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[NABOKOV-L] Second Sightings: Eco and Nabokov
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In Umberto Eco's works as a semiologist (not in his novels, but in those I read there was no reason to bring VN up anyway, except for an "attic" in Queen Luana) I'd never encountered any reference to Nabokov, although Eco regularly mentioned a wealth of writer's names (Poe, Borges, Nerval, Joyce). This always struck me as representative of something, but I could never figure out what it was (Umberto Eco disliking VN? ...whatever).
Editorial criteria excluded any reference to "Nonita" around here, although his other short-story, also included in his book of pastiche and parodies ("Misreadings" translated into English by William Weaver, namely "Regretfully We Are Returning Your... ," in which a publisher's reader rejects the Bible, Homer, Dante, Joyce....), merited a relative fame and amused smiles.
While I googled for more information, I found two novelties (or olddities). Who Is This Model Reader, Anyway?": www.eblong.com/zarf/essays/model.html *- and
"The Significance Of Names In The Fiction Of Martin Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, John Kennedy Toole, Joseph Heller, Samuel Beckett, John Updike, Will Self, Umberto Eco : Waiting For Go.Dot in Biography, Chris Hall, Features, Martin Amis, Novels, Samuel Beckett, Will Self by Chris Hall www.spikemagazine.com/0896name.php - **
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*In his book, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Umberto Eco describes a curious implication in Nabokov's essay "Seduction of View". Nabokov was interested in the separation of the reader and the character, the audience and the protagonist, of course -- as a general topic -- and his essay recounts an incident that had troubled him for some time. It seems (Nabokov explains) that he (Nabokov) was hailed by a young boy on the rue du Mas, in Paris. This boy greeted him familiarly and indignantly, demanding to know if he would be arriving for dinner on time. Now, Nabokov expected to be dining alone that evening; but he knew he was expected by a friend the following evening, and moreover he knew that this friend had a son. He was immediately seized by doubt. It seemed, in that moment, that he had misremembered the date of the engagement. Nabokov turned and blurted out, without thought, "Is it tomorrow?" The child glared at him narrowly, and Nabokov suddenly perceived that it was not a boy at all, but a girl he did not recognize. She abruptly cried, "You're not my Papa!" and dashed away.
Nabokov (the essay concludes) found himself entirely unsure what had occurred. Clearly he had made a mistake. But what? Naively, he had mistaken a strange girl for a familiar boy -- his friend's son. But he did not in fact recognize his friend's son at all; he did not know the boy by face. Does it make sense to mistake one stranger for another? Or had Nabokov mistaken the girl's role, her place in his life-narrative, for another's? Does the nature of the error change if his engagement really was on that night? (Nabokov does not relate whether it was.) What if his friend had had a daughter, who had indeed accosted him to remind him of dinner? Would he then have been mistaken about the child's identity, or only its sex? Nabokov continues in this vein, concluding with the observation that since the girl had briefly recognized him, it might be equally valid for the reader to conclude that Nabokov had mistaken the girl for his own daughter -- whatever fictional person that might be.
This is dizzying enough in itself, and Eco discusses the entire passage in some depth. However, as said earlier, there are more implications than might meet the eye. As Eco explains, Nabokov's essay is not a personal anecdote at all. It is fiction. Nabokov invented it, for the purpose of exploring certain ideas about reader and character, audience and protagonist. So the real Nabokov never mistook anyone at all; everything in the incident occurred by his decision. Now, the fictional Nabokov did make a mistake. What mistake? There is no longer any error we can be certain he made. Before, we were sure that Nabokov did encounter a particular person, male or female, though we have no knowledge who. (Unless you, reading Eco's book, are yourself Nabokov's friend or his child!) But now there is no such person, only a role in a story. The protagonist of the story encountered a person, male or female, on the day of his dinner or some other day, but there is no fact of the matter which -- except that he was wrong, whatever he believed -- for that is the point of the story. A sad situation to be in; I hope you are never subjected to it.
At this point (Eco continues) the situation grows more complex. He (Eco) searched Nabokov's correspondence to try to determine the truth of the situation -- the paratextual clues he might have left, will he or no, explaining what he intended "Seduction of View" to explain. Such clues tell us nothing about the narrative, but in the life-narrative of Nabokov, they have meaning. Did he base the story on a real incident? Did he have a friend who invited him to dinner, and did this friend have a son or a daughter?
To his surprise, Eco found no mention of "Seduction of View" at all. Indeed he found no reference to the work in any of his biographies or bibliographies of Nabokov. Returning to the collection in which he had read it, Eco found nothing by Nabokov at all. In its place was a short story by Borges. With a very great shock, Eco realized he had dreamed the entire incident, complete with the unremarked dream-shift from witnessing the event to reading about it in an equally nonexistent book.
