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Behind the Glass Pane: Vladimir Nabokov's "Perfection" and Transcendence
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Behind the Glass Pane: Vladimir Nabokov's "Perfection" and Transcendence
Annette Wiesner, University of Stuttgart
Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels.
-Delalande: Discours sur les ombres[1]
Vladimir Nabokov never explicitly voiced any religious beliefs, but hints of such are to be found throughout his work, as the quote above by the fictitious philosopher Delalande shows. Nabokov's answer to an interviewer's query whether he believed in God was: "I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more."[2] But in describing his mother's beliefs in Speak, Memory (1967), he may well have been speaking for himself: "Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour."[3]
In his fiction, as Vladimir E. Alexandrov notes, Nabokov often used analogies "between sleep and earthly life on the one hand, and wakefulness and a transcendent world on the other,"[4] thus showing that he incorporated the possibility of an afterlife into his own philosophy. This is also expressed in a passage of "The Art of Literature and Commonsense": "That human life is but the first installment of the serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out."[5] In the context of the essay, in which Nabokov makes a case against "commonsense," his belief in immortality and an afterlife is given a place alongside his ethics and aesthetics.
Equally important, and far more explicitly dealt with by Nabokov, are the themes of consciousness and reality, both central to his work. Consciousness constitutes the uniqueness of human existence, and connects the individual to reality, but it has clear-cut limitations such as death or loss of memory. This can be seen in almost all of Nabokov's work. The story "Terra Incognita" (1931) gives us an example of a Nabokov character experiencing the limitations of his mind and power of imagination, and shows how his consciousness constitutes his reality. As Vallière, the protagonist, becomes increasingly ill, his world loses its stability, and instead of a jungle and a marsh he starts to see parts of a European bedroom, which he calls "the furnished rooms of nonexistence."[6]
The limits of consciousness become even more pronounced in Nabokov's early novel The Eye (1930). Smurov, the narrator, shows "the familiar Nabokovian longing for communion and divestment, for self-transcendence,"[7] but cannot satisfy it. Smurov desperately tries to find a way out of his life, which is a prison to him. But instead of using the powers of his mind to help life become more interesting and colorful, he creates an alternative reality with his imagination, forgetting that there is no complete escape before death, and that his self-imposed solitude will only make his existence more unbearable.
Cincinnatus C. of Invitation to a Beheading (1938), on the other hand, learns to accept what Smurov in The Eye refuses to realize, that is, that he will not escape his world before he has faced death. Caught in the world of two-dimensional characters and papier-mâché buildings, Cincinnatus knows of the existence of a "better world," and manages to enter it for a few moments from time to time. It is Cincinnatus who, as Julian W. Connolly says, gives "substance or credibility to the existence of the artificial mundane world," and who realizes "the need to resist this process,"[8] in order to permanently reach a better world. The recognition that he must be the destroyer of this artificial world is a difficult one, and Cincinnatus is reluctant to leave his body, "fashioned so painstakingly."[9] He is afraid of taking the last step, even though he suspects that there will be no pain, no difficulty in the transition to this new world. It is his mind that must be ready for the transition, or, as the narrator of Transparent Things (1972) calls it, the "mysterious mental maneuver,"[10] for it is his mind that holds the power over his "reality."
In Transparent Things, Nabokov's penultimate novel, consciousness is shown in an actual state of transcendence. The whole story is told from the point of view of a narrator who has reached the realm of an afterlife, and thus we are treated to an insight into what in Nabokov's opinion might be characteristic of a mind in such a state: expanded consciousness, unlimited by space or time, and the ability to perceive patterns in the texture of the past. It would be a state where "cosmic synchronization," as Nabokov calls it in Speak, Memory, would be possible for everyone:
In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better.. While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur-all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.[11]
The protagonist of Transparent Things, Hugh Person, searching for an escape from the misery of his existence, tries to escape first through communion and love-much like the first attempts of Cincinnatus-and then seeks solace in his past. We are shown the distinct difference between the abilities of the still mortal consciousness of Hugh Person, who overlooks signs and patterns, and that of the transcended beings, R. and his companions, who are able to make sense of the patterns inherent in life, yet who are also limited in their own way. Nabokov once discarded a note for Pale Fire (1962) which read: "Time without consciousness-lower animal world; time with consciousness-man; consciousness without time-some still higher state."[12] This last state is the one the narrators of Transparent Things inhabit, and one Cincinnatus and Hugh Person will reach after their deaths.
