Stalking Nabokov (28 page)

(
SM
309–10)

Placing this as the very close of the story of his life, Nabokov suggests here that life itself has a playfulness, that it offers us games of surprise, akin to these two parents wanting to maximize their son’s shock of amazement. He suggests that there is something behind life that invites our imaginations to discovery as generously as doting parents wanting to foster the imagination of their little boy. He suggests that life invites us to play the game, to notice our world and the possibilities it offers us to see things in surprising and playful ways and to take that as a token of further surprises ahead (“authentic humor,” as he once wrote, “comes from the angels” [
LDQ
65]). And he suggests that as a novelist he tries to match life’s own game by maximizing the play and the surprises ahead as we read, by inventing his own equivalents for the inexhaustibility of life’s surprise

Nabokov’s humor stands at the opposite pole from that of Beckett, the other great literary humorist of the middle of last century, of the pre-postmodern era (and the absolute antithesis between these two writers, whose output overlapped for half a century, is the most marvelous proof of the meaninglessness of those period labels). Beckett’s astonishing humor springs (not a Beckettian verb) from a sense of the absurdity, the meaninglessness of human life, the futility of human hope, and the cracked powers of the human mind in its attempts to cope. He shows the awfulness of things yet makes it awfully funny. Nabokov’s humor springs (and here it is the
mot juste
) from his sense of the endless creativity of life, of the pleasures it plants, of the comedy of life’s mismatching our expectations, even from a sense that life’s pleasures and play and surprise might suggest surprises behind and beyond life. If Beckett is our great cosmic comic caustic, Nabokov loves and laughs at life even amid loss.

At the end of
Speak, Memory
, in that ship in the harbor, Nabokov sketches in the promise of America ahead. He was carrying in his suitcase the manuscript of his first English novel, which he couldn’t get published in England or America, a comic novel about the tragic gap between a Russian-born writer’s background and the books he writes in English. When he arrived in New York, Nabokov took another year and a half to get
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
published, and more than a decade and a half to arrange the first translation of one of his major Russian novels. Now in the Library of America he sits on the same shelf as Lincoln, whom he would translate into Russian, or Melville, whom he revered. There’s only one occasion on which I can recall him placing himself alongside his favorite American writer: when he was about to take to task the critic who sought out subliminal sex in his fiction. Before objecting to Rowe’s “manipulating my most innocent words so as to introduce sexual ‘symbols’ into them,” to all his nudges and winks at sex supposedly
between
the lines, Nabokov conceded begrudgingly that it might be legitimate, if hardly necessary, to indicate the sex actually
in
the lines of some of his books. But picking out the “erotic bits” in
Lolita
and
Ada
, he wrote, was “a process rather like looking for allusions to aquatic mammals in
Moby Dick
.” Picking
comic
bits out of Nabokov is even easier than picking out the
erotic—
but, I hope, not quite so pointless.

13. Nabokov as Storyteller

As an undergraduate I was probably excited most, apart from Shakespeare and Dickens, by Nabokov (who did not feature in any of my courses, although I was allowed to write about him for American Studies) and John Barth. Barth’s explorations of the origins of stories in the Sanskrit
Ocean of Stories
, early Greek myth, and the
Thousand and One Nights
must in some way have precipitated the graduate course in narrative that I began to teach at the University of Auckland in 1993, running from Homer to Art Spiegelman, from epics to comics. When that interest coalesced with a developing interest in evolution, I found myself in 2000 writing the book that became
On the Origin of Stories
.

For a keynote at the Nabokov conference at the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg in July 2002, I linked these interests by talking about Nabokov as a storyteller. In comparing the openings of Nabokov’s first novel,
Mary
, and his penultimate completed novel, the mini-masterpiece
Transparent Things
, I may have drawn as much on my comparison of the openings of
Anna Karenina
and
Lolita
in
chapter 17
as on my reflections on narrative before and after adding an evolutionary dimension.

In the quarter century since his death, much has been made of Nabokov as a thinker, as a metaphysician and moralist.
¹
We have learned a great deal, but D. Barton Johnson has recently challenged readers of Nabokov by asking, wouldn’t we still be fascinated by his work even without his ideas?
²
Although Nabokov would write differently in all sorts of ways if his metaphysics and ethics were thinner and poorer, Johnson surely is right: we would still read Nabokov without them.

Why
would we? The obvious first answer is style. Nabokov is widely and justly regarded as a high-water mark of literary style. But although we admire the style of
Speak, Memory
or Nabokov’s forewords and afterwords or even
Strong Opinions
, we would not be drawn back to Nabokov again and again if there were just style and no story in his work. The dazzling detail, the inventive imagery, the patterned prose, the sinuous sentences, the thrill of the thought are all very well—very, very well—but even they are not enough.

Nabokov famously declared that “there are three points of view from which a writer can be considered…as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter” (
LL
5). In his own terms, his metaphysics and ethics fall within his role as teacher; his style, within his role as enchanter, which he himself ranks highest in his holy trinity. Perhaps, but as a species we are so shaped as to be especially entranced by stories. We follow the fates of others, real or invented, far more readily and for far longer than we follow either pure ideas or pure expression. Nabokov attracts us in the first place, and keeps us returning, by his power as a storyteller.

But for that very reason, how can we describe him as a storyteller without saying what we have all known from the start? And how can we describe him as a storyteller without referring to his style or without referring to the ideas that shape his way of telling stories?

Or how can we describe him as a storyteller when one of his hallmarks is that his strategies can differ so much from work to work, when he could write his most fantastic novel,
Invitation to a Beheading
, in the midst of his most densely realistic,
The Gift
? Austen, Dickens, and Tolstoy each have a narrative manner common throughout their canons. Joyce differs even more than Nabokov from work to work, but in his case he steadily matures, to the point of overripeness, even, in
Finnegans Wake
, whereas Nabokov makes deliberate choices from work to work so that even at similar times (
Ada
and
Transparent Things
) or with similar themes (Zoorland and Zembla) one of his works can be deeply unlike another.

