Stalking Nabokov (12 page)

He knows we cannot see any form of consciousness beyond death, but he imagines the next arc of the spiral in terms of overcoming the confinement of human consciousness to the present moment and gaining a free access to the past; in terms of being able to detect the designs of time; and in terms of overcoming the confinement of personality and somehow being able to form free combinations with other souls. Still further out, beyond even a human consciousness that has transcended death, he suspects other levels of consciousness, culminating eventually in a form of mind that actually creates our world, allowing for the independence of things it creates yet imparting whatever designs it chooses, inviting lesser forms of consciousness to develop their own freedom and to exercise their own creative power in recombining the parts of their world or in discovering the freedom and the design that lie behind it.

I have tried to explain, especially in the “Nabokov the Writer” chapter in
VNRY
, how this metaphysics also helps explain the peculiarities of Nabokov’s style: the distinct detail and the verbal design; the unpredictables of the present and the patterns of the past; the power of the mind, especially as it tries to peer beyond itself through the heightened control he imparts to his sentences, in a kind of escape from the muddle of the moment into the freedom of timelessness; and everything that he hides in the texture of a verbal world to be rediscovered by our inquiring minds.

I have also tried to probe the expression of Nabokov’s metaphysics in some of his major works:
The Defense
,
The Gift
,
Speak, Memory
,
Pale Fire
,
Ada
, and
Transparent Things
(see especially
NAPC
,
VNRY
,
VNAY
, and
NPFMAD
). Others have joined me in exploring the metaphysical system revealed in these and other books, but I know that I, for one, am still baffled by such other major works as
Invitation to a Beheading
(where the otherworldly quality seems too dominant, even, paradoxically, despite its emphatic absence) and
Lolita
(where it seems too recessive, even as Humbert celebrates his island of entranced time).

Apart from working out how his metaphysics manifests itself in individual works there are other tasks still to pursue. One is to identify the sources of Nabokov’s metaphysics. Some obvious sources are his mother’s noninstitutional religious sensibility; the pre-Darwinian, early-nineteenth-century tradition of natural theology in George Paley and others, who felt that the intricacy of natural design was clear evidence of a supernatural designer, an attitude that had powerful after-echoes in the poetry of Browning, a lifelong favorite of Nabokov’s; the antipositivism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in artistic circles in the symbolists of Western Europe and Russia: the world of Mallarmé, Yeats, and Blok; and the late-nineteenth-/ early-twentieth-century development by Bergson of an indeterminist and nonmaterialist explanation for evolution. Others have looked at Berkeley,
⁴
whom Nabokov at least mentions, and Uspensky, to whom he never once refers.
⁵
There is much to be done in this area—we need to look, for instance, at Pascal, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer—although in view of our ignorance of
what
Nabokov read
when
, and Nabokov’s reluctance to cite sources and his inclination to find his own terms, this seems likely to remain contested territory.

Another task is to trace the development of Nabokov’s metaphysics. To judge by a note he wrote in 1918 (quoted in
VNRY
154), his attitudes were clearly established by then, and he already sounds the independent and, in a sense, skeptical note that we hear in his later works: as Michael Wood has aptly commented, his metaphysics is “a theology for sceptics.”
⁶
But in Nabokov’s early poems and early stories there is a tendency for the otherworldly to break into this world that is at odds with the subtler methods of his later work. Perhaps this early tendency was merely the result of his reaching for convenient and conventional models, or perhaps it is evidence that his early thinking was indeed more shaped by traditional sources than his later work suggests.

But by about 1925, Nabokov started to stick to the world we see and know and to suggest something more beyond this world only as if by inversion. In “The Return of Chorb,” for instance, the husband’s attempt to retrace the route of his brief life with the wife he has just lost stresses only the impossibility, in human terms, of travelling back in time as we can in space and the desperation of the human craving for a freer kind of time. My guess, but it is only that, is that Nabokov’s sense of a designing force that creates a world for us to rediscover develops into a central part of his metaphysics mostly after the 1920s, perhaps as a result of his deepening knowledge of mimicry or of his exposure to the surprises of his scientific discoveries. Or perhaps this is an illusion, and the change simply reflects his own increasing capacity in his work to create a world that we as readers have to rediscover.

