Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0018137, Sat, 4 Apr 2009 11:47:14 -0700

Subject
Re: THOUGHTS: Bobolinks and apophenia
Date
Body


 
 
On "The Vane Sisters", I don't think I can disprove
your reading based on the story, but it certainly
disagrees with what Nabokov wrote to Katharine White.
I'm still not disputing your right to read the story
based on just the story.
 
J.A. re: You're definitely starting to get what I mean, but I'm not really suggesting a system of interpretation so much as I am pointing to critical limitations in the work that have everything to do with Nabokov's conception of the material and his approach to it. I don't think N. intended the unhelpful message from Aunt Maude to be a fakery of Kinbote's, I'm saying that because Nabokov insists on the layering of spirituality over the first person narratives of people we can't trust, N.'s attempt to smuggle information above and beyond the conscious reasoning of that narrator can't be innocently objective--and even though I'm certain he wants us to feel a haunted something, surely he must have known this way of dramatizing it would never really prove anything, unless you just want to be convinced. Even when you notice it, and most people never will, you're still stuck with the fact that this otherworld derives from an unreliable
narrator--N.s mixing of authorial intention with character motivation introduces, I think, not fully intended ambiguities and distortions. Sometimes these enhance the fiction, other times they just seem obscure or forced, or both. This is a problem of just about all of N.'s first person narratives (excepting Lolita). And I don't literally think N. was trying to make the shallow narrator of "The Vane Sisters" a lying crank either. I'm well aware of that letter to Katherine White, and have always found noteworthy two statements from it: "I am really very disappointed that you, such a subtle and loving reader, should not have seen the inner scheme of my story. I do not mean the acrostic--but the coincidence of Cynthia's spirit with the atmosphere of the begining of the story." (Vladimir Nabokov Selected Leters, p 117). Now let's combine this with a quote a little earlier in the letter. "You may argue that reading downwards, or upwards, or diagonally is
not what an editor can be expected to do; but by means of various allusions to trick-reading I have arranged matters so that the reader almost automatically slips into this discovery, especially because of the abrupt change in style (italics his, Selected Letters p ll6-117) Mrs. White, as described in a footnote, pointed out that she certainly did not discover the acrostic. That it's too subtle for most readers is likely, but his point, I think, suggests the problem with his approach--Nabokov, the author, working through the narrator, has created such an obvious contrivance in order to direct the reader to find his clever code (even if it slips through most reader's fingers) that the very objectivity of the ghostly presence he hopes to evoke is lost at the very moment it's gained, turning it from charged atmosphere to deliberate manipulation, conscious maninpulation too considering all those arrangements of trick reading. As I said
before, were one presented with this as a true-life account it would seem less believable than a story by Stephen King. And the first quote I mentioned, which waves off the need to discover the acrostic in order to truly understand the story, tells us that he knew at some level that this gimmicry, though fun, was just that, gimmicry. In fact the whole business with this code distracts from the idea of the metaphysics it presents. You got at part of the issue I have in mind when you pointed out that Aunt Maude still has her speaking problem, apparently, even in the afterworld. You asked an intriguing question too: if you're not saddled with the limitations you had in life, then would you still be you? But if you do remain saddled with those bodily pangs, being a broken down ninety-something, then it seems like everything N. ever said would be wrong, the material terms of existence would define everything, even after death. But then this is
probably an outcropping of his peculiar underlying notion that once his characters die the greatest thing ever woud be for them to get everything they'd lost back again, and live forever and ever and ever in a kind of giant cosmic museum repetition of thier lives--a more sinister beyond, save a lake of fire, I could not dream up. At least in my opinion. In the "Vane Sisters" he seems to be suggesting that the narrator has such an unpleasant personality that he can't see the real unreal spiritual beauty all around him, and I can't help but object to these terms. How would ordinary human values of taste and depth and sensitivity obtain in the otherworld? Does one have to be the right sort? When N. says that if you lose your memory you lose your immortality (not sure this is correctly remembered). Can you really just forget your way out of the otherworld? Is his unpleasant governess's thoughfulness really her only claim to the eternal? Do
we really believe that being a carping unhappy individual somehow won't tally up in the Cosmos'  score sheet, as he suggests in a couple lines in Speak Memory?  Do we believe what Pale Fire playfully conjectures, that Shakespeare has a bigger, brighter, better actual immortality than a lesser poet? How literally one is meant to take these ideas, one hopes, is provisional, for they seem to wash away under the pressure of any common sense thought, a phrase I use without embarrassment. Anyway, the acrostic, shiny and forced, seems like a bunch of keys N. waves around to keep us from thinking out the mechanics of this sort of metaphysics. And Pale Fire is the biggest, gleamingest, rattlingest, bunch of keys any mesmerist ever dangled in front a rapt reader's eyes.
 
 
Also, as I always say, if Kinbote would garble his
invented ghostly warning and pretend not to understand it,
you can't trust him on anything.  Then how can you infer
that he has a "need to take Shade's poem" or that he
"plunges into folly and bad behavior"?  Maybe those are
also his plants.
 
J.A.'s re: Now you're getting my point. Of course, as I said, I don't literally think the Maude stuff was a plant by Kinbote, just that in a way it was. He's the one who puts this information in the story, Nabokov's intent as disguised by Kinbote.  Hence my idea that distortions and ambiguities have been introduced that can't be resolved, the nature of which I don't think was really intentional.
 

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