http://www.uwo.ca/modlang/ailc/current/RevArticlesNabokov.htm LR/RL Copyright ¿ by the International Comparative Literature Association. All rights reserved. Copyright ¿ par l’Association Internationale de Litt?rature Compar?e. Tous droits r?serv?s. Literary Research/Recherche litt?raire 17.33 (Spring-Summer/printemps-?t?, 2000) 96-104 Charles Lock University of Copenhagen Nabokov’s Centenary: A V-shaped Hereafter Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999; xii+303 pp.; ISBN: 0691009597 (bk.); LC call no.: PS3527.A15P3334; Julian W. Connolly, ed., Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999; xiv+250 pp.; ISBN: 0521632838 (bk.); LC call no.: PG3476.N3Z776; Neil Cornwell, Writers and Their Work: Vladimir Nabokov. Plymouth (U.K.): Northcote House (in association with the British Council), 1999; xvii+142 pp.; ISBN: 074630868x (bk.); LC call no.: in process; Galya Diment, Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel. Seattle & London: U of Washington P, 1997; xii+202 pp.; ISBN: 0295976349; LC call no.: PS3527.A15P5936 The centenary of the birth of Vladimir Nabokov has seen the predictable emergence of a number of monographs and collections of essays, and more must be expected: three major conferences held in 1999, all on sites of Nabokovian resonance – Ithaca, Cambridge and St. Petersburg – will yield their proceedings. Neil Cornwell’s task is explicitly modest and introductory, for his volume belongs to the revamped British Council series “Writers and their Work”: to what extent inclusion in this series marks a claim to Britishness, and is therefore in the present case an act of appropriation, is not clear. Happily, Cornwell is a Slavic specialist who gives due measure to each of the two conjured tongues, and who is particularly interesting on the topic of what George Steiner once (1972) defined as the “extraterritorial”: linguistic displacement as a distinctive feature of twentieth-century writing, from Conrad to Nabokov, Beckett, Borges and, more recently, Brodsky. Cornwell gives much more than one expects from such a volume as this: that Nabokov’s trope of the “knight’s move” is taken (without acknowledgement) from his contemporary, the Formalist V.I. Shklovsky; that Nabokov’s study of [end of page 96] Gogol, published in 1943, was “seemingly the first book on Gogol to appear in English”; that Zembla is invoked not only by Pope but also by Defoe and Hawthorne; that “hazel shade” is a phrase that occurs frequently in English poetry, and that Timon of Athens is not the unique source of the phrase “pale fire.” In a slim book no apology need be made for omission, yet it seems an odd choice for Cornwell to devote a chapter each to Ada or Ardor and Look at the Harlequins! – neither text suitable for beginners –and give no attention at all to Pnin. Here perhaps one detects a whiff of emulous wit, for it is of course Pnin’s fate to be ignored, or –his craft –to elude attention. Not always, however: Galya Diment’s Pniniad is a strange double-focussed work, at once an attempt to illuminate Pnin through a claim to have identified the so-called “real-life” model, and a study of Marc Szeftel whose value and pathos are not exclusively reflected from Pnin: Szeftel was, as it may cruelly be said, a pale fire in his own right. As a portrait of an academic by default, of a Russian Jew who in emigration found university teaching the least uncongenial of options, this story has an ordinariness within which other lives may resonate. A Cornell colleague described Szeftel as Ain outlook a person far more strange –foreign, shall I say, –than anyone who had previously been a member of our department.” Galya Diment introduces a Pninian note of her own when she challenges this recollection with the observation that in 1945 there were “at least three other foreigners” in Cornell’s History Department: two Englishmen and a Dutchman. Szeftel’s hour should have arrived with the great scholarly project in which he was to collaborate with both Nabokov and Roman Jakobson: the translation of Slovo o polku Igoreve as The Song of Igor’s Campaign, with historical commentary and philological apparatus devoted to the demonstration that this poem was genuinely medieval and not a Romantic forgery in the manner of Ossian. The project made slow progress through the 1950’s and was terminated in 1957 when Nabokov found out, from Harry Levin, that Jakobson had sabotaged Nabokov’s chance of being appointed to Harvard’s Department of Modern Languages, as a teacher of Russian literature who was also a Russian writer, with the not-to-be-forgotten words: “I do respect very much the elephant, but would you give him the chair of Zoology?” Nabokov ended the collaboration forthwith, and then brought out his “plain text” translation in 1960, without the scholarly or editorial apparatus, and without even a