Download PDF of Number 30 (Spring 1993) The Nabokovian
THE NABOKOVIAN
Number 30 Spring 1998
____________________________________
CONTENTS
News 3
by Stephen Jan Parker
Annotations to Ada: 1. Part 1, Chapter 1 9
by Brian Boyd
Annotation & Queries 49
by Charles Nicol
Contributors: Jake Pultorak, Jason Merrill, D.
Barton Johnson
Abstracts 58
Tom Goldpaugh, “A Persistent Snore in the
Next Room: Nabokov and Finnegans Wake”
Leona Toker, “Liberal Ironists and 60
the 'Gaudily Painted Savage’: On
Richard Rorty's Reading of Vladimir Nabokov”
Gavriel Shapiro, “On Nabokov's Pen Name 61
Sirin” and “The Salome Motif in Nabokov's
Invitation to a Beheading”
Gregory Wickliff, “The Politics of 62
Perception: Vladimir Nabokov's
Images of the 1940s”
Note on content:
This webpage contains the full content of the print version of Nabokovian Number 30, except for:
- Brian Boyd’s “Annotations to Ada” (because superseded by, updated, hyperlinked and freely available on, his website AdaOnline).
[3]
NEWS
by Stephen Jan Parker
Marking the completion of its fifteenth year of publication, The Nabokovian in this issue embarks on a new sort of activity. Brian Boyd is engaged in annotating Ada, and he has requested the active participation of Nabokovian readers. As he explains, the results of such a collective effort “should bring us closer to the kind of completeness impossible from one person's efforts.” Thus, much of this thirtieth edition is given over to the first installment of the ongoing annotation. We encourage readers to join in this collaborative effort.
*
There was an immediate and gratifying response to our call for sponsors of Nabokovian subscriptions for individuals in Russia and Eastern Europe. Eric Hyman, Michael Juliar, Marina Ledkovsky, Fan Parker, Jacob Pultorak, Thomas Sims, and several others who prefer to remain anonymous came forward with great generosity. The Nabokovian, on behalf of its readers in Russia and Eastern Europe, is grateful for this uncommon show of assistance and support.
*
From D. Barton Johnson: The new journal Nabokov Studies will be launched in 1993. A refereed, scholarly publication, Nabokov Studies will be edited by D. Barton Johnson and published by Charles Schlacks. Gennady Barabtarlo will serve as review editor. The editors will be advised and assisted by an international board of eminent Nabokov scholars. The aim of the journal, which is sponsored by the Vladimir Nabokov Society, it to provide a forum for the best in Nabokov scholarship.
[4]
Contributions may deal with any aspect of Nabokov studies or any subject matter so long as it concerns Nabokov in some substantive way. The only limitation is that bibliography, annotations, notes, queries, documents, conference paper and dissertation abstracts, Nabokoviana, and Nabokov related news will continue to appear exclusively in The Nabokovian. In addition to articles, Nabokov Studies will offer detailed reviews of current and past publications on Nabokov (including dissertations), and, perhaps, a modest annual prize for the year's outstanding contribution to the field. We also visualize survey articles focusing on topics such as the history of Nabokov scholarship and comprehensive overviews of critical studies of individual Nabokov works.
Submissions may be of any length and in any major European language, although English will be the usual language of publication. Submissions should observe The MLA Style Manual (but with footnotes at the bottom of each page). Preliminary inquiries are welcome. Initial submissions should be in three hard copies accompanied by return postage for one copy. Final, revised (accepted) manuscripts should be on disk, preferably in WordPerfect or ASCII, plus one print copy. Graphic materials are welcome. Although anyone may submit article manuscripts, publication of accepted manuscripts will ordinarily require membership in the Vladimir Nabokov Society and subscription to the journal itself.
The inaugural issue will appear in late 1993. Depending upon the quality and quantity of submissions, two issues are envisioned for 1994; subject to the same conditions, publication from 1995 onward will be four issues per year.
Individual subscriptions are $20.75 domestic; $21.50 overseas. Institutional subscriptions: $30.75;
[5]
$31.50 overseas. Please urge your library to order.
Subscription orders should go to:
Charles Schlacks, Publisher
University of Utah
Department of Languages and Literatures
Nabokov Studies
153 Orson Spencer Hall
Salt Lake City, UT 84112
Phone: (801) 581-5554 Fax: (801) 581-7581
Manuscripts, correspondence, and review copies may be sent to:
D. Barton Johnson, Editor
Nabokov Studies
Dept, of German and Comparative Lits.
Phelps Hall
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
Phone: (805) 682-4618. Fax: (805) 893-2374
E-mail address: chtodel@humanitas.ucsb.edu.
