 219, 228, 305, 343 cognition, 17, 18, 36–39, 46, 49, 50, 59, 267 cognitive, 5–7, 17, 36–40, 49, 56, 58, 60, 61, 63, 70, 71, 78, 79, 82, 84, 125, 128, 135, 242, 243, 245, 247, 249–251, 332 neurological, 124 D death, 4, 31, 41, 46, 48–50, 74, 82, 108–120, 125, 182, 188, 189, 204, 216, 221, 232, 306, 307, 309, 319, 339, 340, 342 The Defense, 40 desire, 3, 5, 8, 54, 81, 109, 111, 114, 115, 127, 128, 131, 176, 178, 179, 182, 184, 185, 188, 189, 193, 194, 196, 197, 214, 216, 219, 220, 230–232, 257, 259–263, 265, 266, 269, 332, 334, 337, 338, 341, 343, 354, 356 attraction, 195 lust, 196 obsession, 200

Despair, 5, 9, 19, 54–56, 58, 60, 64–66, 135, 199, 220, 224, 232–237, 272 Felix, 200, 236 Herman, 54–56, 58, 135, 199, 200, 202, 220, 233, 235, 236, 272

E ekphrasis , 257, 262, 263, 272, 353 ekphrastic, 262, 264 emotion, 5, 17, 18, 22, 26, 27, 31, 62, 116, 186, 208, 210, 226, 236, 251, 261, 353 emotional, 21, 27 emotionally, 242 The Enchanter, 3, 124, 182, 219, 272 eroticism, 8, 176, 178, 188, 260, 336, 343 autoeroticism, 337 erection, 260 erotic, 7, 8, 127, 130, 132, 142, 186, 187, 199, 219, 257, 260, 261, 272, 333–336, 338, 343, 355 fellatio, 262 sexual, 259, 262, 264, 313, 317, 320, 322

F Flaubert, Gustave, 8, 207, 209, 217, 314, 327

G The Gift , 6, 23, 54, 70–82, 84, 184, 194, 215, 220, 258, 281–284, 288, 289, 298 Dar, 70, 72, 75, 84, 298 Fyodor, 54, 73, 76–78, 80, 82, 99, 194, 258, 282–284

INDEX

H hearing, 100, 102, 140, 142, 154, 180, 315, 319, 322 ear, 213, 277, 283, 314 hear, 268 heard, 215 listen, 286–288

I imagination, 5, 16–18, 22, 23, 26, 27, 31, 38, 39, 46, 94, 118, 165, 167, 168, 182, 186, 187, 228, 229, 236, 271, 302, 304, 305, 307, 308, 325, 326, 334, 355 imaginative, 27 Invitation to a Beheading , 5, 35, 39, 41, 45, 46, 49, 50, 53, 54, 58, 59, 64, 72, 81, 108, 120, 162, 197, 282 Cincinnatus, 5, 36, 41–49, 282 Emmie, 44 Rodion, 44, 198 irony, 21, 109, 116, 179, 225, 351 ironical, 58

K King, Queen, Knave, 8, 9, 176, 180, 189, 196, 224–226, 228, 231, 233, 236 Franz, 177–180, 189, 196, 230, 231 Martha, 178, 179, 196

L Laughter in the Dark, 3, 93, 102, 124, 127–129, 131, 132, 134, 196, 236, 272, 280 Albinus, 102, 127, 128, 272, 280 Margot, 128, 132

363

Lolita, 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 54, 64, 72, 84, 108, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118–120, 123–125, 129–136, 139, 140, 143–145, 147–150, 152, 155, 158, 175, 176, 180, 184, 188, 189, 196, 208–212, 218–220, 229, 231, 235, 257, 259, 266, 272, 283, 313, 314, 316, 318, 336 Humbert, 1, 7, 8, 26, 64, 108–111, 113, 115–120, 123, 125, 129–131, 133, 135, 136, 180, 182, 189, 192, 195, 202, 207–211, 213, 215, 217, 218, 220, 231, 235, 259, 272, 283, 315, 316, 318 Lolita, 7, 26, 30, 109, 111, 113, 119, 126, 133, 136, 150, 180–183, 207–210, 212–215, 217, 266, 315, 321

M Mary, 180, 184, 192 memory, 3, 7, 9, 17, 18, 22, 23, 26, 31, 38, 39, 47, 53, 54, 74, 80, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97, 98, 108, 111, 115, 117, 118, 120, 123, 177, 181, 184, 191, 195, 243, 247, 260, 272, 277, 305, 306, 326, 331, 332, 334, 335, 338, 340–344 memories, 7, 21, 177, 333, 336, 337, 339, 341 memorize, 92 mnemonic, 5, 332 recollections, 343 remember, 48, 94, 98, 102, 305 remembering, 125 remembrance, 95, 332 multilingualism, 53, 148, 154