mention of Jakobson or Szeftel as former collaborators. Szeftel was by then the leading authority on the historical background to The Song of Igor’s Campaign: his life’s scholarship had come to nothing, and the commentary was never to be published. To what degree Szeftel may have served as a “model” for Pnin is one of those questions that would seem to belong to another age. The attempt to demonstrate the resemblance constitutes quite the least interesting aspect of this book. Yet without [end of page 97] that attempt, that alibi or apology, it is unlikely that this book would have found a publisher. The more we learn about Szeftel, of his wretched decline into self-pity and envy as, now “exiled” once more, from Ithaca to Seattle, he realizes that he never counted for much in Nabokov’s life, the more we may come to admire Professor Pnin. Naive readers of that novel – who include blurb-writers and other paratextual parasites –accept the narrator’s demeaning presentation of the protagonist; careful readers will admire the cunning and wit with which Pnin eludes his narrator and even, at the plot’s necessary end, his author. Szeftel was apparently blest with little wit and less luck. Yet this modest biographical account has its interest: it exposes the mean pettinesses of quotidian academic life, not the awards and celebrations, the scandals and humiliations in the public domain, but the private miseries, unshared and unacknowledged. When Szeftel learns about the Festschrift presented to Jakobson on his seventieth birthday, in three volumes with some two hundred contributors, he confides to his diary: “The fact that no Festschrift has appeared to honor me is different, but not to be asked to participate in honoring a fellow-scholar with whom I have been connected for so many years.... Forgetfulness, oversight?” This book is not easy reading, and it is a tribute to Diment’s tact and circumspection that it is bearable at all. This work serves as a tribute not only to Szeftel but to the many other scholars whose lives have not even the tenuous link to a Nabokov to bring them into the light of our own mordant recognitions. Towards the end of his life, when invited to lecture on medieval Russian history, Szeftel would instead propose a lecture on Nabokov. As a scholar he considered himself to have failed; his claim to attention would rest on his friendship with his erstwhile colleague and fellow-?migr?. The reflections of Pale Fire are not so pale. The appearance of being a bit of a Kinbote is a risk to which anyone writing about Nabokov is exposed. And most exposed of all is Brian Boyd, whose monumental biography (1990-91) is impressively free of the sound of axes on this or the other shore. Hyperbole, however, tends to grind, and one might be grateful that in his monograph devoted to Pale Fire, Boyd does not repeat his praise of the 999 line “poem” contained in the novel: “English poetry has few things better to offer than Pale Fire” (Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991],440). There is now some moderation in the praise of Pale Fire but no “concession” that it should be treated as an “image of a poem,” if not as a pastiche; and Boyd’s line in hyperbole is unabashed. Nabokov is matched against various writers –Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Perec –and each fails the test. (Only Shakespeare is a worthy rival). A by no means unusual instance tells us that time is played with in Pale Fire “in a way far more thrilling and inventive, far more skeptical and yet more magical, than in the postured probings of Eliot’s Four Quartets” (206). Such extremes of praise, and [end of page 98] such predictable reciprocities of condemnation, are enough to instil scepticism among Nabokov’s most fervent admirers. Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a strange book, a monograph as long as its subject, yet rather more conventional in its layout. The layout of Pale Fire virtually prohibits an annotated text, and Boyd’s book will certainly serve as a useful guide, a compendium and synthesis of much of the annotation and elucidation that Pale Fire has elicited. Unfortunately Boyd also has a polemical purpose, to present nothing less than an interpretation, and one moreover that explains “what really happens and what is really at stake in Pale Fire” (xii). There is a peculiar form of scholarly hubris by which an author seeks permission to cite and refute within his own text the comments of the publisher’s reader, who in this case is Michael Wood, author of The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994). Boyd’s argument is that the entire construction of Pale Fire can be attributed neither to Shade – as Boyd had argued earlier – nor to Kinbote, but to Shade’s daughter Hazel who, after her death, works as a benevolent ghostly influence, dropping hints