All of the Society sessions at AATSEEL and MLA in December in New York were well attended. The papers read were the following:
AATSEEL: The Russian Years
“On Nabokov's Pen Name Sirin,” Gavriel Shapiro (Cornell); “Nabokov's Russian Criticism,” Galya Diment (U of Washington); “'Cloud, Castle, Lake' and the Problem of Entering the Otherworld in VN's Prose,” Maxim D. Shrayer (Yale); “On Nabokov’s The Empyrean Path',” Alexander Dunkel (U of Arizona).
MLA: General Session
“The Salome Motif in Invitation to a Beheading, ” Gavriel Shapiro (Cornell); “A Persistent Snore in the Next Room: Nabokov and Finnegans Wake,” Tom
[6]
Goldpaugh (Marist College); “Nabokov's Lolita. Lacan's Mirrors,” Virginia L. Blum (U of Kentucky); “On Richard Rorty's Reading of Nabokov,” Leona Toker (Hebrew University, Jerusalem).
MLA: Vladimir Nabokov's Discovery of America
“Poshlust or Culture Industry: VN and Adorno on American Mass Culture,” John Burt Foster, Jr. (George Mason); “VN's Discovery of America: From Russia to Lolita,” Ellen Pifer (U of Delaware); “The Intersection of McEwen and Wheaton: VN’s Discovery of Clare, Michigan,” Joel J. Brattin (Worcester Polytechnic Institute); “VN and America’s Cinema: Finding Pale Fire in David Thompson's Suspects," Shoshana M. Knapp (Virginia Polytechnic Institute).
Also at AATSEEL, at the panel on Russian Emigré Literature:
“VN's The Gift Chemyshevski As a Failed Hero,” Hana Pichova (U of Texas); “The Motif of Chess in Nabokov,” Bruce Holl (Trinity U).
And, at the Midwest Slavic Conference, May 1, East Lansing, MI:
“The 'Metatheater' of Nabokov and Pirandello,” Yana Hashamova (U of Illinois).
*
New 1993 publications:
— John Burt Foster. Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. “In a fresh approach stressing Nabokov's European context, John Foster shows how this writer's art of memory intersects with early twentieth-century modernism.”
[7]
— Nabokov: Autobiography, Biography, and Fiction. Special edition of Cycnos (Nice, France), Volume 10, no. 1. Contains abbreviated texts of all papers delivered at the international Nabokov conference, June 1992.
— Paperback editions of Brian Boyd. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Upcoming publications:
— Gennady Barabtarlo. Aerial View. Essays on Nabokov's Art and Metaphysics. Peter Lang; for summer or fall 1993.
*
Vadim Stark, Secretary of the Nabokov Fund in St. Petersburg, sends news of recent activities in Russia. In the middle of January the Nabokov Fund, an independent public association, obtained several rooms on the ground floor of the Nabokov home at 47 Bolshaya Morskaya Street as its quarters. The intention is to restore the home, create a Nabokov museum (one room now holds an exhibit of photographs and documents), as well as a library of Russian foreign literature, establish a “Nabokov Center,” publish a Nabokov journal, and engage in what Stark calls “legitimate” publication of Nabokov's works. On April 7 an exhibition, “The History of the Nabokov Mansion,” was scheduled, and later in the month a conference was planned to coincide with the celebration of Nabokov's birthday. The association is also engaged in preparing and subsequently publishing a bibliography of Russian editions of Nabokov works and published critical writings in Russia, 1986-1993. The association’s address is:
Nabokovskii Fond
Bolshaya Morskaya, 47
[8]
190000 St. Petersburg
Russia
Fax: (812) 273 4093
*
A new electronic discussion group devoted to the works of Vladimir Nabokov has recently been founded at the University of California, Santa Barbara by D. Barton Johnson, its “owner-editor.” The address of the new group, NABOKV-L, and its list server are:
To subscribe, send the usual e-mail message to the address of the list server. The group is moderated. NABOKV-L is designed to serve as a forum for discussion of the writings of Vladimir Nabokov and is open to anyone interested in Nabokov.
*
Our continuing thanks to Ms. Paula Malone who for more than a decade has provided essential aid in the preparation of each issue of The Nabokovian.
[9]
ANNOTATIONS TO ADA
1. Part 1, Chapter 1 by Brian Boyd.
In 1959 Nabokov began to work on a project he thought of as “The Texture of Time” and to toy with another to be called something like “Letters from Terra.” After numerous diversions and frustrations, he had a flash late in 1965 of what would become the story of Van and Ada, but the novel did not surge into life until February 1966, when he saw the specific link between Van and Ada, “The Texture of Time” and “Letters from Terra,” and began to compose apace. He completed Ada in October 1968: it was first published by McGraw-Hill on May 5, 1969.
