Subject
IVNS Panels at AATSEEL: "Nabokov at 100 II"
Date
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Panel: "Nabokov at 100 II"
Chair: D. Barton Johnson
1. Paper Title: More Memoirs from a Mousehole: _Lolita_ and _Notes from
the Underground_
Author: Kirsten Rutsala
Affiliation: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Address: 201 E. California Ave., #2, Urbana, IL 61801 (after May 15)
Email: krutsala@parkland.cc.il.us (until May 15), then c/o Yevgeny Slivkin
(slivkin@uiuc.edu)
Despite Nabokov's legendary diatribes against Dostoevsky, many of
Nabokov's novels seem to be self-conscious responses to Dostoevsky's
works. _Despair_, as a parody of and reaction to such works as _The
Double_ and _Crime and Punishment_, may be the most explicit of these
responses.
However, _Lolita_ reveals some striking similarities to _Notes from the
Underground_ which are worth exploring. In particular, the techniques
and devices of narrative in the two novels indicate that Nabokov may well
have intended Humbert Humbert as the literary heir of the underground man.
Both these narrators compose confessions which alternate between candor
and obfuscation, between pronouncements of their guilt and self-justifying
declarations of innocence. Their opinions of their own character traits
and behavior swing from one extreme to another, from arrogance to
self-loathing and back again. Both novels reveal a pronounced tension
between the professed frankness of the narrators and their tendency to
manipulate the telling of events in their own favor.
Both Humbert and the underground man are unreliable narrators, and their
unreliability takes on precisely the same quality. They faithfully record
the basic events of their respective stories; we have no reason to doubt
the facts they describe. Rather than deceiving themselves about factual
information (for instance, Humbert does not delude himself into imagining
that Lolita is really older than twelve), they deceive themselves about
the moral implications of their actions. This tension between the
characters' awareness and their self-deception complicates and enhances
the two novels.
Nabokov and Dostoevsky both choose a first-person narrator; the underground
man and Humbert seem to demand the narration of their own stories in order
to exercise that complete control over the other characters on the page
that they failed to achieve in life. In both cases, they experience
feelings of triumph and success from their ability to manipulate Liza and
Lolita into accepting the roles these narrators have assigned them. The
underground man tries to impose his interpretation of her role on Liza:
he sees her as merely a prostitute whom he alternately humiliates and
imagines redeeming. Similarly, Humbert imposes on Lolita the role of
"nymphet" and reincarnation of Annabel. Yet both female characters escape
this confinement: Lolita runs away with Quilty and Liza leaves the
underground man's apartment without accepting the money he offers simply
to degrade her. Having been outwitted by these young women, Humbert and
the underground man each turn to the one thing that remains in his
control: his story.
Perhaps the most significant "revision" of _Notes from the Underground_
that is present in _Lolita_ is Humbert's relative success as an artist.
The underground man refers to himself as an anti-hero; he may with equal
justification be called an "anti-writer." Though profoundly influenced by
literature and harboring a certain hope of producing a work of enduring
literature, the underground man nonetheless claims to reject all that
literature stands for. This is demonstrated in his rejection of a
conventional plot structure or narrative voice, and in his intentionally
clumsy diction and syntax. He can no more resolve his conflicts as a
writer than he can any other internal conflict; indeed, his writing is a
vivid representation of these inner conflicts. In contrast, Humbert's
prose can be eloquent, lyrical, and resonant; the structure of his
composition is exquisitely symmetrical. Though his writing is uneven, the
process of creation itself paradoxically allows him to immortalize Lolita
in a work of art and simultaneously recognize that she herself was not an
artistic creation but a human child. While the underground man can only
write in circles, Humbert resolves his own internal conflicts through
genuine art.
