Stalking Nabokov (13 page)
What matters in Nabokov’s metaphysics is not so much his answers, then, although these are wonderfully elegant, intellectually and artistically, as the fact that both his questions and his answers arise from such a full appreciation of this world and from such a desire for more.
Don Barton Johnson, who was a cryptologist and a Slavic linguist before the Russian literary scholar, editor, and publisher Carl Proffer invited him to solve Nabokovian puzzles, had become by 1985, with the publication of
Worlds In Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov
, the leading American Nabokovian of his day. He later founded the journal
Nabokov Studies
and the electronic listserv, Nabokv-L, both still running.
Despite his own work on the relation between this world and a next or other world in Nabokov, this natural skeptic came to feel that the metaphysics was almost superfluous icing on the Nabokovian cake. At the Nabokov centenary conference in Cambridge in 1999—where Zoran Kuzmanovich stirred so much discussion when he asked about the place of the metaphysics in Nabokov—Jane Grayson, the conference organizer, invited a concluding discussion on future directions in Nabokov scholarship. Among other things, Don Johnson and I addressed Zoran’s question, and I later persuaded Don that we should write up our remarks for a dialogical prologue to the twovolume record of the conference. Here’s my contribution. I try to explain the relationship between Nabokov’s imagination, as we see it in his writing, and his ethics, metaphysics, and psychology—or to show the depths beneath the dazzling surface and the surface as an entrance to the depths.
Don Johnson concludes with a series of linked questions about responding to and evaluating Nabokov. Let me follow his cue and start with my own series. Do we respond to Nabokov, and do we rate him highly, because of his ethical seriousness or his metaphysical range or his epistemological depth? Or do we respond to him and rate him rather for his gifts of word and image, character and story, fictional detail and form? Or for less usual literary values, such as his unique relationship to his curious readers, the challenges and rewards he offers us? Or for his humor, his irony, his pathos? Or for his alertness to nature or art, to individual cognition or social interaction?
In fact, of course, readers respond to authors and rate them in different ways. Some, like Don himself, will particularly enjoy the local puzzles in Nabokov’s work; others, like Ellen Pifer, will pay these little heed but be passionately interested in his ethics.
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Yet all readers are likely to have their imaginations caught first, if at all, at the level of word, character, story, feeling. Some, of course, may be deterred by obscure words like “granoblastically,” by repellent characters like Axel Rex, by slow stories like Smurov’s, by perverse feelings like Humbert’s, or by a sense that Nabokov demands too much of his readers or dismisses or refuses to care for too many of us and our kind. A proportion of readers who reject Nabokov out of such considerations may gradually be won back by adequate explanations of the ethical, epistemological, metaphysical, aesthetic, scientific, psychological, or sociological reasons for this or that feature or characteristic of his work, while others who might otherwise enjoy a story once and then set it aside might be encouraged to return, to linger, and to discover more as they perceive these dimensions for themselves or with the help of others.
A classic has to appeal to many readers over many readings and many changes in taste, personal and historical. No work can satisfy every taste (a Vermeer can do things that a Breughel cannot and vice versa), but the more dimensions of excellence and interest a work has, the more likely it is to endure, to invite us to keep returning to something that somehow still remains new. The ethical, epistemological, and other dimensions, in other words, are not extraliterary but enrich the literary experience. Their multiplicity and consistency add to the value of a literary work as their absence or inconsistency diminish it—although, again, it must be stressed that readers will respond differently to these different dimensions, as well as to their multiplicity or paucity or their consistency or inconsistency. Of course, Nabokov’s special gift is to suggest so many dimensions without ponderous system building, with the lightest and fastest of touches, keeping our imaginations off guard, jumping from one sudden foothold to another, rather than plodding along a predictable path.
Don seems to imply that one side of Nabokov’s art (the ethical, say, or the metaphysical) is readily detachable from another (in particular, the aesthetic). This was not Nabokov’s attitude (“the forces of imagination . . . in the long run, are the forces of good”;
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“the inherent morality of uninhibited art” [
SL
57]), nor is it mine.
The imagination tries to see things from many different points of view, and that has ethical consequences. It is no accident that Shakespeare, the greatest verbal imagination the word has known, was also the greatest creator of human character. One of the many reasons he remains so perpetually fresh is that he can see from the side of an Aaron as well as a Titus, of an Angela as well as an Isabella, a Bernardine as well as a Duke Vincentio, a Caliban as well as a Prospero. For that reason he has done as much as anyone to extend our sense of humanity, to make us see the depth, flaws, and strengths in people high and low, like us or not. Nabokov works differently, depicting the egotism of the ego from within, in a way that makes us confront our own egotism, as well as encouraging us to transcend it, to exercise the full freedom of our imaginations. His work would be vastly poorer if he did not invite us to see from Lucette’s point of view and Ada’s, as well as from Van’s; from Shade’s point of view and Hazel’s, as well as from Kinbote’s; from Lolita’s point of view and Charlotte’s, as well as from Humbert’s.
Not only does Nabokov see and
realize
in his fiction both the freedom and the confinement of the ego—of those characters at the periphery as well as at the centers of his stories—but his imagination also tries to look at and, again, to
realize
human life not only from within but from without. He talks of Gogol’s religion as “imaginative, humanly imaginative (and thus metaphysically limited)” (
NG
22), and he tries to avoid such limits, to pass beyond the desperate attachment to the official version of Western metaphysics we find in T. S. Eliot or the uncritical acceptance of any not currently official version we find in Yeats.
