Assignment
In the spirit of Borges, who describes the books he may write someday, and in an effort to bring our course’s literary and visual components together, I’d like you to imagine creating a limited-edition artist’s book of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Your proposed book should incorporate the text of Nabokov’s novel and convey its meaning through the book’s own visual, spatial, or conceptual form. What would such a book look like? How would one read it? The artists’ books that you’ve seen in the studio, in exhibits at the Cantor, or in the pages of Smith’s Structure of the Visual Book may inspire you. This is only a proposal, so you’re not limited by your resources or technical skills. Please describe your book in a brief paragraph, about as long as this one (150 words), and bring it to class on Wednesday, Feb. 18. You may include a sketch if you wish.
Summary
We began by looking at this novel in two contexts: narrative genres (biography, autobiography, detective story) and doubled relationships like those in Borges’s “Theme of the Traitor and Hero”: subject/ biographer; dead man/ detective; hero/ narrator; character/ author; writer/ reader.
There are two primary stories in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: the story of Sebastian’s life, told in the third person (“he”) more or less chronologically from birth to death; and the story of writing about Sebastian’s life, told in the first person (“I”) by his half-brother V., more or less in the order in which he conducts his research and increases his understanding of Sebastian. The chart of the novel’s structure that I constructed for you roughly maps out the plot of each story.
As the novel shifts back and forth between these two stories, however, the relationship between them becomes increasingly ambiguous. Their apparent reality seems to flicker, in keeping with the notions of “worlds under erasure” and “Chinese-box worlds” discussed in McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction. Sebastian’s writings, as V. summarizes them for us, become “recursive structures,” in McHale’s terms, that mirror or distort the plot of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: a “strange loop” (Mr. Siller/Silbermann in The Back of the Moon, minor characters in The Doubtful Asphodel), an “infinite regress” (a message perhaps encoded in a wrongly addressed letter in Lost Property), or, more often, a “mise-en-abyme” (as when elements of Success parallel V’s search). In general, the “research theme” of Sebastian’s work (p. 104), which extends to a novel about a dying man and an unfinished “fictitious biography” (p. 40), is the theme of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight itself.
We concluded by glancing at the final paragraph, where V. first proclaims that “any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations” (p. 204), and then, using the metaphor of a stage play, recapitulates the plot of the book he has just written about Sebastian. At the play’s end, however, V. can’t get out of his role. The final sentence is divided into three parts, joined by the word “or,” and suggesting at least three possible interpretations (or, in McHale’s terms, multiple endings). The sentence’s first two parts suggest that V.’s situation could be resolved by viewing one of the novel’s two competing stories as the “real” one: thus, to paraphrase Mary Kate [a student in the class], either “I” is really Sebastian, or else “Sebastian” is really I. But the last part of the sentence adds a third possibility: “or perhaps we are both someone whom neither of us knows” (p. 205). In McHale’s terms, this is an instance of “characters in search of an author”: V. suddenly realizes that he and Sebastian may actually be literary characters. In that case, who is this “someone else” who can be both of them, but whom neither of them knows? The author of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight? or the reader of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight? We’re back where we started!