for both Shade and Kinbote: it is she who orchestrates the two texts, who conjures their two tongues into a single story: “Hazel’s spirit somehow inspires Kinbote with the idea of Zembla” (173). Wood objects, and Boyd repeats the reader’s report: “Death itself is diminished, its horror is cancelled, and a desperate sentimentality beckons. It’s as if Nahum Tate had decided to deal with Cordelia’s death, not by removing it from his version of King Lear, but by bringing her back as a helpful spirit” (257). This seems to me unanswerable and Boyd’s attempt at refutation does nothing to mitigate the force of Wood’s words: what belongs at most to the paratext has thus been incorporated into the text, and it has not been tamed. Boyd’s is a curious rhetorical strategy, unnervingly close to Kinbotism. The opening sentence of Boyd’s final paragraph epitomizes the nakedness of his appropriation of the mind and intentions of Nabokov, shamelessly without the cover of logic: “Pale Fire shows how wrongly so many read Nabokov” (261). I count myself among those many readers, in finding broad interpretations either frivolous or dull, or both. The fascination of Nabokov is entirely on the surface –where all fascination must be sought. And it is extraordinary how much of that surface can be ignored, overlooked or neglected even in a monograph as comprehensive and thorough as this. Boyd’s argument begins with a statement of the obvious: “Pale Fire consists of four parts,” and lists the four parts as they are given on the contents page of the novel: Foreword, Poem, Commentary, Index. There is, however, on the page before the contents page, an epigraph from Boswell in which Johnson speaks about a young man who was running about town shooting cats. “And then in a kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favourite cat, and said, ‘But Hodge shan’t be shot: no, no, Hodge shall not be [end of page 99] shot.’” In Kinbote’s commentary on line 894 we learn that Shade has “been said to resemble at least four people,” the first named of whom is Samuel Johnson. It is even hinted that the epigraph itself may have been selected and placed by Kinbote, who tells us (Commentary to line 172): “In a black pocketbook that I fortunately have with me I find, jotted down, here and there, among various extracts that had happened to please me (a footnote from Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson....) ....” An interpretation of Pale Fire that makes not one mention of Boswell, Johnson, or Hodge is surely not, Sir, to be taken seriously. Thus one strikes an ungrateful note, quite inappropriate to much in Boyd’s commentary. When Shade and Kinbote are on a walk, “skirting Dulwich Forest,” Shade recalls the farmer’s son who “pointed and remarked informatively: ‘Here Papa pisses.’” Not content merely to note the allusion to Browning’s “Pippa Passes,” Boyd finds in Mrs. Sutherland Orr’s Handbook of 1892 an account of the origin of that poem in a walk taken by Browning Ain a wood near Dulwich.” “My friend,” Kinbote writes in the same paragraph, “sparkled with quips, and marrowskies, and anecdotes”: Boyd omits to alert us here to the Index, where “marrowsky” is explained as “a rudimentary spoonerism” –e.g. Papa pisses –“from the name of a Russian diplomat of the early 19th century, Count Komarovski, famous at foreign courts for mispronouncing his own name –Makarovski, Macaronski, Skomorovski, etc.” (Spoonerism is itself derived from the phonemic transpositions of the Warden of New College Oxford named Spooner). “I find it staggering that readers can think someone as playfully generous as Nabokov is out to frustrate them,” writes Boyd in Kinbotic tones. Such aloofness from “readers” certainly lends spice to the reader’s pursuit of whatever Boyd fails to find. This reader finds it puzzling that Boyd does not appear to have recourse to the Oxford English Dictionary. Line 35 of the poem, “Stilettos of a frozen stillicide,” receives this comment from Kinbote: “My dictionary defines [stillicide] as “a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop. I remember having encountered it for the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy.” Boyd refers us to Webster’s for a definition, pointing out that Kinbote does not recall the exact poem, and that Nabokov offers the reader no help. In a footnote Boyd acknowledges that Michael Long (Marvell, Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia [Oxford: Clarendon; London; New York: Oxford UP], 1984) “was the first to note the source” in Hardy’s “Friends Beyond”: “In the muted, measured note/ Of a ripple under archways, or a lone cave’s stillicide.” One need not have waited till 1984. If, puzzled by the word ‘stillicide,’ one had looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, one would have found the word described as “now rare” – and Hardy’s