In the 1969 article in
Time
that led to my reading
Pale Fire
and my “conversion” into a passionate Nabokovian, Nabokov’s own words provided the headline: “I have never met a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.”
⁷
That combination of lucid, lonely, and mad almost suggests to me, now, that Nabokov thought he had buried his metaphysical secrets—the secrets of Fyodor’s dead father’s participation in Fyodor’s life, or dead Hazel Shade’s participation in Kinbote’s and Shade’s lives, for instance, if these readings are right—had buried them so deep that they would perhaps never be discovered. Was it for this reason that, although the skeptical note sounds more and more strongly in his later works, there are also more explicit pointers past the skeptical reading, at least in the acrostic of “The Vane Sisters” and the ghostly narrator or narrators of
Transparent Things
? Did Nabokov write these two works partly
in order to
provide the key to what is safely stored but locked away in his other work?

But what I want to focus on here is not questions about the nature of Nabokov’s metaphysics, its impact on his style or works, or its origins and development, but some quite different kinds of questions that seem appropriate now that so much has been done on his metaphysics, now that it threatens to settle into an orthodoxy in Nabokov criticism.

The first question is: What difference does his metaphysics make? Or, less crudely: Why stress the metaphysics so much, as such a central part of his work, when it is possible to respond with great pleasure to Nabokov and not even
notice
his metaphysics—as Harry Levin and, at least in Véra Nabokov’s eyes, everybody before she wrote her introduction to
Stikhi
, had done? There are utterly committed Nabokovians, like Dieter E. Zimmer—who has worked on Nabokov longer and more selflessly than anyone else—who find Nabokov’s work astonishingly fertile but who have no interest in or sympathy for his metaphysics. How can a response like this be possible, if, as I have argued, Nabokov’s metaphysics shapes his style
and
structures many of his stories, and if one of his claims to originality is the originality of his philosophical world and of the artistic measures he has found to express it?

What if, simply, we dislike or disagree with his metaphysics? Can we then like what he writes? We can easily
not
share Homer’s metaphysics, or Dante’s, and still admire his work. I’m not sure it’s so easy closer to our own times. I know I would prefer Yeats much more, although I value him highly, if he were not so often “away with the fairies,” and I know that T. S. Eliot’s craving for traditional belief, especially traditional Christianity, is at least one strong obstacle to my responding to his work (as it was, too, for Nabokov).

I happen not to share Nabokov’s metaphysics, yet I find it a fascinating intellectual achievement—as I do
not
find the irrationalist credulism of Yeats or the traditionalism-as-refuge of Eliot. Nabokov’s metaphysics seems, indeed, an intellectual achievement like Homer’s or Dante’s, a comprehensive vision that, unlike theirs, of course, can reflect and incorporate modern skepticism even as it refines and fulfils age-old human ways of making ultimate sense of our world.

Being agents ourselves, and particularly attuned to social action, we human beings tend to think of cause in terms of agency and to explain unknown causes in terms of unseen agents: hence all the gods, spirits, witches, fairies, and so on that have appealed to humankind for as long as we have had language capable of telling stories.
⁸
Nabokov knows he cannot
know
directly whether there is unseen agency behind this world, but something in the world’s inexhaustibleness, which he reads as generosity, and in its intricacy, which he reads as design—even design seemingly hidden for rediscovery by our intelligent eyes—suggests to him there is some mindlike agent ultimately behind things.