Although he wrote it quickly, Nabokov incorporated into his longest novel the ideas and the knowledge of a lifetime, and relied on his confidence— now that in the mid-1960s he occupied so dominant a place in the literary world—that he could command the serious attention of first-rate readers. If Nabokov is the most allusive of authors after Joyce, Ada is by far the most allusive and demanding of his novels. But while there have been isolated annotations to Ada in The Nabokovian, there have been far fewer than the book warrants—I suspect because readers simply do not know where to start.
I have had a copious file of glosses to Ada since the late 1970s, but because my work on the biography had priority, had no time to do anything with them. Now that I am drawing on this material for the notes to Ada in the forthcoming Pleiade Nabokov I would like to offer it to readers of The Nabokovian as a source of information and an invitation for more. I hope that it will jog readers into realizing where they have noticed something that has not seemed obvious to at least one other reader, and into sending their additional notes to The Nabokovian. In this first instalment, for instance, I would particularly value the identification
[10]
of the comic strip at 6.01-03n (French readers especially take note) and the quotation about dialogue in autobiography I cannot trace at the end of 8.16-19.12n. I would also welcome suggestions about recurrent features worth being marked as MOTIFS.
This collective effort should bring us closer to the kind of completeness impossible from one person’s efforts. I believe that the accumulating evidence will justify Nabokov's appeal after Ada’s publication: “the main favor I ask of the serious critic is sufficient perceptiveness to understand that whatever term or trope I use, my purpose is not to be facetiously flashy or grotesquely obscure but to express what I feel and think with the utmost truthfulness and perception.” (SO 178)
Not that the notes below are intended to explain the global reasons for each local choice. Although it takes a number of pages of annotations to get beyond the first paragraph of Ada, it would take much longer to discuss the literary implications of those first few-lines—the implications, in terms of character and idea, of the translation theme, of the Anna Karenin allusion, of allusion itself, of Ada's invocation of the tradition of the novel, of questions of family happiness, sameness and difference, originality and repetition and relationship of all kinds.
Reluctantly eschewing for the most part such eventual implications, the notes explain matters of immediate information both outside the novel (geography, biology, history, literature, lexicology, biography, Nabokovology) and inside (recurring phrases, restated subjects, interlocking details). Recurrent internal allusions will be noted as MOTIFS and at the end of the project listed alphabetically by motif and by page and line number within each motif. To serve undergraduates and those who are not native speakers of English, the notes will be over- rather than under-explicit, but will resist the over-ingenious. The density of annotation should diminish rapidly after the first two chapters of the novel.
References are to page and line numbers of the Vintage edition (New York, 1990), which is cheaply
[11]
available throughout the English-speaking world, preserves the pagination of the first American and English editions of the novel, and incorporates both Nabokov’s 1970 “Notes to Ada by Vivian Darkbloom” and corrections made by Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri Nabokov and myself. All textual corrections to the first American edition will be noted. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
For original annotations, see PDF of Number 30 (Spring 1993) The Nabokovian
and for updates version, see Ada Online
[49]
ANNOTATIONS & QUERIES
by Charles Nicol
[Material for this section should be sent to Charles Nicol, English Department, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN 47809. Deadlines for submission are March 1 for the Spring issue and September 1 for the Fall. Unless specifically stated otherwise, references to Nabokov's works will be to the most recent hardcover U.S. editions.]
GOETHE IN HUMBERLAND
In Strong Opinions, Nabokov tells us that while he did not read Goethe as an émigré in Berlin, he “read Goethe and Kafka en regard as [he] also did Homer and Horace” (189), though he does not specify when he did so. His later works show considerable familiarity with Goethe, and I hope to demonstrate, in particular, parodic references to Die Wahlverwandtschaften (hereafter referred to as Elective Affinities] in Lolita.
