JM: Taking an appreciative excerption, I chose:
The complexity of
Nabokov's oeuvre reaches far beyond the playful invention of anagrammatic names,
tortuous narrative structures, and instances of amusing paronomasia, all of
which had occupied a central role in Nabokov studies up until recently. In my
view, the metaliterary approach to Nabokov's fiction is erroneous because it
refuses to take into consideration the author's deeply held conviction in
metaphysics and his capacity to an aesthetically heightened visionary state of
consciousness...The author’s sui generis faith in the
metaphysical allowed him to establish a perceptible link between two ore more
worlds, reinforcing the view that the “otherworld” is never a self-contained
realm detached from present reality. It never supplants the real world but
exists as an alternative for the dissonance of the real world, offering an exit
from the darkness of one universe and entrance to the brilliance of another
one. R.Sárdi*
........................................................................................................................
Excerpts from AN APPROACH TO VLADIMIR
NABOKOV'S "OTHERWORLD" by Rudolf Sárdi
While the Nabokovian text seems to
offer a bewildering variety of readings even today, it is the pervasive concept
of the "otherworld" that has stimulated the most intense discussion among
scholars in recent years. The claim that any single critical school can
ever hope to capture all the aspects of the author's fiction may sound
preposterous to the trained ear, and yet there seems to be a mutual
agreement among scholars that the "otherworld" has evolved into a major
repository of all the thematic dominants that had been formerly identified
in connection with his texts.[...]Pierre Delalande, the imaginary
philosopher of The Gift (and perhaps the only philosopher whose
postulations the author unconditionally accepted) also reinforces this view by
stating that "the otherworld surrounds us always and is not at all at the
end of some pilgrimage" (NABOKOV, 1991, 321-322).[...]the author's attempts to
unify these two universes during moments of spiritual revelations
that Nabokov described as "aesthetic bliss" (NABOKOV, 2000, 305).[...]Véra
Nabokova was the first to call attention to the formerly overlooked notion of
the "otherworld". She made the following observation in the preface to Nabokov's
posthumously published Verses (1979, 3): I would like to call the reader
to a key undercurrent in Nabokov's work, which permeates all that he has written
and characterizes it like a kind of watermark. I am speaking of a strange
otherworldliness, the "hereafter" (potustoronnost'), as he himself called it in
his last poem, "Being in Love".[...] Early critics of Nabokov's work viewed his
fictional universes as hermetic, as arcane self-referential systems designed as
metaliterary manifestos (MEYER, 1994, 326). Today it seems that nothing could be
further
from the truth, and the critics who obdurately ventured in the
metaliterary direction were on the wrong scent. [...] To the questions whether
he was a hidden god, a mystifier, an incorrigible leg-puller, or a literary
agent provocateur, I would unhesitatingly reply in the affirmative. Of course,
none of these attributes can be rejected when the author's works are subjected
to critical scrutiny. Although Nabokov's originality, power of language,
artistic deceitfulness, and the involutions of his works do not make up the
whole of his art, they undoubtedly constitute a significant part of it.
Nevertheless, the one-sided view one is to vehemently reject is the
propensity of looking at Nabokov as merely a brilliant but shallow artist,
who fails to take notice of universal human issues: a stylist whose audacious
style calls attention as much to itself as to what it means to convey (PARKER,
1987, 17).[...] Instead of making his voice clearly identifiable, he employs
several forms of authorial self-encodement, most of which are shining examples
of how the author "drops in" his fictional world but only makes himself visible
for the most perceptive of readers [...] Therefore it is an
oversimplification to assume that Nabokov's treatment of the "otherworld" is
attributable to the fact that he was an exile himself. If exiles are ubiquitous
as they are in his fictional world, it is not because he had been twice
uprooted, but because the acute state of dislocation offers ideal conditions for
contemplation on the individual, who is forced to confront past, present, and
future, self and setting (PARKER, 1987, 10).
[...]Nabokov aptly maintained
that the conception of a fictional world is not dependent on the author's life
course as it were, but "the transrational awareness of the existence of other
worlds outside mundane reality carries more significance" (quoted in SHRAYER,
1999, 18).[...]The reader may well have identified by now the underlying
philosophical current of Nabokov's worlds by seeing the echo of that true,
otherworldly reality as resemblance to the model of the universe portrayed by
Neo-Platonism. Knowing how much Nabokov abhorred to hear about classification
and literary influences, I would not even try to establish a close kinship
between his art and any twentieth-century literary or philosophical currents. It
has been convincingly demonstrated that Nabokov seemed to have stronger
affinities with the nineteenth century than with the twentieth[...] It is a
widely accepted view today to think of Nabokov as a Romantic in the Platonic
tradition. He once stated that: I am afraid to get mixed up with Plato
whom I do not care for, but I do think that in my case it is true that the
entire book, before it is written, seems to be ready in some other, now
transparent, now dimming, dimension, and my job is to take down as much of it as
I can make out and as precisely as I am humanly able to. Consequently, we can
conclude that Nabokov's art grows out of Romanticism, because he viewed this
world as a pale reflection of the otherworld. The many varieties of doublings,
mirrorings, and inversions appear to be a key organizing principle of his
fiction, connecting worlds and worlds apart: our reality and realities beyond
human consciousness.[...] In fact, Nabokov conceived of this otherworldliness as
something he could not openly share with his readers. In "Fame", a poem from
1942, Nabokov awakened his readers' interest by writing: But one day while
disrupting the strata of sense/ and descending deep down to my wellspring/ I saw
mirrored, besides my own self and the world,/ something else, something
else, something else. (NABOKOV, 1970, 11; quoted in SISSON, 1994)
In an article about soccer from the London
Times (September 20, 1993) Nabokov appeared as “one of history’s great goalies”
and is quoted: “I was less the keeper of a goal than the keeper of a secret”
(STRINGER-HYE, 2008) [...] God’s existence, art, and language for Nabokov were
all obscure phenomena whose understanding lies beyond general human
perception.
Characters partaking of otherworldly experiences in Nabokov’s
fiction do not submerge into the realm of the “beyond” through death. In his
fiction, dying provides no clearly defined passage to the land of the deceased
[...] “The Return of Chorb” (1925) is an emblematic text that points
toward the author’s preoccupation with the idealized realm of the “otherworld”
and his lifelong desire to recapture past in memory [...] Nabokov’s idea of
presenting a world beyond human consciousness is in line with the Gnostic view
of regarding the world of matter as something fallen and that all humans are
divine souls incarcerated in a material world. Consequently,[...] the
otherworldly as a theme functions as the antithesis of a nightmarish locus,
often epitomized by the “horrible here” (NABOKOV, 1989, 93), a pale reflection,
or rather, the imperfect imitation of a world attainable only for a few elects
[...]