In an early short story, "Perfection," which Nabokov wrote in Berlin in 1938, the moment of transcendence and the glimpse of an afterlife are described more explicitly even than in Transparent Things. The protagonist of "Perfection," Ivanov, a Russian émigré in Berlin, tutors a boy, David, who is characterized as "gentle but dullish,"[13] and whom Ivanov accompanies to the seaside for a summer vacation. Ivanov says at the beginning of the story, during a lesson: "Now then, here we have two lines" (TD 177). For Ivanov, having "two lines" is "a rare fortune, something one could be proud of" (TD 177), the meaning of which becomes clear in the further course of the story as the two lines take on metaphoric meaning for two separate levels of Ivanov's existence.
Ivanov is ill suited for the world in which he exists. He daydreams about "the many things he would never get to know closer, about professions that he would never practice, about a parachute, opening like a colossal corolla, or the fleeting, speckled world of automobile racers, about various images of happiness, about the pleasures of very rich people amidst very picturesque natural surroundings" (TD 179). He asks himself questions he will never be able to answer, and wonders, for example, about the washing habits of chimney sweeps or about the state of the country road in Russia he has just recalled. Unlike his pupil David, Ivanov has never been "on intimate terms with the secret fraternity of man-made things that goes under the name technology" (TD 180). He feels shut out from the world, disconnected, as it were, even though he has the passionate desire "to attain and touch everything, to let the dappled voices, the bird calls, filter through his being and to enter for a moment into a passerby's soul as one enters the cool shade of a tree" (TD 179). He is uncomfortable in his body, and mentions an ailing heart, which lets the reader guess at the ending to the story; yet Ivanov attempts to savor life to the fullest, to enjoy the world around him, even if he lacks an understanding of it.
Ivanov's main characteristic is a feeling of alienation to the world around him. He describes his state as "the glass pane which for as long as he lived would prevent him from having direct contact with the world," and behind which his "thought fluttered and walked up and down" (TD 179). The phrase "for as long as he lived" is no doubt the key to the whole story, for Ivanov will not be rescued from his glass cage until after he dies. Unlike Smurov in The Eye, Ivanov actively seeks contact with the world but is simply unable to attain it; he is not dissatisfied with his life in the way Smurov is, only dismayed at his inability to live in the same way other people do.
His attempts at contact with the world fail even in the case of his relation to David. Watching the boy, he is reminded of his own childhood, reflecting that he, too, "must have appeared to be a stolid and dryish lad, I who never shared with anyone my loves, my fancies and fears" (TD 181). But over this self-contemplation he forgets to look at David more closely, which has its consequences later on. His endeavor to show David the world of imagination and memory is fruitless. As they walk through a forest together-David is sulking because he would rather be at the beach-Ivanov tries to lighten the boy's mood by suggesting he imagine that they are in a Malayan forest: "'Look about you: you'll presently see the rarest of birds fly past, Prince Albert's paradise bird, whose head is adorned with a pair of long plumes consisting of blue oriflammes.' 'Ach, quatsch,' responded David dejectedly.. 'Of course, it's nonsense, we are not in the mountains of New Guinea. But the point is that with a bit of imagination-if, God forbid, you were some day to go blind or be imprisoned, or were merely forced to perform, in appalling poverty, some hopeless, distasteful task, you might remember this walk we are taking today in an ordinary forest as if it had been-how shall I say-fairytale ecstasy'" (TD 186).
