Stalking Nabokov (45 page)

To reduce these highly individual notions to preprinted, easy-peel labels like realism or postmodernism would be to rob literature of all its magic.

18. Nabokov and Machado de Assis

I had learned of the great Brazilian novelist Joaquím Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) through John Barth’s enthusiasm for him and bought a number of his novels in 1975 just before switching from Barth back to Nabokov for my doctoral dissertation. The Brazilian writer and social-networking commentator Claudio Soares, inspired in composing his hypertext novel,
Santos Dumont No. 8
, by
Pale Fire
and by my website
Ada
Online, wrote to me asking what, if anything, Nabokov thought of Machado. I had only sipped a mouthful of Machado’s sparkling but bitter waters but answered that as far as I knew, Nabokov had not known of Machado’s existence but would have loved him. Soares arranged for me to talk at the Brazilian Academy of Letters, of which Machado de Assis was the founding president, on September 17, 2009. I had rashly suggested I could talk on Nabokov and Machado and as the time approached had to devour Machado in great gulps. What a feast. To my taste he ranks among the great fiction writers of the second half of the nineteenth century. He would have made Joyce write differently. His closest literary kin could be Beckett and especially Nabokov.

Other pairings I might like to tackle, if life lasts forever and no one else beats me to them: Nabokov and Darwin; Nabokov and William James; Nabokov and T. S. Eliot.

For me to come to Rio de Janeiro to talk about Machado at the Casa de Machado seems as foolhardy as traveling back in time to ancient Athens, without knowing Greek, to talk about Plato to an audience of Aristotles. I hope you can accept my tentative foray into your home territory in the spirit in which it’s intended.

Vladimir Nabokov, so far as I know, was unaware of the existence of Joaquím Machado de Assis. Had he read him, he would surely have said so in no uncertain terms and ranked him among the pinnacles of nineteenth-century fiction with Dickens, Flaubert, and Tolstoy.

Nabokov liked to claim that after his juvenilia he was never influenced by anybody. If Machado were as well known outside the Lusophone world as he deserves, critics would no doubt have claimed to see his influence on Nabokov. On the evidence of the astonishing similarities in their work, and disregarding the minor detail that Nabokov knew nothing of Machado, such critics would seem to have had more in their favor than those who have proposed Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Joyce, Proust, or Kafka as influences on Nabokov. The Brazilian and the Russian could almost have thought up some of each other’s works: Nabokov could easily have developed the ideas behind Machado stories like “Those Cousins from Sapucaia,” “Final Prayer,” and “Dona Paula,” just as Machado might have taken as premises the ideas behind stories like “A Nursery Tale,” “An Affair of Honor,” or “Lips to Lips.” Nabokov played again and again with the central paradox of Machado’s breakthrough novel,
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
,
¹
written from beyond the grave. In Nabokov’s novella
The Eye
, Smurov, the narrator, tells us early in the story that he has committed suicide, but he continues to narrate. In
Transparent Things
, the narrator is a novelist who dies in the course of the story and welcomes the hero over the threshold of death in the last line. In
Look at the Harlequins!
, the narrator cites a little rhyme, “The I of the book / Cannot die in the book” (239), but describes a three-week delirium that he feels as a traverse through death, not unlike the delirious vision from outside human time that Brás Cubas has just before
he
dies.

Machado never traveled far from Rio de Janeiro, and Nabokov never visited Latin America, although he did say in his late years that he would like to visit Peru before he pupated. In Nabokov’s other career, as a lepidopterist, his greatest work was the reclassification of the Blues of Latin America, work that has been extended over the last twenty years and celebrated in
Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius
. Nabokov would have been thrilled by Machado as a writer, even if he might have been frustrated sometimes to find that he’d been beaten to ideas he might have wanted to use.

He would have found it an extra pleasure that Machado had a rich strand of African ancestry. In 1942 he spoke at what was then called a Negro women’s college in Atlanta, in the segregated American South, and delighted his audience by lecturing on Pushkin and Pushkin’s pride in his one-eighth African heritage. He told them that Pushkin, the greatest poet since Shake-speare, “provides a most striking example of mankind at its very best when human races are allowed to mix” (
VNAY
51).

