Adam Krug's Parrot
by Michael H. Begnal
page three of three

With the exposure of what the narrative voice politely calls: "the agony of his senses," Krug's other self loses control of the depiction of events, and the perspective is jolted back into the first person. Distance is destroyed. "My hot, vulgar, heavenly delicate little puella. This is the translucent amphora which I slowly set down by the handles. This is the pink moth clinging--" (197). On the level of physical, narrative reality, the mood and the possibility of a sexual encounter are shattered by the ringing of the doorbell and the thunder of loud knocking, but as well a subliminal association has put an end to Krug's desire. The "pink moth," no matter to what part of his or Mariette's anatomy it may metaphorically refer, immediately recalls the moth which Olga returned to the orchard in his fictionalized portrait, and it looks ahead to the moth which twangs on the window screen on the last page of the novel. This particular evening is certainly not a good night for mothing, and Krug's consciousness recoils in disgust when his own metaphor brings home to him what he has almost done. Mariette is stripped of her momentary allure, pleading that they still have a second left to do "it," but soon she becomes blatantly enamored of the policeman Mac's flashlight: "reverently touching the huge leathery thing" (199). (Her crudity, funny though it is, was foreshadowed earlier at Ember's arrest when Krug's narrative voice, much more calmly, recounted the dialogue of yet another policeman and Mariette's sister Linda. "'Show the Professor that big ugly thing you carry about in your pocket, Hustav.' 'Say that again?' 'I mean your pistol of course,' said the lady stiffly" [123-124].)8

The arrest of David and Krug causes the fictionalist to shift gears completely, to grope for a structuring device which will allow him to control his mounting horror, and this he does by assuming the stance of an objective dramatist or commentator whenever he can. Thus, the appearance of Linda and her henchmen is encapsulated as: "Young woman with pistol in gloved hand; two raw youths of S. B. (Schoolboy Brigade): repulsive patches of unshaven skin and pustules, plaid wool shirts, worn loose and flapping" (198), and Mac's hearty greeting is stripped down to: "Dental display, extended palm the size of a steak for five" (199). David is here protected as a character in a play: "'I want my daddy,' he cried off stage" (201). The narrative voice exhorts itself to remain calm and aloof: "Now let us figure it out, let us look at it squarely. . . . let us proceed logically. . . . let us not imagine things, let us stick to pure reason" (203-204). The "us" here is a fusion of the two "I's" of Krug's narrative voice, since the rational and the emotional must come together to allow the description of events to proceed. The voice counsels: "Keep telling yourself that whatever they do they will not harm him," and Krug tells himself: "no, this is all wrong, hold on, I must not imagine things" (204). He will not allow himself to dissolve in fear.

Consequently, the only feasible alternative to imagining the unthinkable is to restructure what will happen, to restructure it with whatever fictional techniques are available. But events begin to move too fast for Krug's fictionalizing tricks to be anything more than a momentary stay against confusion. As he enters the prison, he maintains a distance by observing that: "had he been a character in fiction, he might well have wondered whether the strange doings and so on had not been some evil vision, and so forth" (210). The perfunctory "and so on," "and so forth," indicate that he is too alarmed to be totally up for the game, that he can no longer sit back and narrate at length. As he says, with irritation, to his first interrogator: "'You had better hurry. The nightmare may get out of control"' (213). The perspective remains in the third person, once again structured as a play when the wrong David is trotted out, and the plot moves inexorably toward the inevitable: "Unnumbered scene (belonging to one of the last acts, anyway): the spacious waiting room of a fashionable prison" (214). While Krug waits for some resolution, he reverts to the clinical, diary-like form he used before, introducing each trivial fact with precise clock time: "At 11:24 P.M. a policeman (now in uniform) stole in, looking for Crystalsen" (216).

The actual fact of David's brutal murder is something Krug cannot face directly, and so it is presented incredibly as a kind of surreal film of a scientific experiment in which the boy is attacked by a gang of sadistic psychopaths. As long as Krug can tell himself that none of this is real, he can maintain his sanity, but a close up of David begins Krug's emotional collapse. His own technique betrays him. Third person immediately becomes first: "His [David's] face became larger, dimmer, and vanished as it met mine" (223). The novelist is now hopelessly trapped in his own nightmare: "I want to wake up. Where is he? I shall die if I do not wake up" (224). Confronted by the macabre apparition of David's corpse powdered and dressed up like a doll, Krug's consciousness can take no more. The fictionalist can no longer stand back from the horror of reality, and his prose totally collapses into chaos.

Tut pocherk zhizni stanovitsa kraine nerazborchivym [here the long hand of life becomes extremely illegible]. Ochevidtzy, sredi kotorykh byl i evo vnutrennii sogliadatai [witnesses among whom was his own something or other ('inner spy'? 'private detective'? The sense is not at all clear)] potom govorili [afterwards said] shto evo prishlos' sviazat' [that he had to be tied]. Mezhdu tem [among the themes? (Perhaps: among the subjects of his dreamlike state)] (225).