As Grossmith says, "memory and imagination are of such importance to Ivanov because they are his principal, indeed his only, means of contact with the world."[14] He actually is in the state he warns David about: poor and forced to perform a task that he was not cut out to do, nor really enjoys, and his mind the only tool he has to lighten his dreary existence. But, as in the case of Cincinnatus and Hugh Person, memory and imagination are only temporary escapes, and Ivanov longs to transcend these limitations.
Ivanov does not feel well on the day following the walk in the woods, and he would like to stay in bed and think of "remote and vague semievents illumined by memory on only one side.. But it was impossible to concentrate on them, they all somehow slipped away" (TD 187), and he finally gets out of bed. Walking towards the sea, Ivanov "suddenly half-remembered something-something extraordinarily comforting and strange-but it immediately dissolved, and the turbulent sea air constricted his chest" (TD 187). Sitting on the beach, he muses, "I've lived neither very long nor very well.. Still it would be a shame to complain; this alien world is beautiful, and I would feel happy right now if only I could recall that wonderful, wonderful-what? What was it?" (TD 187-88). As Grossmith points out, there are indications that he is now even more alienated from the world than ever. He has put on David's sunglasses to protect his eyes from the harsh sun, but they also add an additional blind through which he views the world. His memory does not give him the desired relief any more, and his body refuses him sensory experience: his chest feels constricted, his ears plugged up, and when he inhales through his nose "a rumble started in his head, and something bumped into a membranous dead end" (TD 187). "He has lost contact not only with the world of the present ., but also with the world of his own past."[15]
When he hears a sudden scream and, looking up, sees David apparently drowning, he rushes into the water to save him, but does not reach him. Instead, his heart gives out: "All at once a rapid something passed through him, a flash of fingers rippling over piano keys-and this was the very thing he had been trying to recall through the morning. He came out on a stretch of sand. Sand, sea, and air were of an odd, faded, opaque tint, and everything was perfectly still" (TD 189). His sensory perception is still not in order, and he reflects that it must be evening and David long since drowned. But on looking around him he "understood that if David was not with him, David is not dead" (TD 189). Once he has realized the state of things, that is, that he is the one who has died, "the dull mist immediately broke, blossomed with marvelous colors, all kinds of sounds burst forth" (TD 189), and he sees David, who had only been playing a trick in pretending to drown, on the beach, and people who are searching the water for the body of his tutor, "and the Baltic Sea sparkled from end to end, and, in the thinned-out forest, across a green country road, there lay, still breathing, freshly cut aspens; and a youth, smeared with soot, gradually turned white as he washed under the kitchen tap, and black parakeets flew above the eternal snows of the New Zealand mountains; and a fisherman, squinting in the sun, was solemnly predicting that not until the ninth day would the waves surrender the corpse" (TD 190).
Ivanov, so willing, yet unable, to live, finds everything he was looking for, all the answers he sought in life, after transcending death. The barrier which separated him from the world is removed. Nothing hinders him, as his sick body did before; there are no limits to where he can go, neither in space nor in time. Grossmith concludes that "liberation from space and time and liberation from self-with no attendant loss of personal memory-this is Ivanov's, and Nabokov's, 'perfection'."[16]
Yet there is more to the final step into the transcendent realm than perfection: the step itself is the important aspect for Ivanov, the "mysterious mental maneuver" that enables an individual to leave one state of being behind and emerge into one of expanded consciousness. Nabokov crafts his work in such a way that the reader himself is given the same chance as Ivanov, Cincinnatus, and Hugh Person. As Brian Boyd notes: "There is some strange shimmer in the gaps between [Nabokov's] words to lure readers through until they can see the world of his books as if from the other side, from beyond the limits of consciousness."[17] But this is something not every reader of Nabokov's fiction will be able to attain. Nabokov was well aware of this fact, and responded to an interviewer's question about his relation to the reader with the comment: "[The author] clashes with readerdom because he is his own ideal reader and those other readers are so very often mere lip-moving ghosts and amnesiacs. On the other hand, a good reader is bound to make fierce efforts when wrestling with a difficult author, but those efforts can be most rewarding after the bright dust has settled."[18] When "the bright dust has settled" in front of the reader's eyes, he is able, like Ivanov and Hugh Person, to see and hear better than he was able to before, he will detect more patterns and be less fettered by time and space, that is, he will be able to reach a state of "cosmic synchronization."