poem (from 1898) cited as the only example since the seventeenth century. This lends a certain uncanny focus to Robert Graves’s not entirely reliable account of a conversation with Hardy in [end of page 100] August 1920, in which the latter protested against the critics who complained about Hardy’s use of extraordinary words not to be found in any dictionary: “Hardy then laughed a little. Once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and found it there right enough - only to read on and discover that the sole authority quoted was himself....!” (Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1929), ch. 28; the “st-” fascicle of the OED had been published in 1919.) Boyd manages to come to his own rescue, or mitigation: Webster’s was the dictionary always open on Nabokov’s table – we even have a photograph (reproduced in American Years). It was only in December 1973 that Nabokov acquired his own set of the thirteen volumes of the OED (American Years, 622); but one is well-advised to assume his familiarity with a library set. Boyd draws our attention to the “consonne /D’appui, Echo’s fey child” (lines 965-66), for which Shade declares a special partiality just after having rhymed “meant” with “cement.” As Boyd notes – and is the first to note – the repetition of the poem’s first line as its thousandth and last would close the whole with another consonne d’appui: Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. [I was the shadow of the waxwing slain.] In the earlier instance we have further reinforcement of the consonne d’appui(“supporting consonant,” though “intrusive consonant” gives a fairer sense of its value, at least in English verse) with an internal rhyme in l. 965: The brain is drained And a brown ament, and the noun I meant To use but did not, dry on the cement. What is an ament, apart from being an unusual word that escapes entirely the notice of our interpreter? It means catkin, which links it to Kinbote, and to Gradus who hawks Cartesian devils “during Catkin Week” (comment on line 171); and to the “muscat grape” in the second line of Shade’s poem “The Sacred Tree” cited by Kinbote in his comment on line 49, with the further remark: AI do not know if it is relevant or not but there is a cat-and-mouse game in the second line.” The noun he meant to use instead of ament must be catkin: the OED tells us that George Eliot’s Felix Holt contains the phrase “catkined hazels”: somewhere in this game, Hodge may be lurking. “Ament” from Latin amentum, tail or catkin; “amental” can mean either “catkin-bearing” or, as a homonym from a different root, “denying or lacking intelligence.” According to the Supplement of the OED, the substantive “ament” [end of page 101] in the twentieth century has been used clinically to denote those who lack intelligence; the only non-clinical instance cited is from Walter de la Mare, writing in 1935. In 1938 Beckett, in Murphy, uses the adjective “amental.” Nabokov has “ament” as “catkin” in his early story “Christmas” (1921), or at least in its English version: “slippery planks, flecked with aments.” This double sense of “ament” creates a tenuous link between Nabokov and de la Mare. In 1942 Nabokov confessed to Edmund Wilson that his early poems “are strongly influenced by the Georgian poets, Rupert Brooke, De la Mare, etc., by whom I was much fascinated at the time.” This is cited by D. Barton Johnson in “Vladimir Nabokov and Rupert Brooke,” an essay in Nabokov and his Fiction. Barton Johnson sketches some of the links between Brooke and those poets most popular in Cambridge c. 1920, and is entirely persuasive in his claim that this formative time in Nabokov’s life needs to be more thoroughly explored. Nabokov’s familiarity with English Literature was acquired in three stages, of which we know much about the first – from Nabokov’s father and tutors in Russia – and the last –in America, under the guidance of Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin and others. But of the Cambridge years we know very little; and in various ways Nabokov does his best to discourage enquiry. In 1922 Nabokov published an essay, “Rupert Bruk,” which has not even yet been translated into English. This essay is concerned with one poem in particular, entitled “Life Beyond” (its title not far from Hardy’s “Friends Beyond”), and it is in this essay that Nabokov first uses the word potustoronnost’(the hereafter, the beyond), a word that Nabokov will use over fifty years later in his last novel, Look at the Harlequins! (1974). In 1979, in a preface to a posthumous collection of Nabokov’s poetry, V?ra Nabokov claimed that potustoronnost’ was the “main theme” of all his work. Cornwall laments the results of this intervention, pointing out that the theme had “not gone completely unremarked [though] it had certainly not received the attention she felt