The death of David has killed one half of Adam Krug as well, and the "I" of the human and emotional half of the novelist will not appear again in the few pages before the author-narrator intervenes. The remaining narrative is taken over by the observer half of Krug, who describes himself as sinking into exhaustion, before the author-narrator bestows upon Krug his liberating madness. The dualism of the two "I's" remains intact, and the rational and the emotional halves of the human consciousness can never be truly incorporated. The only sound to be heard in the darkness of the prison cell is: "the cautious crackling of a page which had been viciously crumpled and thrown into the wastebasket and was making a pitiful effort to uncrumple itself and live just a little longer" (233-234). This is the first conclusion of the novel; the observer too has realized that he can no longer go on, that there is nothing left to tell. The author-narrator will present the final moments leading to Krug's death, but he has cloaked the beating heart of Adam Krug in madness, and thus protects him from further agony. Krug has transcended the torture of reality, and it seems that he can remember nothing, is finally able to rise above memory and the past. "'Ridiculous! Same as those infantile pleasures Olga and the boy taking part in some silly theatricals, she getting drowned, he losing his life or something in a railway accident. What on earth does it matter?"' (236).

Thus it is only through art that the reader can grasp the essence of the "beating of Krug's loving heart, the torture an intense tenderness is subjected to" (viii),9 but the significance does not stop here. As Krug has composed himself in his fictionalizing, he has come to discover himself, much as did Sebastian Knight's brother V. Krug is not a hapless pawn, but instead a shaper of worlds which have come together through his own words. He deserves to be spared his own end. Krug's earlier remark about Ekwilism might here be applied to Krug's relationship to the author narrator: "the average vessels are not as simple as they appear: it is a conjuror's set and nobody, not even the enchanter himself, really knows what and how much they hold" (79). Krug ("pitcher" in German), holds multitudes.

As well, the author-narrator is not at all aloof from what Krug's life represents, since he realizes that, potentially at least, their situations are parallel. "The various parts of my comparative paradise the bedside lamp, the sleeping tablets, the glass of milk looked with perfect submission into my eyes. I knew that the immortality I had conferred on the poor fellow was a slippery sophism, a play upon words [italics mine]" (241). It is only his fictional art that enables the author-narrator to control the possibility of his own world, that allows him to contain things "with perfect submission." Having fled the Nazis from Berlin to Paris to America, Nabokov knows whereof he speaks. It is perhaps only a small step from Olga to Véra, from David to Dmitri.10 In a world filled with pain, with time, perhaps happiness can only be realized as a play upon words, and it is for this reason that Vladimir Nabokov seems intimately tied to his fictional creations. If nothing makes sense outside the mind of Adam Krug, still the truths of compassion and love can coalesce inside, within the novel that Krug has written within Bend Sinister. As he says: "'Anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past'" (10).

Michael H. Begnal is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. His books include Dreamscheme: Narrative and Voice in Finnegans Wake. He can be reached by email at mhb3@psu.edu.

8. The black humor or absurdity of a moment like this is possibly reflected in the occasional appearance of a cast iron beetle named Gregoire, used to pull off one's boots, and an obvious reference to Kafka's Gregor Samsa. Several critics have noticed it. But Nabokov's professorial comment on Kafka might be applied equally to Bend Sinister: "in 'The Metamorphosis' there is a central figure endowed with a certain amount of human pathos among grotesque, heartless characters, figures of fun or figures of horror," Lectures on Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980), pp. 253-254.

9. Ellen Pifer would not agree: "The techniques of self-declared artifice prevent us from identifying with Adam Krug and his world; we have no illusions that such an 'invented habitus' is continuous with our own reality," Nabokov and the Novel, p. 95.

10. Nabokov avoids declared political positions, but he does say this: "Let me submit, however, that I have bridged the 'esthetic distance' in my own way by means of such absolutely final indictments of Russian and German totalitarianism as my novels Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister," Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 156. Further, he wrote about Bend Sinister to an editor in 1944: "Although I do not believe in message of hope books whose intention is to solve the more or less transient problems of mankind, I do think that a certain very special quality of this book is in itself a kind of justification and redemption, at least in the case of my likes," Selected Letters 1940-1977, ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989), p. 49. Galya Diment says that Nabokov's fear that the Nazis might have seized Véra and Dmitri lies behind the novel: "I strongly suspect that it is Nabokov's own pain, caused by this particular realization, that feeds Krug's agony after the tragic loss of his wife and son," Pniad (Seattle: University of Washington Press, l997), p. 54. In the same vein, Michael Wood declares: "the pain of a child is Nabokov's dominant image of moral horror," The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 60.