The most distinct Goethe allusion in the Nabokov ouevre is to the poem Erlkönig (The Elf-King). In Lolita, when Humbert carries Lolita to the Elphinstone (!) hospital, he conjures up an image of Quilty as “a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit” (242). The poem receives a more involved treatment in Pale Fire. Kinbote notes in his gloss of line 662 (“Who rides so late in the night and the wind”): “This line, and indeed the whole passage (lines 653-664), allude to the well-known poem by Goethe about the erlking, hoary enchanter of the elf-haunted alderwood, who falls in love with the delicate little boy of a belated traveller” (239). In referring to the “haunted alderwood,” Nabokov quietly points out to the reader that, as Edwin H. Zeydel states it in Goethe, the Lyrist (13), “Erlkönig (actually ‘alder king') is a mistranslation of
[50]
Danish ellerkonge, ‘elfin king'.” This is followed by Kinbote's parodic translation of some the poem's lines into Zemblan and an aside: “Another fabulous ruler, the last king of Zembla. kept repeating these haunting lines to himself both in Zemblan and German . . . while he climbed through the bracken belt of the dark mountains he had to traverse in his bid for freedom.” During an earlier escape episode, Kinbote recalled that “a shiver of alfear (uncontrollable fear caused by elves) ran between his shoulder blades. He murmured a familiar prayer, crossed himself, and resolutely proceeded toward the pass” (143). One wonders whether the lines from the poem were not actually the “familiar prayer,” or he confused the two.
Nabokov also parodies Goethe's Wilhelm. Meister’s Apprenticeship. In Bend Sinister, Ember, like Wilhelm, involves himself in a production of Hamlet, as Literary Adviser to the State Theater. The parody of Goethe's and Wilhelm's twisted perceptions of Hamlet and Ophelia is overt: “She and the producer, like Goethe, imagine Ophelia in the guise of a canned peach: ‘her whole being floats in sweet ripe passion,’ says Johann Wolfgang, Ger. poet, nov., dram. & phil. Oh, horrible” (116). Nabokov apparently did not agree with Goethe's interpretation of Hamlet
Citing the Nabokov-Wilson Letters (214), Gennady Barabtarlo notes in Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov's Pnin, “Nabokov did not care much for Goethe and once called Faust an ‘academic shibboleth’” (215). In Nikolai Gogol we find the reason behind Nabokov's distaste for Goethe, and Faust in particular:
Among the nations with which we came into contact, Germany had always seemed to us a country where poshlust, instead of being mocked, was one of the essential parts of the national spirit, habits, traditions and general atmosphere, although at the same time well-meaning Russian Intellectuals of a more romantic type readily, too
[51]
readily, adopted the legend of the greatness of German philosophy and literature; for it takes a super-Russian to admit that there is a dreadful streak of poshlust running through Goethe's Faust (64)
Here we have not only the motive but the modus operandi for Goethe parodies as well: poshlust. According to the Nabokovian sense of justice, poshlust provides a fair target for parody. When we compare Elective Affinities with Lolita, we see that Nabokov does not merely distort the Goethe work by reflecting and refracting its precious plot structure, but openly parodies its most poshly elements.
Parodic references to Elective Affiinities center around Charlotte, whose poshlust resembles that of Goethe's bourgeois couple. While Goethe's Charlotte occupies herself with the dilettantism of landscaping and estate beautification, Nabokov's Charlotte must confine herself to home decoration in American suburbia:
She dabbled in cretonnes and chintzes; she changed the colors of the sofa. . . . She rearranged the furniture—and was pleased when she found, in a household treatise, that “it is permissible to separate a pair of sofa commodes and their companion lamps.” With the authoress of Your Home is You, she developed a hatred for lean chairs and spindle tables. (80)
In Elective Affinities, Goethe reveals his characters solely by their first names, and the four main characters share one communal forename: Otto. The novel begins by introducing the protagonist as Eduard, but the reader soon learns that Otto is his true Christian name, which he relinquished as a youth to distinguish himself from his boyhood friend, the Captain, also named Otto. And the names of the two females in the novel both contain elements of this same name: Charlotte and Ottilie. This is not far from
[52]
Charlotte and Lolita. One cannot help being struck by “one of those dazzling coincidences that logicians loathe poets love" when Humbert Humbert includes among his possible choices for pseudonyms, “Otto Otto" (310).
Making love with Charlotte, Humbert “would manage to invoke the child while caressing the mother” (78), and does so for the reader by combining their names: Lotte, Lottelita, Lolitchen. Alfred Appel, Jr., glosses these names by reference to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. “H.H. no doubt recalls that Goethe’s Werther calls his Charlotte ‘Lotte’ and ‘Lottchen’” (Annotated Lolita 368) and points to the Eugene Onegin commentary (on which Nabokov was working collaterally), where Nabokov says of Werther, “he meets Charlotte S., Lotte, ‘Mamsell Lottchen’ (as he so delightfully addresses her in the original, using a German bourgeois intonation peculiar to the period)’’ (2: 345). However, the situation seems instead to parallel that of Goethe’s other Charlotte in Elective Affinities, where Eduard, while embracing his wife Charlotte, “(holds] Ottilie in his arms” (105).