And because we explain things in terms of the difference between the material and the mental, or between the physical and the spiritual (we can cause a material object to move by touching it in the right way, but we can cause a “mental object,” another person, to move without our needing to physically touch them), we also have an age-old conviction that the spiritual is not subject to the same laws as the physical. That being so, and the mental or spiritual being unseen, we have often come to the conclusion that perhaps our spirits, our nonmaterial parts, survive, unseen, the material decay brought on by death. Nabokov again knows he cannot
know
that we survive death, but as in the case of conscious agency as ultimate cause, he uses the very fact that we have no direct evidence of the survival of mortal consciousness as the beginnings of his argument. We cannot know because an existence beyond death would have to be so inconceivably different from the conditions of mortal consciousness that it is beyond our apprehension.

This is why I find it so annoying when readers of Nabokov, aware of the ways in which the shape and structure of his metaphysics have been described, tend at once to look for explanations in terms of the metaphysics.
⁹
This is not at all how Nabokov has written since his work began to mature, in 1925, apart from the unique exception of
Transparent Things
, where we see the story through the eyes of the dead narrator. In the vast bulk of his work, there is no
presumption
of the otherworldly. He presents a seemingly self-sufficient material world, with human beings in it who are certainly mental agents, who may have a conviction or a strong curiosity about something mindlike behind or beyond matter (as in the case of, say, Fyodor or Shade), but whose conviction never seems supported, or whose curiosity never seems answered, within the fiction. Fyodor imagines fate on his and Zina’s side, but they are then locked out of the apartment where they could be together at last. Shade feels as confident that his daughter is somewhere alive as that he will wake up the next morning, but he is killed that very day. It is only after we have mastered all the details of the particular world of a novel, forming a relationship to its parts and its time quite unlike that of the characters as they live it, that we can see that the very evidence that seems to refute the hopes of a Fyodor or a Shade actually testifies to their being fulfilled in a way greater than even they could imagine.

Another reason Nabokov’s metaphysics seems to me such an amazing intellectual achievement is that in his efforts to encompass modern skepticism, he finds himself prompted to such extraordinary
artistic
achievements. His metaphysics forces Nabokov to invent worlds that are self-sufficient, on one level, more or less akin to our normal modern way of reading our world—although of course he sees these worlds more exactly and more imaginatively than the rest of us—but worlds that nevertheless, the more closely we look, seem to require a deeper and utterly unexpected level of explanation. No one else has ever been able to create such hidden worlds of discovery within stories so fascinating and original and moving on a first reading.

Whether or not one shares Nabokov’s sense of a designer behind the world and some sort of deliverance beyond death, it seems to me, does not matter artistically. Of course
personally
it would be wonderful if Nabokov’s metaphysics were true and one could believe it, but I cannot do so: it seems to result from hopes rather than sober recognitions. The mimicry, for instance, that Nabokov took as such strong evidence of a conscious design concealed behind nature, a cosmic hide-and-seek, can in fact now be explained perfectly well, even in its most intricate forms, in terms of evolution by Darwinian natural selection.

But as a matter of attitude, Nabokov’s response to his world is wonderfully refreshing and fertile. If the optimist sees a glass half filled with water as half-full and the pessimist sees it as half-empty, Nabokov sees the empty glass as overfull: merely looking at the reflections of the scene around the glass and the refracted distortions of the scene behind the glass are more than enough to quench the mind’s thirst. But he also sees the full glass as empty: his thirst to savor and understand the world is infinitely greater than even the full glass can provide.

Nabokov has a sense of the inexhaustible riches of the world, even a small aspect of the world (the butterfly genus
Lycaenidae
, for instance), yet this, nevertheless, seems to drive him in quest of an even more inexhaustible relationship to his world. “Though I personally would be satisfied to spend the whole of eternity gazing at a blue hill or a butterfly,” he wrote in 1940, “I would feel the poorer if I accepted the idea of there not existing still more vivid means of knowing butterflies and hills.”
¹⁰
We may or may not share his sense that the very riches of the world amount to a generosity offering hope that there is some even more inexhaustible surprise beyond what our mortal minds can see. But whether we share that sense or not, we can appreciate the power of his drive to know this world and to know what might lie beyond it and his capacity to awaken us to the surprise of this world and the surprises that perhaps lie behind it, if only we could know more.