364

INDEX

multilingual, 3, 6, 70, 71, 77, 83, 139, 147, 149, 157, 158, 161–163, 166, 169, 242 plurilingual, 83 translingual, 69–71, 83 music, 6, 73–75, 94, 103, 159, 211, 248, 276, 277, 288, 289, 295–299, 301–304, 306–311 harmony, 61, 277, 289, 299, 300 musical, 6, 246, 276–278, 295, 296, 298–300, 303, 304, 307, 309, 311

N narration, 46, 123, 124, 127, 133, 134, 233, 235, 339 narrator, 8, 28, 30, 47, 48, 54, 72, 95, 98, 107, 108, 111, 113, 118, 119, 142, 152, 158, 167, 168, 179, 184, 198, 199, 201, 204, 207, 219, 259, 264, 266, 277, 280, 284, 287, 314, 324, 325, 328, 355 nonsense, 5, 25, 54, 55, 57, 58, 63, 64, 82, 220, 315

O The Original of Laura, 39, 107, 112, 119, 189

P painting art, 75, 107–109, 119, 187, 219, 226, 227 canvas, 262, 263 frame, 353 painted, 2 paintings, 342 Pale Fire, 6, 73, 75, 114, 117, 220

Kinbote, 29, 114, 115, 117, 118, 134, 136, 200, 220 Shade, 7, 220, 314 Sibyl, 307 Pnin, 23, 28, 29, 108, 119, 136, 159, 167, 169 Poe, Edgar Allan, 8, 36, 41, 46–48, 50, 209, 210, 212–214 poetics, 2, 6–8, 37, 38, 40, 74, 115, 118, 175, 182–184, 188, 210, 213, 216, 217, 262, 265, 282, 340, 343, 351 poetry, 6, 8, 9, 28, 64, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 81, 162, 167, 176, 207, 208, 210, 211, 213, 215–218, 220, 224, 258, 263, 265 poem, 162, 218, 220, 344 poet, 215 poetic, 6, 8, 37, 38, 61, 182, 183, 263, 340 poetical, 214 politics, 158, 161, 166, 289 Proust, Marcel, 3, 5, 7, 9, 89, 90, 94–96, 98–100, 103, 104, 331, 332 psychoanalysis, 272, 332, 341 R reader, 2–5, 8, 16, 20, 35, 36, 38–42, 44, 46, 49, 53–62, 65, 66, 72, 79, 104, 108, 115, 116, 119, 124, 127–129, 132–134, 136, 140–144, 146, 147, 150, 152, 155, 158, 166, 175, 186, 187, 202–204, 208–214, 216, 218, 220, 224, 227–230, 233–235, 242, 257, 259, 261, 263, 266–268, 270, 278, 284, 304, 314, 322, 324, 327–329, 333–338, 341–343, 348, 349, 352, 354–357 read, 26

INDEX

reading, 6, 7, 35–38, 40, 48, 49, 54, 64, 66, 82, 94, 97, 103, 116, 124, 130–133, 166, 199, 200, 214, 218, 235, 242, 246, 251, 257, 261, 269, 296, 308, 333, 337, 338, 341 The Real Life of Sebastian Knight , 158 romanticism, 282 S scopophilia, 131 self-translation, 71, 139, 140, 145, 149, 153–155 self-translated, 71 sensation, 3–5, 7, 9, 16–18, 79, 89–92, 94–104, 154, 160–162, 166, 185, 188, 194, 210, 212, 215, 235, 241, 242, 255, 261, 263, 266, 271, 320, 332–334, 337, 338, 341, 347, 348, 356, 357 sensory, 20, 123, 140, 142, 152 sensitivity, 5, 29–31, 183, 215, 259, 269, 354 sensibility, 169 sensitive, 5, 37, 49, 90, 114, 257, 268, 282 sensitiveness, 2 sensuality, 8, 29, 31, 176, 178, 180, 181, 183–185, 187–189, 313 sensual, 4, 8, 9, 57, 83, 90, 142, 153, 184, 185, 188, 257, 259, 262–266, 313, 316, 317, 319–321, 334–336, 340 sensuous, 95, 208, 215, 229, 338, 339, 343, 344, 348, 354 sensuously, 220 sensuousness, 354 sight(s), 4, 6, 42, 55, 58, 93, 97, 98, 100, 103, 140, 142, 154, 176, 177, 180, 182, 186, 191, 195,