The Eugene Onegin commentary demonstrates Nabokov’s close reading of Elective Affinities. At one point (2: 403) he notes that an intertwined E and О monogram appears in both works. More relevant here is another reference: “the passion for a pretty instep that Pushkin shared with Goethe would have been called ‘foot-fetishism’ by a modem student of the psychology of sex” (EO 2: 117), referring the reader to a scene in Elective Affinities where Eduard says to Charlotte before the double adultery scene, “I have taken a vow that tonight I shall kiss your shoe” (105). Nabokov parodies this passion by giving it to Humbert: “God, what I would not have given to kiss then and there those delicate-boned, long-toed, monkeyish feet!” (53).
We know from a biographical standpoint that Goethe fell in love with younger women in his later
[53]
years; in fact, critics have described Elective Affinities as a reflection of Goethe's conflict between the high moral regard he had for his marriage and the spontaneous passion he felt for an aging nymphet, eighteen-year-old Mina Herzlieb. Goethe entered a “literary duel” with Minna’s other admirer, Zacharias Werner; the weapons were Italian sonnets. Humbert and Quilty seemingly duel over Lolita at a literary level: Quilty writes a play in her honor, while Humbert composes poems to his lost Lolita and reads Quilty his death sentence in verse.
Ultimately, the element in Elective Affinities that made it a victim of choice for Nabokov may have been its element of social criticism. In it, the Baron suggests that marriage should be made a five-year renewable contract. For Nabokov, in contrast, marriage is a bond, a sharing of two lives, and stands above all else as the only possible way to escape the prison of one's own self and access another's. Perhaps for this reason, Nabokov does not even give Goethe a consolation prize. At the end of the novel, Humbert finds Lolita married to Richard F. [Friedrich?] Schiller. As a coup de grâce and final lampoon of Goethe’s fondness for young girls, Nabokov gives his nymphet to the namesake of Goethe's closest personal friend and rival, Schiller.
—Jake Pultorak
WHENCE THE COCKERELLS' PITCHER?
Optical reflection is one of the major motifs in Pnin. A common source of reflection is glassware, such as the “gleam of a tumbler” in chapter one and the “large bowl of aquamarine glass” Pnin receives as a present from his son Victor. When Joan Clements sees the bowl, she compares it to another glass vessel, telling Pnin that the Cockerells own “a Lake Dunmore pitcher that looks like a poor relation of this” (158). In Phantom of Fact (242) Gennady Barabtarlo has
[54]
suggested several models for the pitcher; I would like to add a more probable source, expanding on Barabtarlo's mention of Old American glassware.
In November 1810, the Vermont State Legislature granted a charter for the founding of the Vermont Glass Factory in Middlebury. Production started the next year, and business was so successful that a second factory was established nearby on the banks of Lake Dunmore. A fire in 1815 temporarily halted glass production at the new location, and two years later, due in part to the economic effects of the War of 1812, the Lake Dunmore Glass Company ceased operations. In 1833 a group of Middlebury investors refurbished the plant and manufactured glass for the next nine years. In 1849, the Lake Dunmore Hotel Company purchased the land on which the factory was situated, and tourism became the lake's main industry.
All types of glassware were made at Lake Dunmore, such as bottles, bowls, dishes, and most importantly, pitchers. The articles were well known, appearing for sale as far south as Hartford, Connecticut. However, due to the short life of the Lake Dunmore Glass Company, the glassware it produced is very rare. There is a small collection at the Sheldon Art Museum in Middlebury, Vermont, and the Chemistry Department of Middlebury College also owns several pieces. A complete discussion of Lake Dunmore glassware can be found in Florence Allen and Thomas Omsbee, “Glassmaking at Lake Dunmore, Vermont,” American Collector, August 1937; 6-7, and a sequel published the next month (6-7, 19). The article contains many photographs of the various types of glassware made at the Lake Dunmore factory, including two Lake Dunmore pitchers. (Several of the featured pieces are aquamarine, the same color as Pnin's bowl.) Victor's gift must be extremely valuable if a Lake Dunmore pitcher pales in comparison.
Nabokov and his family spent two summers, 1940 and 1942, with Mikhail Karpovich in West Wardsboro,
[55]
Vermont, less than fifty miles from Lake Dunmore (Boyd, American Years 14-16). More importantly, on July 20, 1955, Nabokov delivered a guest lecture at the Middlebury College Russian Summer School (Boyd 270). Especially popular among students during the hot summer months. Lake Dunmore is only a few miles from the college. Nabokov mailed Chapter Six, in which the Lake Dunmore reference occurs, to the New Yorker on August 23, only one month and three days after his Middlebury lecture. It seems likely that he heard about or saw examples of Lake Dunmore glassware during this stay at Middlebury, and they thus found their way into his Pnin.