Now, where does this leave poor Nabokov? Here he is, mistaking one person for another, and even his creator has never decided which for what or whom. His creator, in fact, isn't Eco at all. Eco knows that perfectly well, for he has written books (including the very volume Six Walks which recounts this) and writing is a process of decision. Dreams are observed, not written. Eco observes Nabokov inventing Nabokov inventing a fictitious boy on top of a real girl, but the only fact of the matter is the amorphous, unobservable content of Eco's mind that might have gone into constructing such a dream. Perhaps Eco was worried about missing a dinner engagement of his own, with his publishing agent. In which case Nabokov might have mistaken a strange girl for Eco's agent's son. Or, indeed, Eco's mother for his agent's daughter. Dreams are capricious, as Nabokov had reason to know.
Can we conclude anything from this passage? What conclusions does Eco come to?
In honesty, none. This may be a dizzying, complex literary construction, but there is no brilliant conclusion to be drawn. It's merely a glib and facile mess -- layers of fiction piled upon layers in a rather pointless way. The question of who Nabokov thought he saw is trivially insoluble. So why, you may wonder, did Eco spend so much effort writing about it?
He didn't. This discussion does not occur in Six Walks at all. Eco wrote nothing about Nabokov in that book. He wanted to, but he never got the chance; I killed him first. Murdered him, via a particularly clever scheme involving wasps.
I suppose you're wondering where that leaves Nabokov. Suspended, I suppose. The essay "Seduction of View" does exist, so we could once again concern ourselves with the question of the strange child's identity. It would probably be a waste of time, however. "Seduction of View" is not about a child on the rue du Mas. I don't know what it's about; I haven't read it. The incident in question is taken from Nabokov's correspondence, where he also reveals that the girl was in fact a boy, an inmate at a nearby sanitarium who had escaped while dressed in women's clothing.
So you must conclude that I am the author. I constructed the entire incident, by selecting text from a letter, true, but a process of decision all the same. My intent is paramount in deciphering the riddle. I am the one who knows the answer.
I wish I could help, but unfortunately, I have no idea. I am not the author, after all. I don't really exist -- I am as fictional as Eco. I merely parrot the words that are written for me, and they tell me nothing about Nabokov.
Now it is written that I say that this is the end of this text, which means that a fictional world is ending.
My, aren't you in for a surprise.
-- Milan, 1999
** - The importance of names in literature has nowhere been more typified than in recent attempts to pin down the elusive etymology of Beckett's Godot. Following that farrago you can be sure that the name 'Godot' is missing from any parental 'Book Of Names' (although I quite like the idea of pregnant women going around stroking their bellies and saying: "Yes, we're waiting for Godot..."). One can imagine the bewildered child suffering an intolerable identity problem from having his peers forever arguing about what he 'means.'
To some, 'Godot' has a kind of cosmic signifier in the duality 'God/Eau'. Less Francophile readings have insisted it should scan as 'Go.dot', a reference to the mental and physical movement that must result from Existential inertia. Perhaps the least credible suggestion, although the most interesting and curious, comes from a bizarre triangular link between James Joyce's Ulysses and the Tour de France. Some painstaking (or entirely serendipitous) research has discovered that a French cyclist by the name of, wait for it, Godot, rode through Dublin on the 16th June in the early part of this century, the exact day which Leopold Bloom spends milling around Dublin in Ulysses. To me this has a further curious affinity with the 'Go.dot' reading and one of cheery Norman Tebbit's maxims: on yer bike! Evidence perhaps that Beckett really was a hilarious wag or, simply, a precognitive member of the Tory party?
Charles Dickens was one of the first to really let rip with overblown allusional comic sobriquets and it is in this tradition that a lot of modern and postmodern neologising is entrenched. Writers have always liked a name's potential to succinctly allude to character and disposition, often spending months deliberating over the final choice. For me, one of the best examples of a truly great fictional name belongs to the central character in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces: Ignatius J. Reilly. The christian name is practically onomatopoeic, suggesting indignation and outrage which, for anyone who has read the book, will almost sound like a definition of our Rabelaisian hero going about his hatred of anything modern. (In a cinema Ignatius loudly proclaims: "This is an abortion!") There is also the subtle use of the pompous, self-important middle initial that furthers our understanding of the character.
Philip K. Dick's obsession with duality (probably originating from the fact that his twin sister died when only a few months old) led him to invent some gloriously unlikely names. In Valis one-half of the narrator (as with a lot of Dick's novels, it is hard to tell) is called Horselover Fat. 'Philip' is Greek for 'lover of horses'; 'Dick' is German for 'Fat'. Similarly, for close watchers of Karaoke by Dennis Potter, the character of Nick Balmer, played by Richard E. Grant, immediately raised suspicion: N. Balmer = Enbalmer, a famous line from deranged Danny the headhunter in the film Withnail And I. Incidentally, this provides further evidence that Dennis Potter (or Pennis Dotter, as A.A. Gill waggish refers to the playwright) was taking the piss with his Channel 4/BBC 2 collaboration. A less subtle form of this codified obscurantism appears in the film Angel Heart, where Robert De Niro plays the character Louis Cyphre, who turn out to be, surprise surprise, Lucifer.