to be its due. This shortfall has by now been made perhaps more than good, as something of an ‘otherworld’ bandwagon has been rolling for some time in Nabokov scholarship” (Cornwell, 12). That bandwagon has been driven by Vladimir Alexandrov, author of Nabokov’s Otherworld (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991), and it has made possible, even plausible, Boyd’s sentimental reading of Pale Fire. One would like to think that V?ra Nabokov was merely playing with the idea of posterity, that now, after Nabokov’s death, one is in the beyond for which he was writing. The fundamentalist line has however prevailed, and provided a master-alibi for subordinating textual details to grand and hazy interpretations. Connolly’s volume is full of local illuminations and happily devoid of postured [end of page 102] probings into the hereafter. As the master taught us: “Only myopia condones the blurry generalizations of ignorance” (Strong Opinions, 168). The first essay is so myopic as to pose a severe test of the reader’s faith. Gavriel Shapiro argues that Nabokov leaves traces of his names all through his texts, not just in the anagrams – such as Vivian Darkbloom or Adam von Librikov – that any child could make out, but also in hypograms distributed throughout a paragraph. Saussure’s pursuit of onomastic anagrams in Latin poetry provides us with some sort of precursor for Shapiro’s exercise. But Saussure did hold to the rule that sequence had to be maintained. Shapiro is subject to no such constraint, and is constantly amazed to discover, in what he regards as important sentences, all the characters that make up the name of Vladimir Nabokov, and sometimes Sirin as well. Such acronyms and lipograms are valid – if that word can denote a contractual recognition between author, reader and other readers – if they operate according to some system that excludes random replication of results. I astonish myself to notice that the last five words of the previous sentence form an acronym of their verdict on Shapiro’s procedure; and that of the last six, the acronym expresses a likely consequence of hypogrammatic paranoia. On alphabetical iconicism, on the V and X and W that wing their way through the Nabokovian text, Shapiro is considerably more persuasive. Maxim Shrayer’s essay on Jewish questions in Nabokov’s life and art treats a difficult subject with delicacy and tolerance; Leona Toker treats the dead without too much respect, and joins the opposition to the School of the Hereafter. Gennady Barabtarlo addresses with some success the problem that we always encounter: how to reconcile the fascination of details with any sort of schematic reading. An extremely suggestive paragraph on Nabokov’s objections to Dostoevsky leads on to Julian Connolly’s treatment of the topic. While Connolly’s discussion is largely thematic, Barabtarlo outlines the possibilities of a generic resolution of the conflict: that, as Nabokov said in his lectures, Dostoevsky was in the wrong genre: “He seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.” This is not very different from Bakhtin’s observation that Dostoevsky’s novels are Menippean satires. Maurice Couturier tries altogether too hard to squeeze Pale Fire into the mould of a novel with a “single authorial figure.” One realizes yet again the problematic nature of literary genres within the Russian tradition: that Eugene Onegin is subtitled “a novel in verse,” while War and Peace is declared by its author not to be a novel at all. Couturier’s consideration of attempts to “monologize” Pale Fire reminds me of another textual element, like ament, unmentioned by Boyd, and, as far as I know, by every other annotator of or commentator on Pale Fire. This is the name of Jakob Gradus’ maternal uncle, as revealed by Kinbote in the commentary on [end of page 103] line 17: “His father, Martin Gradus, had been a Protestant minister in Riga, but except for him and a maternal uncle (Roman Tselovalnikov, police officer and part-time member of the Social-Revolutionary party), the whole clan seems to have been in the liquor business.” Here are two obvious puns, and a more subtle one. Jakob, the nephew of Roman, invokes a ripple of Roman son of Jakob. Equally obviously, Roman Tselo is a novel that is complete, whole, integral, intact. The root tselo is present in the Russian word for kiss, tselovat’: the word is not merely imitative like English “kiss” but contains the idea of unity, of making whole. In the uncle’s name we may hear not only a complete novel but also a kissing novel, and we may understand a “kissing-novel” to be like a kissing-gate, a gate that swings within a narrow enclosure, in either position forming an unbroken fence. The OED gives a definition that is clear, illuminating, even momentarily dazzling: “a small gate swinging in a U- or V-shaped enclosure.”