(I would like to extend special thanks to Mrs. Betsy Brent at the Isley Public Library in Middlebury, VT.)
—Jason Merrill, University of Kansas
ADA AND PERCY: BEREFT MAIDENS AND DEAD OFFICERS
The affair between Ada and Lt. Percy de Prey is brief, but its echoes resound throughout much of Ada. Since the reader sees Ada’s other lovers mostly through Van's eyes, Percy emerges as a despicable figure. Ada, who understandably tries to minimize the virtues of her past lovers, nonetheless remarks that Percy “had a keen sense of honor, odd though it may seem to you and me” (335). Count de Prey’s offer to duel Van following their scuffle at Ada's birthday picnic attests this, as does his enlistment in the Crimean conflict. Ada is perhaps not without feeling for the doomed young officer. Three superimposed motifs that are linked with their affair may suggest this.
Percy de Prey is associated with the French folk song “Malbrough's s'en va-t-en guerre,” the melody of which underlies the English “For he's a jolly good fellow” (287-289). In the song Malbrough or Malbrook has gone to war but nothing is known of his return. Perhaps at Easter or Trinity. Easter and Trinity pass.
[56]
His wife, watching from a tower, sees the approach of a page dressed black. Malbrook is dead. (The text of the song may be found in my earlier VN note “Ada's Percy de Prey as the Marlborough Man.”) The “Malbrough” of the song is widely assumed to be the famous Duke of Marlborough who won a great victory over the French at Malplaquet in 1709. Although in real life the Duke survived, the song with its image of the grieving widow became enormously popular throughout Europe. Catherine the Great had it played at the funeral of her lover Prince Potemkin. It is perhaps worth noting that the Duke of Marlborough and his almost equally famous wife, Sarah Jennings, are one of history's great love stores. In Ada the song is sung as a clue to the identity of Ada’s lover and as a foreshadowing of Percy/Malbrook's death in the Crimea, but the implied role of Ada as bereft mistress should not be overlooked.
The second layer of allusion focusses more directly on Ada. At the family dinner Demon teasingly prophesies that Ada's dream is to become a concert pianist and (mis-) quotes the lines: “Lorsque son fiancé fut parti pour la guerre / Irène de Grandfief, la pauvre et noble enfant / Ferma son piano ... vendit son elephant”.... Van identifies Coppée as the author and goes on to mention that Ada de Grandfief has translated another of his poems into English (246). J. E. Rivers and William Walker (Nabokov's Fifth Arc, pp. 284-85) further identify Francois Coppée's (1842-1908) sentimental narrative poem “La Veille” and summarize it: Vicomte Roger has gone to war while Irene de Grandfief waits for him. There is a skirmish near the castle and a wounded enemy soldier is brought in for care. In nursing him Irene leams he has killed Roger. After a struggle with her Christian conscience, she continues to nurse him but her hair has turned white overnight. Demon jokingly quotes the poem and assigns Ada the role of Irene because he has heard rumors of her affair with Lt. de Prey who is departing for the Crimea. As with the song “Malbrough s'en va-t-en guerre,” Ada is cast as the abandoned fiancée and Percy's death is forecast.
[57]
The motif has a third incarnation arising from Ada's career as an actress. One of her roles, she says, is that of “la pauvre et noble enfant Irina, the youngest of Chekhov's Three Sisters—which become four in the Anti-Terran version (426-430). Note Ada’s quote from the Coppée poem specifically links this scene to the family dinner scene with its covert allusion to Percy. They are also linked by the names Irene and Irina. Chekhov's Irina, failing to find a meaningful life or love in the provincial garrison town where the sisters live, agrees to marry one of the officers, Baron Tuzenbach, whom she finds decent but little else. As the regiment departs on the eve of her wedding, Lt. Tuzenbach is killed in a duel by a friend, a disappointed suitor.
The French folk song, Coppée’s poem, and Chekhov's play all serve as subtexts for the Ada-Percy relationship. In each of them, as in Ada, a titled army officer is killed leaving a grieving fiancée. Percy's role is echoed by the Duke of Marlborough, Vicomte Roger, and Baron Tuzenbach; Ada's—by the Duchess of Marlborough, Irene de Grandfief, and Irina Prozorov.
We opened our remarks by suggesting that perhaps Ada's feelings for Percy were deeper than Van implies. This may be but we must reflect on another possibility. Ada is not an admirable character and perhaps our suggestion that she grieves for her lost lover is over generous. Brian Boyd points out that Ada even encourages Van to fondle Lucette, ostensibly to defuse her pesky jealousy but in part to give Ada time for her “botanical rambles” with Percy [Ada: The Place of Consciousness, p. 49). Nabokov may be using the above three subtexts parodically. The superficial situation is similar in all cases, but Ada’s feeling for Percy may be quite different from that of her proxies. Whatever Ada’s feelings for Percy, the real point is Nabokov's artful use of the triple-decker set of allusions for Ada's bereft maiden/dead officer theme.