Much, of course, has been written about Nabokov as storyteller, and much has been written about narrative and narratology in general over the last forty years.
³
But can we describe Nabokov as a storyteller in a way that keeps close to the feel of his work, that doesn’t trap the telling of tales in a tangle of terminology? Can we also do this in a way that doesn’t move too quickly from description to explanation?

THE NATURE OF NABOKOVIAN NARRATIVE

Let me first set out in stark, almost tabular form, Nabokov’s features as a storyteller and then compare the openings of novels from each end of his career to see how these characteristics play out in particular cases.

Nabokov is a master of language, but like late (and unlike early) Shakespeare, his aims as a storyteller predominate over detachable delights of style. Unlike other major modernist novelists, Nabokov did not disparage
plot
; although he rarely offers formal stories within stories, in the manner of Cervantes, Fielding, or Barth, he likes to offer hints of or vistas on other stories, or even a second main story concealed behind the first.
⁴
For all his compulsive originality, he relies on the salient events of story that arise out of the biological necessities of reproduction and survival: love or death—or both—intense, consuming, sometimes perverse passion; and murder, suicide, execution, assassination, and violent death by fire, water, or air.

Like many writers from Sterne and Austen on, Nabokov drives stories by means of
character
rather than plot. But his stories are unique in their intense focus on one character. Nabokov respects individual experience as primary, as all that any of us can know from the inside. Each of his novels highlights the centrality and isolation of the consciousness of the hero. Usually there will be a marked disparity between the individual and his (it is almost without exception
his
) environment. The environment itself, whether as real as Fyodor’s Berlin or as fanciful as Kinbote’s Zembla, will be superbly evoked, but the hero will have a tragic or comic or tragicomic disjunction from it. He will usually be driven by an obsession—love, chess, art, murder, a real or imagined lost homeland—which gives an urgency to the story and an edge to the irony of the disjunction between the individual and his world.

Nabokov evokes
scenes
as few can do. His scenes are tightly consistent, exact, literal, specific, surprising, economical, evocative, quickly set up, and often quickly dismissed. Nabokov uses detail with the eye of a naturalist, a photographer, a painter, and a poet: visual, natural, social, locomotory, and gestural particulars seen from the outside but also felt from the inside. But despite his precision, he is sparing. He operates not by steady accumulation of detail but by swooping and swerving in ways that catch our attention, stir our imagination, and prod our memory, for the detail is highly selective, highly open-ended, highly diverse, highly correlated. And despite his focus on one central consciousness, he
peoples
his scenes with characters limned with the same quick exactness and surprising individuality as everything else and evaluated for their capacity to see their world for themselves and to imagine it from the point of view of others.

But while Nabokov evokes scenes and people from without and within, he can also
shift
readily at any point
from
the scene. He may establish scenes almost as vividly as Tolstoy, but he can glide away from them at any moment in ways Tolstoy never does: to a metaphor or an abstraction, to another time or place or mind, real or imagined, within the story or elsewhere, to the mind evoking the scene in words, or to the mind of the reader recreating it. His scenes are always saturated by mind, by the hero’s or, briefly, by another character’s, by the narrator’s or author’s or reader’s, able to move with grace and speed within or behind or away from the scene.

Beyond the scene, Nabokov handles stories with an inventive and critical awareness of narrative convention and possibility. He challenges and questions and refreshes every aspect of narrative, from
exposition
of new material,
preparation
for later developments,
transition
from one element to another, to the
conclusion
of stories.
⁵

He does not impose technical innovations for their own sake, but nor will he accept a convention like first- or third-person narration simply because it exists as a convention. When one of his first-person narrators tells his own story, Nabokov will always supply him with a motive, a means, an occasion, and an audience, and the relationship between the telling and the tale will transform both. As his oeuvre expands he seldom uses third-person narration, but if he does he will question or complicate it according to the needs or opportunities of the story.

Nabokov pays especially close attention to what both his characters and his readers can know at a particular point in the story. He has a superb command of
anticipation
and
recapitulation
, so central to the traditional impetus and impact of story and heightened in his work by the hero’s often obsessive quest after a goal. Because his stories focus on a single life, there are rarely secrets to be unearthed, à la
Oedipus
or Dickens or Ibsen, or any reason for multiple narrators or disjoined narratives, à la Faulkner or Erdrich or DeLillo. To Nabokov, such devices falsify the unfolding of individual experience, and in his stories, the
siuzhet
(the events in the order they are related) therefore largely follows the sequence of the
fabula
(the events in the order they happen). But Nabokov explores time from many sides and knows how present experience may be modified by what we
have
lived and
will
live through, and he can add time’s details and designs in many ways, internally (through a character’s recollection or discovery) or externally (through a narrator’s disclosure), overtly or covertly, smoothly or joltingly, in advance or arrears, in a trickle or a deluge, without the least anxiety that this will dispel the force of the current scene.

Nabokov rethinks story, scene, structure, and narrative situation out of an impatience with convention, a desire for artistic originality, a search for a singular way of revealing the singular circumstances of a new story, and a unique sense of both the scope and the limits of consciousness that inspires him to make the most of the gaps and the links between character, reader, and author. And because the human mind’s capacity to represent, or meta-represent, is central to its power,
⁶
and because he is always preoccupied with the relationship between the inner (the individual consciousness) and the outer (the world outside the individual consciousness), Nabokov also incorporates in his stories an extraordinary number and variety of metarepresentations of the story, of parts that reflect the whole.