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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 17.33 (Spring-Summer/printemps-été, 2000) 96-104
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-émigré. 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
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:
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, Véra 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 Véra 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.