Art, however, is not the only means of achieving a sense of transcendence. This state can be reached through other acts of the mind, as in experiencing "the thrill of pure science,"[19] or when using memory to make sense of one's past. "The main thing is to experience that tingle in any department of thought or emotion," Nabokov says, and he claims this tingle to be crucial to "the best in life."[20] He himself, for example, found the best often in butterfly hunting. Commingling his two passions-lepidoptera and fiction-he shares his "tingle" and transcendent moment with the reader in a passage from Speak, Memory, in which his ramble through the Russian marsh of his boyhood ends among American "Ponderosa pines. In the distance, fleeting cloud shadows dappled the dull green of slopes above timber line, and the gray and white of Longs Peak."[21] In the blink of an eye, the sentence takes Nabokov not only to the other side of the world, but also forty years forward, defying space and time. He goes on to say: "I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."[22] This sensation of timelessness, of "oneness with sun and stone," and also a feeling of gratitude, is the reward a reader finds when he makes the effort of wrestling with Nabokov's fiction.
As Nabokov describes literature, "a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."[23] Important in this passage is the fact that Nabokov defines art, or aesthetic bliss, by moral categories rather than aesthetic ones. Only later, in the afterword to the Russian edition of Lolita, he added a fifth category, "harmony," to express his aesthetic requirements.[24] Nabokov is considered by many to be one of the century's great prose stylists because of what he sought in art: "the nonutilitarian delights."[25] This is certainly the most obvious of the pleasures which Nabokov's work gives the reader. But there is a deeper feeling that there might be more than these delights to be found in his art; that the act of reading Nabokov might be, in some way, a preparatory exercise for "what the spirit may be expected to perform, when the time comes, on a vaster and more satisfactory scale."[26]
NOTES
[1]Vladimir Nabokov, Epigraph to Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Dmitri Nabokov with Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Putnam's, 1959) 9.
[2]Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973) 45.
[3]Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Putnam's, 1967) 39.
[4]Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Nabokov's Otherworld (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) 35.
[5]Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/ Broccoli Clark, 1980) 377.
[6]Vladimir Nabokov, A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, trans. Dmitri Nabokov and Simon Karlinsky with Vladimir Nabokov (Penguin, 1975) 122.
[7]Robert Grossmith, "Perfection," A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov's Short Fiction, ed. Charles Nicol and Gennady Barabtarlo (New York: Garland, 1993) 74.
[8]Julian W. Connolly, "Nabokov's 'Terra Incognita' and Invitation to a Beheading: The Struggle for Imaginative Freedom," Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 12 (1983): 59.
[9]Nabokov, Invitation 21.
[10]Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973) 104.
[11]Nabokov, Speak Memory 218.
[12]Nabokov, Strong Opinions 30.
[13]Vladimir Nabokov, Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, trans. Dmitri Nabokov with Vladimir Nabokov (Penguin, 1975, 177). All references to the story "Perfection" are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation TD.
[14]Grossmith 76.
[15]Grossmith 77.
[16]Grossmith 79.
[17]Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) 308.
[18]Nabokov, Strong Opinions 183.
[19]Nabokov, Lectures on Literature 382.
[20]Nabokov, Lectures on Literature 382.
[21]Nabokov, Speak, Memory 138-39.
[22]Nabokov, Speak, Memory 139.
[23]Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Putnam's, 1957) 314-15.
[24]Cf. "Postscript to the Russian Edition of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov," trans. and commented on by Earl D. Sampson, Nabokov's Fifth Arc, ed. J. E. Rivers and Charles Nicol (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1987) 189.
[25]Nabokov, Speak, Memory 125.
[26]Words missing in Nabokov's essay "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," Lectures on Literature, 371-80, quoted in Alexandrov 57.
