Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0000806, Wed, 8 Nov 1995 14:07:37 -0800

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MLA VN Abstract: Varia (179) #3
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From: Thomas Seifrid <seifrid@bcf.usc.edu>
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Thomas Seifrid, "*Kamera obskura* and Nabokov's Poetics of Vision"

As so many of its details attest, Nabokov's *Kamera obskura* (1933) is in
part a self-conscious and ironic reworking of Tolstoy's *Anna Karenina*. If
this is obvious enough on the level of plot it is less so on that of the two
works' subtle but important forays into epistemology. Tolstoy's novel offers
itself as a manifesto for post-Renaissance perspective: throughout the work
Tolstoy exercises his commitment to the notions that vision and truth are
essentially linked, and thatthe only philosophically authentic way of coming
to terms with the world is to gaze on it, as a solitary observer, through an
aperture or frame--i.e., he asserts the epistemology of the 18th-century
device of the *camera obscura*. Nabokov turns out to be uncannily responsive
to this thematic line in Tolstoy, but he rearranges the theme's emphases in
significant ways. For example, the cinema, a central metaphor in Nabokov's
novel, serves as a cultural updating of the Tolstoyan metaphor of the 'magic
lantern' (elsewhere promoted by Nabokov as well), which in turn transmits the
allegory of Plato's cave--both the movie house in which Kretschmar meets
Magda and the movie world she dreams of entering turn out to be domains of
mere appearance and deceit, and this line finds its logical endpoint in
Kretschmar's literal blindness.

But Nabokov's most significant reworking of Tosltoy has to do with issues of
authorship. For Tolstoy an intimate connection exists between the *camera
obscura* and the theater of vision that is realized through the act of
writing (the author's eye both projecting and gazing on a screen-like sheet
of paper). Nabokov adopts this model but subjects it to ambiguity. One the
one hand he exaggerates and burlesques the position of auctorial superiority
Tolstoy allows himself, specifically by attempting to assume a position
outside of or above his own "theater" of fictional events, and from this
stance to watch others in their blindness. This gesture is marked as a form
of evil in the novel, but neither author nor reader remains innocent of it.
It is already problematic because in a sense it represents a flight from the
conventional arrangements of fiction; but it is also troubled by (very
Nabokovian) anticipations of the opposite possibility, namely, that while
attempting to project or view one is oneself also *seen*--an anxiety alluded
to in the name of the novel's cinema ("Argus"), in Magda's nude posing for
artists, in her expositionist debut as an actress which turns into public
embarrassment, and in the tale of expulsion from Eden which underlies these
and related examples in the novel. This, in essence, is what Tolstoy is
doing in *Kamera obskura*. The question with which the novel grapples is
"Where, if anywhere, can the writerconfidently situate himself within the
post-Renaissance paradighm of vision?" In this it registers Nabokov's
response, at once peculiar to him and typically modernist, to an account of
the epistemology of authorship offered half a century earlier by Tolstoy.