I, X Does Not Equal Nabokov
by Maurice Couturier
page three of three

This episode is important for understanding Nabokov's last novel, Look at the Harlequins!, written at the time when the author was in conflict with Field. The novel presents itself as the autobiography of a writer whose real name is never given in the book, even if, with one of the characters, we are tempted to call him Vadim McNab. His works are listed at the beginning as if the novel were a genuine autobiography. The titles strangely resemble those of Nabokov's own novels: Pawn Takes Queen (1927) is reminiscent of King, Queen, Knave (1928), Plenilune, allegedly published in Russian in 1929, of Pale Fire, published in English in 1962, and Camera Lucida (Slaughter in the Sun), supposedly published in 1931, of Camera Obscura (Laughter in the Dark), published 1932, etc… The link between McNab's and Nabokov's novels is not always of the same nature. Judging from the title, Pawn Takes Queen is a rewriting of Nabokov's novel but with a happy ending, the pawn (the knave) finally eliminating the king and taking the queen, whereas in the "original," fate eliminates the queen after saving the king's life at the last minute.

The narrator of Look at the Harlequins! gradually becomes aware of the similarities between his books and those of a well-known author. Oksman, a Russian librarian and book-seller whom Vadim visits in order to find a secretary, confuses his Camera Lucida with Nabokov's Camera Obscura, and his Tamara with Nabokov's Machenka.27 McNab begins to wonder whether he is not impersonating a more famous writer; at the end of the previous chapter, after explaining how he had overheard someone on the phone talking about somebody else's madness, he says:

I now confess that I was bothered that night, and the next and some time before, by a dream feeling that my life was the non-identical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man's life, somewhere on this or another earth. A demon, I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man, that other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier, and crueler than your obedient servant.28

In order to free himself from this madness and to foil fate's pranks, McNab wonders whether he should not totally recompose his life:

Should I ignore the coincidence and its implications? Should I, on the contrary, repattern my entire life? Should I abandon my art, choose another line of achievement, take up chess seriously, or become, say, a lepidopterist, or spend a dozen years as an obscure scholar making a Russian translation of Paradise Lost that would cause hacks to shy and asses to kick? But only the writing of fiction, the endless re-creation of my fluid self could keep me more or less sane. All I did finally was drop my pen name, the rather cloying and somehow misleading "V. Irisin" (of which my Iris herself used to say that it sounded as if I were a villa), and revert to my own family name.29

In Look at the Harlequins!, the distance between narrator and author turns out to be comparatively small, though McNab is obviously less talented than his creator, whom he is desperately trying to defeat or free himself from. At the end of a long and successful career as a novelist, Nabokov, like McNab, seems to be reviewing his printed books with a sense of Unheimliche, realizing that he has scattered fragments of his personal story and identity throughout his books and fed millions of readers with his own flesh and blood. Looking back on his books and the interpretations of them offered by critics and scholars, he seems to be arguing that the man Nabokov should not be considered simply the sum of his works, especially as distorted by commentators. After having fictionalized his Russian childhood and his career as a Russian expatriate living in Europe in Conclusive Evidence, Nabokov finally invents a puppet which, Frankenstein-like, tries to impersonate him, and he haughtily asserts his authority over him, as if he were trying to dig up the existential core of his being after recklessly scavenging from it to distribute bits of it to his characters. His two or three exiles, his passionate nostalgia for his idyllic Russian childhood, and the senseless rewriting of own past by an unscrupulous biographer eventually made it difficult for him to separate the reality of his own life from the fiction of his characters' lives, a drama which he had metaphorically represented in The Defense, in which the chess maestro Luzhin confuses the real world with a colossal chess game, committing suicide by leaping from an open window into a chessboard-like world outside. Nabokov told Katharine A. White about his switch from Russian to English: "I think I have told you more than once what agony it was, in the early 'forties, to switch from Russian to English. After going through that atrocious metamorphosis, I swore I would never go back from my wizened Hyde form to my ample Jekyll one."30 In both cases, he was putting himself in the shoes of a fictional character. After moving so many times and scattering bits of his own past among his various characters, he seems to have felt partly dispossessed of his own life and identity. It is this poignant nostalgia as well as this stubborn attempt to reclaim a lost past which give the reader the impression of being somehow in contact with the authorial figure in his final published novel: the author's desire seeps constantly through the homodiegetic narrator's words, at times poetic and at others seemingly mad.

Is it possible to discuss Look at the Harlequins! without making any reference to Nabokov and his other novels? It may be, but no critic, to the best of my knowledge, has attempted to do so. Nabokov is a bona fide character, the better known writer, in this novel, and the narrator is fighting bitterly against him, like Lucifer struggling against God in Milton's Paradise Lost. Even though he never walks onto the stage of the novel, as he does in King, Queen, Knave and Pnin, he serves as a counter model to the narrator who, though not without talent, is not in the same league as Nabokov. The struggle between author and narrator constitutes one of the mainsprings of this surprising novel; whoever chooses to ignore this conflict is condemned to misread the book. In this instance Nabokov, who claimed as Proust did that the author's life is of no account and that only his writing is important, compelled his readers to take his own life into consideration. Look at the Harlequins! constitutes a kind of allegory on the theme of "the return of the author"; it is as if Nabokov, fearing near the end of his life that his subtle endeavors to absent himself from his texts might induce his readers to consider him an impostor or a pure fiction, had come back on stage for the last time to show that he was a real person. In this case, the authorial figure comes out as a result of the conflict between the real author and the fictional narrator, a conflict arbitrated by the reader familiar with Nabokov's life and with his earlier novels. Nabokov encourages us to practice a Sainte-Beuvian variety of criticism even as we celebrate the author's death, thus placing us in a highly paradoxical situation.

27. Look at the Harlequins! (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 92 and p. 93.

28. Ibid., p. 89.

29. Ibid., p. 97.

30. Selected Letters, p. 149.