Gray on Nabokov

 From A History of American Literature, by Richard Gray:

(...) 

It is difficult to think of a European émigré writer further from all this than Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). In fact, the verbal shift that seems required, from immigrant to émigré, suggests some of the difference. Nabokov was born into a wealthy, prominent family in St. Petersburg, Russia and as a youth traveled extensively. His father, a liberal aristocratic jurist, opposed the tyranny of the czar then that of the bolshevviks. He took his family into exile, then was murdered in Berlin in 1922 by a reactionary White Russian who later became a Nazi official. Nabokov lived in Berlin and Paris between the two world wars. There, he produced a critically acclaimed series of poems, short stories, and novels in Russian. Then, in 1940, in flight from various forms of totalitarianism, he emigrated to the United States where he began teaching Russian literature. His frist novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, was published in 1941; it concerns a young Russian in Paris, the narrator, who discovers the true nature of his half-brother, and English novelist, while writing his biography. This was followed by Bend Sinister in 1947, about a politically uncommitted professor in a totalitarian state who tries to maintain personal integrity. Four years later, Nabokov published his first memoir, Conclusive Evidence, later retitled Speak, Memory and, under this title, revised and expanded in 1966. Four years after that, in turn, came the book that established his fortune, his reputation for some and his notoriety for others, Lolita, published first in France then, after censorship problems were resolved, in the United States in 1958. It tells of the passion of a middle-aged European émigré, who calls himself Humbert Humbert, for what he terms "nymphets" in general and the 12-year-old girl he calls Lolita in particular, and their wanderings across America. It was Nabokov's first novel set in his new home in the New World; and its success allowed him to devote himself full time to his writing. Three more novels appeared after the first publication of Lolita: among them, Pale Fire (1962), a postmodernist tour de force purporting to be a poem about an exiled Balkan king in a New England college town and the involved critical commentary on the poem by an academic who admits to being the king himself. Along with the two other novels, Pnin (1957) and Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), there are novellas, short stories, a play, critical studies and commentary, translations of his earlier Russian novels, lectures and correspondence, and a monumental translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964). All of the work reflects, in some way, Nabokov's aesthetic of subjective idealism. All of it plays variations on an observation made by the academic commentator in Pale Fire: "'reality' is neither the subject nor the object of true art," that commentator observes, "which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average 'reality' perceived by the communal eye." 

Which suggests the fundamental difference between Nabokov and even a writer like Singer, let alone Olsen or Ozick. "To be sure, there is an average reality, perceived by all of us," Nabokov admits in Strong Opinions (1973), a collection of his answers to questions about himself, art, and public issues. "But that is not true reality: it is only the reality of general ideas, conventional forms of humdrummery, current editorials." "Average reality," Nabokov insits, "begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture." Any book he makes, any art anyone makes that is worth reading is "a subjective and specific affair," Nabokov suggests. It is the creative act that effectively maintains reality just as—and the analogy is his—electricity binds the earth together. As a writer, a creator, he has "no purpose at all when composing the stuff except to compose it." "I work long, on a body of words," as Nabokov puts it, "until it grants me complete possession and pleasure." According to this subjective idealist creed, there can be no totalizaing, totalitarian reading of experience, no monolithic entity entitled "life." There is only the "manifold shimmer" of separate, specific lives, my life, your life, his life, or her life. As Nabokov has it, "life does not exist without a possessive epithet." Nor is there some kind of absolute truth or absolute morality attainable, a master narrative of history or ethics that the artists must discover and disclose. "Reality is an infinite succession of stops, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable," Nabokov argues. "You can never get near enough"; and so "whatever the mind grasps it does so with the assistance of creative fancy, that drop of water on a glass slide which gives distinction and relief to the observed organism." There is no place here for naturalism or didacticism. "I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction," Nabokov confesses. "Why do I write books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty." "Lolita has no moral in tow," he adds. "For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I bluntly call aesthetic bliss." That bliss is the triumph of art, for Nabokov. Its tragedy is suggested by an anecdote Nabokov tells about the original inspiration for Lolita. Which is a story about an ape, who, after months of coaxing, produced the first ever drawing by an animal. "This sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage."

