Charles Nicol’s essay, “Nabokov and Science Fiction: Lance,” resolves several pertinent issues in the story, from “the Future as obsolete in reverse” and its relevance in the running Medieval-Romance theme, to the “narrator” of Lance, as well as the style and imagery in the story. A point in the essay that can be further explicated is the “deliberate mystification” (Nicol, section 6), i.e. the dream described by the narrator at the end of the fourth section in the story. The narrator describes his recurrent childhood dream that takes place in a somewhat vague surrounding, seen as if through a rear-view mirror. To quote the dream in full: “The nuisance of that dream was that for some reason I could not walk around the view to meet it on equal terms. There lurked in the mist a mass of something—mineral matter or the like—oppressively and quite meaninglessly shaped, and, in the course of my dream, I kept filling some kind of receptacle (translated as “pail”) with smaller shapes (translated as “pebbles”), and my nose was bleeding but I was too impatient and excited to do anything about it. And every time I had that dream, suddenly somebody would start screaming behind me, and I awoke screaming too, thus prolonging the initial anonymous shriek, with its initial note of rising exultation, but with no meaning attached to it any more—if there had been a meaning.”
The narrator explains that he had to resort to this dream “to patch up a gaping hole, a raw wound in my story.” What this “gaping hole” entails is the ineffable first impressions of Lance and his companions when they get to land on the distant planet (Mars probably, going by the clues interspersed). The previous (3rd) section of the story was largely told through Mr. and Mrs. Boke’s perspective, and their strained efforts to imagine Lance’s interplanetary journey can be summed up nicely from a passage in The Gift, where it is said that any efforts to imagine the ineffable “are symbols--symbols which become a burden to the mind as soon as it takes a close look at them” (Chapter 5).It is also in the same section that the mountain-climbing metaphors are the most prominent, quite rightly so, as Lance’s parents have only Lance’s efforts at mountaineering as the sole reference-point to base the current expedition upon.
Nicol explains the dream as facing death, or more importantly the spiritual experience that accompanies strenuous mountaineering and goes on to quote a relevant passage from Glory, Chapter 40. There is a similar dream from Transparent Things that isalso described as a recurrent nightmare of the protagonist, Hugh Person: “…he would find himself trying to stop or divert a trickle of grain or fine gravel from a rift in the texture of space and being hampered in every conceivable respect by cobwebby, splintery, filamentary elements, confused heaps and hollows, brittle debris, collapsing colossuses. He was finally blocked by masses of rubbish, and that was death” (Chap 16, 60, Vintage). The theme in both dreams seems to be the dreamer’s efforts to constrain the situation: their attempts to introduce order by marshalling large masses of amorphous matter in extremis.
The contents of the “dream” (pebbles and pail as well as the gravel and the sand) is a recurrent metaphor in scientific writings from Archimedes to Newton and Darwin. For example, The Sand Reckoner of Archimedes, has: “There are some, king Gelon, who think that the number of the sand is infinite in multitude; and I mean by the sand not only that which exists about Syracuse and the rest of Sicily but also that which is found in every region whether inhabited or uninhabited. Again there are some who, without regarding it as infinite, yet think that no number has been named which is great enough to exceed its multitude” (God created the Integers, 200 & 208, ed. Stephen Hawking, Running Press, 2007). By the end of his demonstration, Archimedes is able to reach a finite number (having the base of myriads, i.e. 10,000) in the range 1063(i.e. the number of grains of sand) that can be fitted inside the universe. One also recalls here Newton’s famous, valedictory statement on his accomplishments: “I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me” (God created the Integers, 373).
Peter Medawar, in his lecture series about the methodology of science,Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought(American Philosophical Society, 11, 1969), quotes Darwin from a letter on the importance of ordering observations: “About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize, and I well remember, someone saying that at this rate, a man may as well go into a gravel pit, count the pebbles and describe their colour.” So we have this recurrent analogy in scientific writing in regard to counting and classification, and maybe Nabokov would have been aware of at least one of the sources. The point of all this is the age-old desire and urge of mankind to classify, order and understand the universe surrounding them, to reduce the gap between bewilderment and understanding, and to accomplish things that may have been impossible in a person’s wildest fancies. So the major arc (explicitly stated) in the story deals with Mr. and Mrs. Boke’s fears regarding Lance’s perilous journey, “wildly envying the lot of fishermen’s wives” and the terrors of the “infinite and gratuitous awfulness of fluid space” (Section 1). Their fears find their due justification when Lance’s close friend, Denny, a biologist, is “dead and left behind in heaven.” On the other hand, there is also an implicit arc where the ecstasy and rapture of discovery and journey have enough purpose to them that justifies the tremendous risk. To quote Nabokov’s own attitude to the perils of space-travel, almost twenty years after he had written the story and after the first moon-landing: “I would only recommend that our jaunty and fearless space sportsmen be accompanied by a few men of acute imagination, true scientists of Darwin's type, an artistic genius or two--even some gray octopus of a poet who might lose his mind in the process of gaining a new world, but what does it matter, it is the ecstasy that counts” (The Nabokovian, N.10, Interview with Mati Laansoo for the CBC, 1973). I think that thisis the source of the stylistic flourishes, the resulting buoyant and upbeat tone of the narrator running in the story. It is from this fountainhead, as Nabokov claims in a letter to Wilson, that “he has put in the equivalent of a dozen distant thunderstorms in nervous energy into the story” (Letter No. 238, Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 300, ed. Karlinsky, Univ. of California Press).
—Shakeeb Arzoo, Kolkata, India
I thank Dr. Priscilla Meyer for her helpful comments on the earlier version of the article and Dr. Brian Boyd for helping me focus and clarify the ideas for the article.