If there is one author who best exemplifies a predilection for names and games of the distinctly literary type it is Vladimir Nabokov. In Bend Sinister there is paronomasias (a 'verbal plague' as Nabokov describes it) in Padukgrad where everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else. Nabokov concedes that by their very nature these "delicate markers" will bypass the inattentive reader and that "well-wishers will bring their own symbols and mobiles, and portable radios, to my little party" and concludes that in the end "it is only the author's private satisfaction that counts." It was this "wayside murmur" that pleased him the most when rereading his own fiction for the purposes of correction. etc. Nabokov reminds us that reading is a bungee jump (especially first person narratives) where we may become so engrossed in the rush and thrill of the story that we forget we are tethered to the author. Nabokov had a kind of withering, yet paternalistic, disregard for kidding ourselves: he had a fondness for snapping on the ropes and shouting down, "You idiots!"
James Wood, in comparing young American and English writing, recently argued for a fiction of unknowingness and against one of omniscient authorial intrusion. But surely this is just the point that Nabokov is making: fiction is a conscious game where the author manipulates the proceedings. There is little escape from this fact (and why should we want to escape it?) What varies is authorial acknowledgement which sounds patronising or exhilarating, according to taste. Some people don't like the pedagogical voice in modern fiction, don't like being 'lectured to', and some don't like being told they're being 'lectured to.' Fine. But Woods, and even more recently, the children's writer Philip Pullman, recent winner of the Carnegie Medal, goes too far in implying that any type of postmodern or self-conscious position cannot co-exist with what they conceive as a 'pure storytelling' form.
I can't help but detect a very conservative sensibility here that has an analogue with the political rhetoric of the "Back To Basics" government campaign: a return to good honest readability, out with this leftie cleverness, elliptical narrative on yer bike! Note also the tedious cyclical nature inherent to both arguments, roughly appearing in the runup to the Booker Prize or a General Election. A recent Dillons survey of MPs' reading habits (a thinly veiled attempt to annoy Jeffrey Archer, which is fine by me) reveals similarly conservative reading values. Most overrated novelist? Archer, of course, who goes down for obvious political reasons (though it begs the question: who is it that 'rated' him in the first place?) Next came Martin Amis, A.S.Byatt and Salman Rushdie, which sounds suspiciously like a list of people you are supposed to say are overrated. Either that or, dare I say it, a list of authors your average MP is a little too sentence-challenged to understand. Well, think about it: all those years of soundbite politics hardly indicates a love of Proust or Joyce, does it?
The importance of a name to plot structure is nowhere more comically heightened than in Martin Amis' Money, where John Self finds himself the patsy in a financial conspiracy of moviemakers and money shakers. It is the character's very name that is the source of his downfall. (Skip the next couple of paragraphs if you haven't read the book). 'John' is, I think, the perfect name for invoking the bland anonymity of the giant financial institutions where, in Nabokovian terms, everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else. (Viz. Nick Leeson: a name that should have set alarm bells ringing in itself).
'Self' of course embodies the ultimate Eighties Thatcherite 'ideas' of individualism and survival. But the apposite brilliance of 'John Self ' is in making it the central twist. Amis has subservient to the greater scheme of things (the plot), just as his character is made to serve the greed of the players around him. It transpires that Self has been signing company documents twice; once under co-signatory, once under 'Self': "It was your name." This literary playfulness and close attention to detail can be traced from Nabokov through the American heavyweights Saul Bellow and John Updike to Anthony Burgess and most recently Amis.
The playfulness which employs hyperreal and ciphered names runs riot in the comic novel, best exemplified by Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Here the names are neither naturalistic or ciphered but faintly ludicrous (viz. Pulp Fiction:"This is America: names don't mean shit"). There is a phonetic suggestibility of sedition and subversion in the name 'Yossarian' (which is noted by one of his paranoid superiors in the book). There is also the double 'Major Major' (which has recently been recycled as the title of Terry Major-Ball's autobiography) and the sub-Dickensian 'Chaplain Tapmann'. 'Milo Minderbinder' is a personal favourite, conjuring up an image of a kind of entrepreneurial mesmerist who also happens to be mentally ill. However, we also have Richard Ford's 'Frank Banscombe', a name redolent of Updike's great tragicomic figure Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom: thus a more naturalistic name could be said to suit the subtler pastiche and ironic metiers of Ford and Updike.
Names become their strangest when the demarcations between fiction and reality begin to merge into one another . Umberto Eco is a case in point. His non-fictional name is almost too literary, too good, to be the real name of an author. One of Eco's short stories from Misreadings is entitled Granita and is a twist upon Lolita, where the subject of desire is an old lady. In the Nabokovian version the central protagonist is, of course, Humbert Humbert, the name once again being indicative of a double or split image. The similarity of Umberto to Humbert is striking, and 'Eco'` sounds like an allusion to the fact that the first name is an echo of the first. Before knowing any better I found myself thinking that perhaps Will Self was a sly allusion to one of his mentors (and mates) Martin Amis. But that would be to confuse art with life. And we all know where that gets us....
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