As a lepidopterist, Nabokov was regarded as temperamentally a splitter rather than a lumper: in other words he placed more stress on
differences
between what might look like representatives of the
same
species or genus rather than similarities, so he would be inclined to split them into different species or genera. He gives perhaps his most gifted creation, the poet John Shade in
Pale Fire
, the remark: “Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences” (
PF
265). How do the similarities and differences between Machado and Nabokov throw light on the resources of fiction and the range of literary vision?

First, what
are
the similarities? I could spend an entertaining hour just pulling verbal rabbits out of hats to illustrate moments when Machado and Nabokov seem part of the same magic act.

Self-conscious fiction stretches from at least Lucian and Apuleius through Cervantes and Sterne into postmodernism, but Machado and Nabokov seem particularly close in their quick comic asides to readers. Early in
Lolita
, Humbert writes that he somehow sensed Lolita was ready to be kissed by him: “I cannot tell my learned reader (whose eyebrows, I suspect, have by now traveled all the way to the back of his bald head), I cannot tell him how the knowledge came to me” (
Lolita
50). At a much later stage in his stalking Lolita, Humbert playfully appeals to part of his audience: “Frigid gentlewomen of the jury!” (
Lolita
134) Machado’s narrators, too, address readers who shift from male to female according to context or impulse. Although Nabokov has a reputation for teasing his readers, Machado much more overtly berates his imagined bad readers (“the main defect of this book is you, reader” [
BC
111]; “Good Lord! Do I have to explain everything?” [
BC
183])—and thereby instructs, amuses, and compliments his actual good readers.

Both Machado and Nabokov wring comedy, drama, and psychological revelation from the narrator’s processes of composition and publication. Bento Santiago confesses, as his control over his story starts to slip, “Right here I should be at the middle point of my book, but inexperience has made me lag behind my pen, and I arrive almost at the end of my supply of paper, with the best of the story yet to tell.”
²
Humbert writes at yet another moment of desperation, “Don’t think I can go on. Heart, head—everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer” (
Lolita
111). Brás Cubas notes in chapter 130 that: “This chapter is to be inserted between the first two sentences of Chapter 129.” In his foreword to
Pale Fire
, Kinbote writes, “Frank has acknowledged the safe return of the galleys I had been sent here and has asked me to mention in my Preface—and this I willingly do—that I alone am responsible for any mistakes in my commentary. Insert before a professional. A professional proofreader has carefully rechecked the printed text of the poem” (
PF
18).

Machado and Nabokov both make their readers conscious of the book as book. Tolstoy might conjure up the beauty of Natasha or Anna at a ball, but only Machado could write of Sofia: “She was wearing a dark blue dress, very low-cut—for the reasons cited in Chapter XXXV.”
³
Like Machado, Nabokov was a foe of capital punishment, and he begins
Invitation to a Beheading
with the hero having his death sentence pronounced, according to the custom of this nightmare world, with a nightmare discreetness, in a whisper. The second paragraph starts: “So we are nearing the end. The right-hand, still-untasted part of the novel, which, during our delectable reading, we would lightly feel, mechanically testing whether there were still plenty left (and our fingers were always gladdened by the placid, faithful thickness) has suddenly, for no reason at all, become quite meagre: a few minutes of quick reading, already downhill, and—O horrible” (
IB
12).

In Machado and Nabokov the undermining and overturning of the conventions of fiction bespeak a skeptical, independent intelligence that can also be directed to challenges to extraliterary conventions and assumptions. Both writers can be caustically critical and mordantly ironic. Machado may not be quite the “peevish pessimist” that Brás Cubas calls himself, but he remains always alert to the ironies and imperfections of life beneath accepted commonplaces and practices. Nabokov’s view of life could also seem bleak and unsparing. One critic responding to his first great Russian novel,
The Defense
, wrote, “How terrible, to see life as [Nabokov] does” (
VNRY
343), and in the afterword to his first great English novel,
Lolita
, Nabokov reports a close friend worried that he lived “among such depressing people” (
Lolita
318). Both Machado and Nabokov hated cruelty enough to depict it in its raw horror, in the nightmarish vivisections of first rats, then prisoners, then philosophers in Machado’s “Alexandrian Tale” or the senseless, tasteless, agonizing, and appallingly cheery torture of the hero’s son at the close of Nabokov’s
Bend Sinister
.