Hence it is for good reason that Don’s remarks focus particularly on the metaphysical side of Nabokov, a subject, as he points out, increasingly dominant in Nabokov studies over the last twenty years. He modestly underplays his own invaluable part, in
Worlds in Regression
and after, in this development. But he asks if it would make any difference whether Nabokov’s otherworldly philosophy were shopworn. To me it certainly would. Eliot’s craving for the authority of tradition and Yeats’s refuge in the irrational to me seriously diminish their art. Nabokov is of such interest partly because he is such a clear and independent thinker, and his style is the way it is because he has such clarity and independence of thought. You cannot detach the style or the wit from the rest.
Don now speaks of a plurality of “levels” or “worlds.” Advisedly so, in my view. I found his older “two-world” terminology unsatisfactory because, first, Nabokov stresses in numerous ways that the “other” world he suspects surrounds the one we see is somehow
in
as well as
beyond
this one. Second, the idea of two worlds collapses or ignores several possible levels in the Nabokovian “beyond”: a more or less personal afterlife; a more or less personal fate, designing force or forces, or series of such forces not responsible for the world but creatively contributing to or attempting to contribute to the designs of time; and a more or less ultimate conscious creative power, or god, more or less emergent, more or less responsible for and more or less providentially predesigning “this” world. Third, “two worlds” overdefines as it undercounts. Nabokov suggests possibilities and possibilities within possibilities or, if you like, worlds within worlds: worlds in regression.
Nabokov was fascinated by the possibility of a beyond and rightly felt it would make all the difference to our sense of our lives if we could know whether there
is
anything beyond. But he also knew that despite all his own searching he had no “conclusive evidence.” Only in private intuitions could he feel this possibility; only in the analogies he could fashion in his art could he express it; and even then he could do so only covertly, only through indirection and concealment. In order not to falsify human experience, he never (outside the more or less explicit ghost story of
Transparent Things
) violates the rule that for his mortal characters and for all but those rereaders who have transcended the linear time of the characters, this world is all there is.
This means, of course, that Nabokov’s ethics and epistemology, like his politics and sociology and psychology, must operate within the constraints of this world. This also means that although his metaphysics, his otherworld, is a vitally important aspect of his work, and in some senses its deepest level, its most recently discovered, and its most secret until discovery, he creates his fiction to work perfectly self-sufficiently, to have its principal life upon the surface tension of the here and now.
Good work is being done on Nabokov’s metaphysics by younger scholars, and there is more to be done. But Nabokov was never reductive and never uninterested in this world. May I offer some advice? Do not look for Nabokov’s otherworld just because it is a critical fashion but because you think the evidence compels you to, and do not overlook all his other worlds, his Russia, his Germany, his France, his England, his America, his Switzerland, his dream and nightmare Europes, his Zemblas and Antiterras. If he could not make this world exist so well in fiction, his otherworlds would matter much, much less.
8. Nabokov, Literature, Lepidoptera
In writing the biography I knew I needed to examine closely Nabokov’s passion for Lepidoptera because it was so early, deep, and long-lasting, because it dominated his working life for much of the 1940s, and because it must have appealed to and intensified something worth understanding in his mind. In researching
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
I interviewed those who had worked alongside Nabokov at his bench at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, like graduate student Charles Remington, later head of entomology at Yale. Shortly after the biography, I met Kurt Johnson, then at the American Museum of Natural History. Johnson, the American apex of an international triangle of scholars reexamining the South American Plebejinae, a subfamily of butterflies of which Nabokov had been first reviser, could not stress enough how highly they rated Nabokov’s work, and he has remained unwavering in this admiration for twenty years.
In the early 1990s Princeton University Press, which had published my Nabokov biographies, approached me to edit a volume of Nabokov’s butterfly papers because a historian of Lepidoptera they had contracted for the project years earlier had not delivered. I agreed but was shortly afterward asked by the nature writer Robert Michael Pyle, also editor of the
Audubon Guide to the Butterflies of North America
, whether I could put him in touch with Dmitri Nabokov for the rights to Nabokov’s butterfly papers for a volume for which he was signed with Beacon. I suggested we pool resources, and since Beacon’s editor, Deanne Urmy, was keen to venture well beyond the scientific papers into fiction, memoirs, poetry, letters, and notes, we moved to Beacon with
Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings
.
I introduced the volume by looking at Nabokov’s life in art and science, discussing his work as butterfly collector and scientist as both intimately connected with
and
perfectly separable from his literary output.
My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
—Vladimir Nabokov,
Strong Opinions
The problem is this. Scientists think of VN as an important entomologist who wrote fiction. Literary critics think of VN as one of the most important twentieth century literary figures who somehow fancied insects.
—Ronald Wilkinson
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Let me pin Vladimir Nabokov into place between several superficially similar specimens.
Nabokov and Beckett seem likely to be remembered as the foremost writers of the mid-twentieth century. Both published over six decades, from just after the heyday of the great modernists, Joyce, Proust, and Kafka, to the emergence of postmodernism as a fashion and a formula. Both wrote major works in two languages (Russian and English, English and French) and translated them from one language into another. Both wrote with great eloquence, intelligence, learning, wit, and originality. But their visions were polar opposites.