—D. Barton Johnson
University of California at Santa Barbara
[58]
ABSTRACTS
“A PERSISTENT SNORE IN THE NEXT ROOM: NABOKOV AND FINNEGANS WAKE"
by Tom Goldpaugh
(Abstract of a paper delivered at the Annual MLA Convention, New York City, December 1992)
Although Vladimir Nabokov always expressed admiration for Ulysses, he claimed that Finnegans Wake was “a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac that I am” (Strong Opinions 71). For the most part, Nabokov's critics have taken him at his word, in the process ignoring the Wake's impact on him. In fact, if the Wake was a snore Nabokov heard in the next room, it was one that turned him into the perfect insomniac that Joyce claimed was the true reader of Finnegans Wake. From 1939 and “The Waltz Invention” to 1969 and Ada, Finnegans Wake informs Nabokov's works with a force that can be felt in his themes, his structures, and his character types.
Three works bear the imprint of the Wake. “The Waltz Invention,” a play written in Russian shortly after Nabokov met Joyce, employs the dream-as-setting and uses multi-roled characters similar to those that characterize Finnegans Wake. Lolita, the most heavily indebted, re-works the Wake’s character types and its Viconian cycle. In Ada, Van Veen's treatise on time opposes Joyce's version of Viconian time, and throughout Ada both Finnegans Wake and Joyce are sent up.
The Wake’s presence in these three works, though, suggests more than Nabokov's customary acknowledgement of a literary ancestor. Each one displays a different stage in Nabokov’s relationship
[59]
with Joyce and the Wake. In “The Waltz Invention" Nabokov awkwardly borrowed both the general framework of the dream and minor elements from published parts of Joyce's still-as-yet unfinished work. In particular, what Joyce had already published as “The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies” was influential. What we see in such borrowings is a young Nabokov's masked and hesitant appropriation of material from Joyce.
Lolita, however, shows Nabokov's comic mastery of that same material. Not only do his characters bear a close resemblance to Joyce's, right down to the speech impediments of Humbert Humbert and Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, but in Lolita Nabokov embeds the four-stage Viconian cycle that Joyce uses to power Finnegans Wake. To think of this as a case of literary borrowing misreads Nabokov's purpose. His inclusion of the Wake's structure and character types in Lolita attempts to subordinate the Wake to Lolita in the same way that the Wake's inclusion of other works tries to subordinate them to the Wake.
Appropriation and subordination, though, are not the same as confrontation, a task Nabokov undertakes in Ada. Here Nabokov frequently parodies the Wake, and at least two minor comic characters directly recall Joyce as its author. At the same time, twice in the novel Nabokov places himself as third in a line that begins with Lewis Carroll and includes the Joyce of the Wake. His mockery of the Wake and his recognition of Joyce as a literary forbearer are the two sides to his confrontation with Joyce and the Wake. In Ada, partially through Van Veen, Nabokov directly challenges Joyce's version of the Viconian cycle of Time by separating Time and Space which in Finnegans Wake are opposed but indivisible.
Nabokov's relationship to Finnegans Wake as it manifests in Ada is the final stage in his relationship with James Joyce. Simultaneously mocking the Wake and acknowledging Joyce on the one hand, and directly challenging the Wake's theory of Time on the other, it completes the process begun in “The Waltz
[60]
Invention.” Over the course of his career, Nabokov moves from a simple appropriation of minor elements, to a comic mastery of Joyce's Viconian cycle and his character types, to a confrontation with Joyce and with Finnegans Wake in an area where both laid claim: Time.
“LIBERAL IRONISTS AND THE ‘GAUDILY PAINTED SAVAGE’: ON RICHARD RORTYS READING OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV”
by Leona Tucker
(Abstract of a paper delivered at the Annual MLA Convention, New York City, December 1992)
While applauding Richard Rorty's discussion of the analogies between Humbert's callousness to the bereaved father who gives him a “mediocre haircut” in Kasbeam and the reader's insensitivity to Charlote Haze's and Dolly’s feelings for Dolly’s dead little brother, the paper protests (1) against Rorty's pointing to “cruelty” rather than callousness as the main target of Nabokov’s fiction, (2) against the conclusions that Rorty draws from Nabokov's statement that the “little shiver” of aesthetic experience “is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science” (Lectures on Literature 64), and (3) against his comments on Nabokov's conjoining, as it were, literary immortality with metaphysical, or “literal” immortality.