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2. Paper Title: Kinbote and Poprishchin (temporary title)
Author: Andrew Swensen
Affiliation: Brandeis University
Address: Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages, Brandeis University,
MS 024, Waltham, MA 02454 Telephone: 781-736-3191
Email: swensen@brandeis.edu
That Nabokov's fiction presents the reader with a myriad of
puzzles is a commonplace of Nabokov criticism. Solutions to such puzzles
do exist in some cases, but in others the author deliberately crafts a
permanent mystery instead of presenting a certain, if obscured,
resolution. Concealed
by the unreliable narration born of madness, Charles Kinbote of Pale Fire
constitutes one such "permanent mystery." One of Nabokov's most beloved
forbears, Nikolai Gogol, offers insight on the particular nature of the
mystery of Pale Fire and simultaneously elucidates the nature of permanent
narrative mystery in Nabokov. Specifically, viewing Kinbote through the
lens of Gogol's Poprishchin - to read the King of Zembla informed by the
precedent of the King of Spain - first offers strong evidence for one
possible reading of events in Pale Fire: that all events outside of
Kinbote's relationship with John Shade in fact occur in an asylum. More
important, however, are the contrasts in narration between the two works;
the juxtaposition of the knowable reality of "Notes of a Madman" to the
obscured truth behind Kinbote's delusional tale ultimately demonstrates
the unsolvable nature of the fabula of Pale Fire. To discuss Pale Fire
requires that one make certain assumptions, which in themselves are leaps
of a reader's faith. For the purposes of the present study, we shall
assume that Kinbote is indeed mentally deranged and that the novel occurs
in "our" world, that is, that Nabokov has not created a fictive geography
and globe that includes the nation of Zembla. Given these assumptions, one
notes a strong similarity in the psychopathology of Kinbote and that of
Poprishchin: acute paranoia, absurd megalomaniacal delusion, and a sharply
distorted perception of reality. Such similar states of mind suggest that
Kinbote may well exist in a similar reality to that gleaned through
Poprishchin's narration. The king's castle, the palace coup, and the
flight from Zembla are viably read much as we read the torture of the King
of Spain, but instead of the mustard plasters, we infer the realia of an
asylum, pursuit by interns, and the escape of an institutionalized
psychotic. In the comparative reading with Gogol, as we move from
events of plot to the matter of narration, we find that Nabokov departs
from Gogol in that the former forgoes any anchoring points on which the
reader might base a clear version of events. Narrative unreliability and
madness have a rich history in prose, and often, perhaps typically, the
author provides sufficient "objective" cues to the reader, such that the
reader progressively obtains the means for determining a reliable version
of events. Such is the case in a number of Poe's mad narrators, for
example, and in these instances, the reader's perception of the deviation
between reality and the protagonist's view of reality becomes part of the
orchestration of the literary work. Nabokov, however, does not grant his
reader any firm grip on the reality lurking beneath the surface of
Kinbote's narrative, and even the most fundamental assertions regarding
plot events could potentially be subject to doubt. In Poprishchin's tale
we never doubt that we possess some reasonably complete version of "real"
events; but with Nabokov, we find ourselves fluctuating between certitude
that an actual event lies behind a narrated event (Shade and Oleg, for
example), and perplexity over events that seem the product of pure
fantasy.
Ultimately, the comparative reading demonstrates the truism of Kinbote's
"basic fact" of aesthetics: "That 'reality' is neither the subject nor the
object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to
do with the average 'reality' perceived by the communal eye."
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3. Paper Title: The Impact of the Italian Commedia dell'arte on Nabokov's
last novel, Look at the Harlequins!
Author: Olga Partan
Affiliation: Brown University
Address: 10 Kent Square, Brookline MA 02446
Telephone: 617-232-6297
Email: olga@partan.com
This paper will focus on the impact of the Italian commedia dell'arte
(often called the Harlequinade) and its aesthetic principles on Vladimir
Nabokov's last novel Look at the Harlequins!, or LATH (1974). I
reinterpret the novel by following Nabokov's exhortation in the title, and
suggest that the ancient Harlequinade is a lath that, like the lath used
by builders, helps structure the entire novel. By writing such a work at
the end of his creative career, Nabokov was defining his work and artistic
philosophy as being part of the Western and Russian tradition of
"Harlequinized art and literature" (this term is defined in the paper).
LATH is a novel-game, traditionally defined as a "mock-biography" or a
"self-parody" of a master who, at the end of his career, tricks readers
and critics by creating a double of himself, called Vadim Vadimovich, to
"confuse art and life, imagination and reality" (D. Barton Johnson). There
is a tendency in Nabokovian criticism to decode the enigmatic meaning of
LATH by focusing on the parallelism between the fictional world of the
novel and Nabokov's real life and art (Boyd, Field, Grabes, Fraysse and
others). I am not the first researcher to notice the constant apparition
of commedia dell'arte motifs within the novel. In their large study, The
Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell'arte and the Modern Imagination,
Green and Swan discussed the influence of the Italian commedia dell'arte
on LATH. Nevertheless, while Green and Swan point out that "Harlequins,
and other commedia figures, appear throughout the book," they do not
conduct a detailed textual analysis of the commedia's influence on the
novel or explore the broad range of ways that the commedia shapes the
novel.
My approach will be interdisciplinary, as I trace and analyze the links
between the commedia as a theatrical form, and the literary text of LATH.
First, I will discuss Nabokov's textual allusions to the Harlequinade that
are spread throughout the novel yet have largely been ignored by literary
scholars. For example, the narrator calls his beloved women inamoratas,
and his daughter's name is Isabelle - both names belong to the
Harlequinade, suggesting a certain scenario of destiny and certain norms
of behavior. The narrator refers to his Russian and English novels as
harlequins, and the audience of a writer is compared to the theatrical
audience of a performer. The word lath is used within the novel not only
as an acronym, but also refers to the stick of a clown or mime. Several
scenes within the novel are described as pantomimes such as those often
used in the Harlequinade. Vadim, the narrator, is described as a
theatrical character with extravagant gestures and bizarre intonation,
like Harlequin. Second, I will discuss the role that key devices of the
commedia dell'arte play within the novel. These devices include
improvisation within a stable scenario or plot, playing the mask, the
interweaving of tragic and comic, extensive use of grotesque or farce,
self-parody, and the presence of doubles and mistaken identities.