365

196, 259, 260, 281, 299, 300, 314–317, 319, 321, 322, 326, 328, 336, 351, 353, 356 color, 99, 255, 257, 263, 265, 327 eye(s), 5, 44, 59, 65, 81, 92, 101, 102, 123, 129, 180, 181, 191, 194, 195, 197, 198, 283, 314, 316, 318, 320, 326, 344 gaze, 78, 201, 268, 335, 353 image, 300, 325 look, 196, 200 observe, 194, 202 observing, 24 optical, 242 peering, 341 perceive, 126 scopic, 177 see(s)/seeing/seen, 21, 23, 57, 64, 91, 95, 128, 193, 198, 200, 201, 246, 283 vision, 4, 6, 9, 29, 43, 48, 49, 130, 132, 231, 286 visual, 2, 3, 25–27, 30, 65, 92, 93, 96, 98, 101, 103, 108, 114, 123, 126, 127, 129, 132, 133, 135, 136, 195, 267, 269, 298, 302, 313, 314, 318, 336, 350, 351 visual form, 242 visualization, 242 watch, 199 smell(s), 4, 9, 29, 35, 95, 96, 98, 102, 154, 161, 177, 182, 188, 259, 260, 268, 299, 300, 314, 315, 318 fragrance, 165, 181, 259, 299 nose, 176, 177 odor, 181, 265 olfactive, 257 olfactory, 3 perfume, 102, 103 scent, 260, 300, 352, 353

366

INDEX

whiff, 95 sound(s), 4, 47, 55, 58, 95, 97–99, 103, 152, 159, 161, 165, 168, 215, 241, 242, 248, 257, 263, 265, 276, 277, 279, 281, 282, 284–289, 297–300, 302, 307, 325, 357 auditive, 93, 101–103 auditory, 3, 91, 103, 159, 275, 281, 283, 286, 311 ear, 6, 46, 209, 283, 284, 286, 288, 297, 299–301 hear, 63 hearing, 6, 9, 29, 55, 92, 94, 98, 100, 103, 153, 241, 255, 275, 284, 299, 300 noise, 278, 280, 282, 284 silent, 101 voice, 102, 285 Speak, Memory, 3, 4, 7, 39, 54, 89, 91, 95, 96, 99, 101, 118, 120, 123, 124, 135, 139, 143, 149, 157, 180, 188, 189, 191–193, 201, 241, 247, 255, 277, 296, 331, 333, 338, 339, 341, 343, 344, 356 structure, 5, 6, 36–38, 41, 49, 50, 56, 70, 78, 165, 202, 203, 213, 259, 266, 269, 289, 297–299, 311, 322, 335 synesthesia, 6, 7, 9, 53, 76, 99, 123, 154, 241–251, 255–259, 266–272, 297, 327 synesthete, 99 synesthetic, 153, 152, 260–263, 265, 266, 268, 270 synesthetically, 27 T taste, 4, 9, 26, 29, 53, 75, 76, 94, 95, 100, 102, 139, 142, 154, 161, 163, 165, 177, 180, 186, 188,

212, 223–227, 229–231, 237, 259, 260, 297, 316, 319, 320, 340 culinary, 141 dish, 142 food, 141, 144–147, 149, 151 gustative, 4 gustatory, 3 meal, 152 mouth, 76, 177, 217, 224, 229–231, 234, 237, 340 time, 2, 7, 22, 23, 37, 43–46, 49, 82, 89, 91, 97, 98, 110, 114, 125, 127, 128, 133, 148, 154, 161, 164–166, 187, 200, 209, 213, 220, 227, 228, 231, 262, 264, 285, 286, 299, 313, 317, 322–324, 328, 331, 333–336, 340–342, 353 past, 285 temporal, 285, 339, 340 temporality, 125, 199 timelessness, 339 touch(es), 6, 7, 9, 29, 49, 92, 95, 98, 103, 142, 153, 154, 157, 167, 176, 177, 180, 186, 187, 259, 268, 314, 318, 320–322, 326–328, 331, 333–336, 338, 341, 347–349, 351, 353–357 contact, 260, 328 feel, 259 hand, 53, 65, 132, 177, 185, 219, 317, 320, 321, 326–328, 334, 337, 338, 342, 350 haptic, 350, 351, 354, 355 skin, 7, 187, 272, 317, 320, 333, 334, 336, 337, 348, 349, 354, 356, 357 tactile, 3, 7, 93, 102, 103, 123, 131, 242, 258, 313, 314, 316–324, 328, 335, 336, 339,

INDEX

342, 347, 348, 350, 351, 355–357 tactility, 322, 353 tangible, 327 texture, 263, 327 touched, 47 translation, 4, 5, 48, 57, 59, 65, 69–72, 75, 76, 82, 84, 96, 139–155, 157, 160, 162–165, 168, 169, 225, 236, 265, 271 translatability, 71 translating, 4 translators, 56, 59, 71, 84, 140, 143, 155, 161, 162, 164–166, 168, 242 Transparent Things , 111, 112, 116, 119, 179, 195 Armande, 179, 195 Hugh, 111, 116, 195

367

V vision, 15, 19 Voluptates Tactionum, 6, 258, 313, 314, 323, 324, 327, 329, 349, 353 voyeurism eyed, 316 scopophilia, 8, 128, 192 scopophilic, 192, 195, 202 voyeur, 132, 192, 199 voyeuristic, 336

W wordplay, 56, 57, 59, 63, 65, 66, 131 pun, 6, 55, 57, 65, 66, 69, 77, 265 punning, 75