“THE SALOME MOTIFY IN NABOKOV'S INVITATION TO A BEHEADING"
by Gavriel Shapiro
(Abstract of a paper delivered at the MLA Convention, New York City, December 1992)
This paper demonstrates that in his portrayal of Emmie, Nabokov drew on the image of Salome as it had evolved throughout the centuries, from the Gospels to his day. Like her evangelical counterpart, Emmie is a blind tool in the hands of an adult, in this case of M’sieur Pierre. The latter masterminds and, with her assistance, carries out a vicious ploy designed to torment Cincinnatus, who is evidently cast in the novel in the role of John the Baptist. Emmie is twelve years old and therefore is close in age to ’the little girl’ of the Gospels. The Late Medieval and Renaissance iconography based on the Gospels, as reflected in the works of Giotto, the anonymous artist of the San Marco mosaic, Filippo Lippi, and Benozzo Gozzoli, all of whom portrayed Salome as an adolescent with blond hair, was, no doubt, the source of Nabokov’s inspiration for the portrayal of Emmie. Further, the condemnation of dancing, that Devil-pleasing activity, as expressed in the homiletic works of John Chrysostom arid his Russian successors, is manifest in the photohoroscope, with its realization of the metaphoric formula—’dancing is the Devil’s bride.’ And, finally, in accordance with the modernist image of the evangelical princess, particularly as it appears in Oscar Wilde's Salomé, Nabokov portrays Emmie as a peevish adolescent avenging her unrequited love. The paper was accompanied with slides.
[62]
“ON NABOKOV'S PEN NAME SIRIN”
by Gavriel Shapiro
(Abstract of a paper delivered at the Annual AATSEEL Convention, New York City, December 1992)
This paper proposes the reasons for Nabokov's choosing Sirin as the pen name for his "Russian years.' The discussion follows Nabokov's own remarks on the subject which he made in his second interview with Alfred Appel, Jr. (Strong Opinions 161). In these remarks, Nabokov suggests the four sources for this nom de plume: Sirin as an owl. Siren as a Greek Deity, Sirin as a mythical Russian bird, and Sirin as 'the Blokian era' image. In conclusion, the paper considers some fatidic dates, to which Nabokov always attached great importance, and particularly the fatidic date symbolism with which Sirin had surrounded the first two decades of the writer's life, as an additional argument in favor of this choice. The paper was accompanied with slides.
“THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION: VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S IMAGES OF THE 1940s”
by Gregory Wickliff
(Abstract of a Ph.D. Dissertation, Purdue University, December 1991.)
Nabokov's published texts of the 1940s—his lepidoptera articles, Nikolai Gogol, Conclusive Evidence, ten short stories, and Bend Sinister—are read in terms of Henri's Bergson’s theories of image perception. For both authors, time is real, and change is basic to human perception. Consequently, any static representation of time, including language, is
[63]
finally mechanistic, false, and even deterministic in the sense of presenting a single, closed future. In Nabokov's texts, mechanism and determinism are rejected, subverted by reflexive techniques, and parodied as aesthetically and morally empty doctrines.
In Nabokov's lepidoptera articles this thesis takes the form of Nabokov's theory of the creative evolution of butterfly genitalia, a hypothesis that rejects Spencerian “survival of the fittest” and the single line of biological development implied by Darwin's theory of “natural selection.” Instead, Nabokov argues for the mind-like development of species in novel and plural directions, and the constant need for revolutionary revision in science.
Principles similar to biological mechanism are carried into the human social realm by Spencer's deterministic theories of sociology that Nabokov rejects utterly, especially as they are represented by nineteenth century Russian literary criticism, by Marxist-Leninist dogma, by Stalinism, and by Hitler’s National Socialism. In Nabokov’s literary biography of Gogol, he revises criticism of the Gogol texts to continue a critique of nineteenth century Russian literary and social criticism, and to parody the biological determinism of associationist psychology, especially as practiced by Freud. Nabokov's autobiography creatively explodes many genre conventions and Imitates the flow of human memory in the structure of its recurrent themes, one of the greatest of which is the political liberalism of Nabokov's father. The short stories treat quite directly the conflict between mechanism and individual creative consciousness that Nabokov suggests underlies the causes of World War II, and that projects itself as a kind of neurosis, even in the wake of the war. Bend Sinister, the most important work of the period for the purposes of this study, presents an exhaustive parody of the mechanistic police state that destroys every vestige of creative consciousness within its borders, but is itself destroyed by the unexpected intervention of the creative author of that world.