Both Machado and Nabokov can ground their fiction in the particulars of their worlds yet can also shift at any moment to a view from far outside the apparent solidity of the characters’ situations. Machado writes of the heroine of
Quincas Borba
: “Sofia put her soul into a cedar casket, closed the cedar one up in the lead casket of the day, and left it there, sincerely deceased. She didn’t know that the deceased think, that a swarm of new notions comes to take the place of the old, and that they emerge criticizing the world the way spectators come out of the theater criticizing the play and the actors” (
QB
222). The Nabokov scholar Alfred Appel Jr., who became a friend of his former teacher, told Nabokov of staging a puppet show for his children and catching the expression of horror and then hilarity on their faces when in the excitement of the climax of the story he knocked over the stage of the puppet world they had been so engrossed in—a shift in perspective that he felt akin to what readers face in Nabokov. Nabokov told him: “You must put that in your book” (
Annotated Lolita
xxxii).

Time has been a subject of literature since Ecclesiastes, if not since time immemorial. But both Machado and Nabokov not only obsess about time as loss but also show how the passage of time can make what had been reviled or barely noticed in its day seem infinitely precious if it lasts. In Machado, a politician’s unsparing tell-all memoirs will cause a justified outcry for its breaches of trust, “but after a century has passed, the same book will become a valuable historical and psychological document. With cool objectivity readers will study the intimate life of our times: how we loved, how government cabinets were formed or dissolved, if women were open or dissimulating, how we held elections and courted women, if we wore shawls or capes, what kind of carriages were in vogue, if watches were worn to the right or the left.”
⁴
In exactly the same spirit, Nabokov’s story “A Guide to Berlin” observes, “The horse-drawn tram has vanished, and so will the trolley, and some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the twenty-first century, wishing to portray our time, will go to a museum of technological history and locate a hundred-year-old streetcar, yellow, uncouth, with old-fashioned curved seats, and in a museum of old costumes dig up a black, shiny-buttoned conductor’s uniform. Then he will go home and compile a description of Berlin streets in bygone days. Everything, every trifle, will be valuable and meaningful: the conductor’s purse, the advertisement over the window, that peculiar jolting motion which our great-grandchildren will perhaps imagine—everything will be ennobled and justified by its age” (
SoVN
157).

Love has been an even more irresistible theme in literature than time. Not only does it dominate all of Machado’s novels and most of Nabokov’s, but both writers often explore the self-love entangled with the love of another: in the many adulteries in Machado or his chilling delineation of Carlos Maria’s faithful but utterly narcissistic married love in
Quincas Borba
, or in Humbert’s supposition that his adoration of Lolita elevates her, or in Van and Ada Veen’s glorying in each other as magnifying mirrors of their mutual vanity. The perversity of jealousy fascinates Machado again and again, not least in adulterous lovers’ jealousy of their mistresses’ husbands or passing admirers. Humbert, too, becomes murderously jealous of the man who takes Lolita from him yet thinks nothing of showing Lolita his very active interest in other young girls (
Lolita
163).Nothing will stop Van Veen’s urge to duel or maim the two men with whom Ada has betrayed him, but even as he rushes by train after his rivals he caresses another willing girl under the table of the dining car.

Both Machado and Nabokov focus on jealousy as a prime case of conflicted human motives. More generally, both revel in psychological contradiction and psychological extremes, like the madness of Quincas Borba and Rubião, or the alienist in the story of that name, or the madness of Nabokov’s heroes Luzhin, Hermann, Krug, and Kinbote.