Lolita is certainly Nabokov's finest book. Before it was published, he wrote of it to Edmund Wilson, "its art is pure and its fun is riotous." The purity of its art has several dimensions. Structurally, Nabokov uses traditional romance patterns only to deconstruct them. Humbert Humbert reveals how he desired Lolita, possessed her, fled with her across America after the death of her mother, Charlotte Haze, lost her to a man named Quilty, then killed her new lover. It is the elemental romance structure used here to startling, inverted effect, with elements of quest, attainment, journey, loss, pursuit, and revenge. The love plot is propelled forward in a straight line, in accordance with whose unrelateing extension Charlotte loves Humbert, who loves Lolita, who loves Quilty, who seems to love no one at all. And, as in the courtly love story, the desire of the narrator becomes a metaphor for other kinds of daring, transgression, and retribution. "Oh, My Lolita, I have only words to play with!" Humbert declares early on in the novel. And that discloses another kind of arfulness. The narrator is telling his story as he awaits trial for murder. A "foreword" by one "John Ray Jr. Ph.D." informs us that Humbert died "in legal captivity" after writing this "Confession of a white Widowed Male" "a few days before his trial was scheduled to start." Humbert is a peculiarly knowing narrator. "I shall not exist if you do not imagine me," he tells the reader. Using a style both outrageously lyrical and outrageously jokey, he is constantly teasing, eluding his audienc. Undercutting what might seem predictably valid responses, he plays on the whole litary history of dubious antiheroes and duplicitous first-person protagonists from Diderot to Dostoyevsky. "I am writing this under observation," Humbert admits. Within the narrative, this is literal, since he is in the psychiatric ward of the prison and his cell has an observation window. But Humbert is additionally, acutely aware of being under our observation as well. That helps make his story slippery, his character protean, and his language radically, magically self-referential. Like all Nabokov's novels, but even more than most, Lolita is a verbal game, a maze—what one character in Pale Fire christens a "lexical playfield."

The lexical playfield belongs, of course, to the author eventually rather than the narrator. It is Nabokov who discovers pleasure and difficulty in the complex web of allusion and verbal play—"the magic of games," as Humbert calls it—that constitutes the text. There is, in any event, a distinct difference between the games of the narrator and those of the author; or "Lolita" the confession and Lolita the novel. It is this. Humbert remains so trapped in his words, the "singposts and tombstones" of his story, that he does not realize he is using Lolita. Nabokov does. A great deal of intercultural fun is derived from the contrast between the "old-world politeness" of Humbert and what he perceives as the intriguing banality of America. This is an international novel, in one of tis dimensions, and it offers a riotously comic contrast between different languages, different voices. The verbal hauteur of Humbert ("You talk like a book, Dad," Lolita tells him) collides, in particular, with the unbuttoned slangy creativity that is a verbal element of the girl he pursues and possesses ("Yesser! The Joe-Rea marital enigma is making yaps flap"). And that collision has the dramatic advantage of allowing Lolita, as she is to herself, to escape through the chinks of the narrative. "Lolita had been safely solipsisized," Humbert claims, after he has used her as an unsuspecting aid to masturbatory fantasy. But he does not really solipsisize her, turn her as he puts it into "my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita," even for the period that he writes or we read the text. Perversely, Nabokov once claimed that "one day a reappraiser will come and and declare that I was a rigid moralist kicking sin . . . and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride." That reappraisal is celarly required here, for what we as readers witness is Humbert committing the cardinal sin in the subjective idealistic moral lexicon: he takes another human being as a means rather than an end. In the process, he commits child abuse and statutory rape. But that is subsumed, for Nabokov, under the determining, damning fact that he has acted like a moral totalitarian with Lolita. He has imprisoned her within his own reality, denying her her right to hers—and, as a corollary to that, her specific right to be an ordinary, vulgar, obnoxious but charming but not charmed or enchanted or mesmerized child. Momentarily, Humbert senses this when, in the last chapter of Lolita, he hears from his cell sounds coming from the valley below. "What I heard was the melody of children at play," he confesses; "and then I knew that the poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." The note of longing and loss was one that Nabokov was particularly inclined to sound. He once said that "the type of artist who is always in exile" was one for whom he felt "some affinity," which was perhaps natural for someone who spent nearly all his life as an émigré. What charges it with a tragic pathos here, however, is the pain of knowing, as Humbert does for a brief, enchanted moment, that there is nothing worse than this: to rob someone of their childhood—to steal from them the chance to say, right from the start, this is my reality, my life.

Vladimir Nabokov

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