'Lords and Owners': Nabokov's Sequestered Imagination
by William Monroe
page two of five

Nabokov would agree with Carlyle that the heroic artist participates in something transcendent and unenculturated, that culture's understanding--its system of domination and control--cannot contain works of a sequestered imagination. And certainly Nabokov's ingenious literary performances are directed to "parts" of the mind, as the German Romantics would say, that are adamantly unconcerned with the worldly tasks of predicting, calculating, accommodating, and negotiating. As a consequence, Nabokov's fiction, according to Dale Peterson, has the capacity to "liberate present and future victims from the drab prison houses of authoritarian language."12 Ellen Pifer argues that Pale Fire's "self-conscious design will have a liberating effect on the reader, as the patterns of artifice provide a perspective on reality that both reveals and transcends the narrow perception of a Kinbote."13 If Peterson and Pifer are right, and I think they are, then that perspective is presumably made possible by the functioning of an independent aestheticist imagination. Pale Fire resists being incorporated into the political economy by discouraging us from apprehending the text with our culturally determined modes of interpretation; it retards Culler's "unseemly rush from word to world." To be sure, the novel reminds us that our ordinary methods of reading, our assimilative attempts at naturalization, are usually predatory instances of "overstanding"; but Nabokov's strange work implies, by indirection, that there may be another way. Pale Fire appeals not to our capacity for calculation and appropriation, but to a more artistic and "final," less mediated and instrumental faculty.

The most deadening example of the wrong way to "apprehend" art is exemplified by Gradus, the killer of Nabokov's poet.14 Gradus represents the material world: joyless, quotidian, grave. Like one of those "clumsy and gloomy" members of the political world's ubiquitous shooting squads, he is stubborn, relentless, and unleavened. As Tony Tanner says, "Gradus is representative of all that is utterly inimical and hostile to art and imagination."15 He is guilty, as Kinbote's index to the poem tells us, of "lynching the wrong people."16 But if Nabokov creates Gradus to be the nemesis of art's provocative "gleam," he might also be considered representative of Nabokov's professional opponents: Marxist and other historical-materialist critics who are motivated by partisan agendas. Gradus has numerous aliases and manifestations--"Jack Degree, de Grey, d'Argus, Vinogradus, Leningradus"--and he has been sent by the Shadows, a "regicidal organization" of bloody Zemblan revolutionaries (pp. 217, 223). In the index under "Sudarg of Bokay," Zemblan mirror-maker, we are given the rather ominous news that this palindromic reflection of Jacob Gradus has a "life span not known" (p.223). Gradus, then, is violent, jealous of power, polytropic, persistent, and ubiquitous: the oppressions of culture are everywhere.17 He represents the common world, the "communal eye," and also, almost certainly, literature's social realists--contemporaries of Nabokov who harried him with their particular mode of materialist criticism.

It seems clear, then, that the greatest threat to the sequestered imagination is Gradus. Yet Nabokov also creates the parasitic critic, Kinbote-Sybil Shade calls him "King Bot"18-whose relentless scholarly apparatus and vested motives consume and assimilate John Shade's poem even as Gradus destroys the man. Kinbote, like institutionalized economic power, functions to take, to consume, to colonize, to own. Kinbote attempts to make Shade an implement of his own predatory con-sciousness and to use the poem as a means of fabricating structural preferments for his interests and fantasies. Kinbote's "use" of Shade and his poem thus serves as a negative model of culture's intellectually legitimated suppression and domination of the other.

Kinbote protests his personal devotion to his neighbor and "friend" repeatedly, but his affection for Shade, on examination, is nothing more than jealous possessiveness. When Shade is killed by a bullet meant for Kinbote (at least on one narrative level), his depiction of the incident in a "note" to line 1,000 of Shade's poem betrays Kinbote's egocentrism: "[Shade's] presence behind me abruptly failing me caused me to lose my balance . . . . My coccyx and right wrist hurt badly but the poem was safe. John, though, lay prone on the ground, with a red spot on his white shirt" (p. 208). To the envying and exploitative reader-critic, the fact that the poet has died is of little consequence; the poem, the property, is safe. Kinbote has yet to take full possession of it, but presently will by a blatant act of appropriation and commodification. Gradus kills the poet and Kinbote takes his poem. Both represent the machinations of culture.

The story of Zembla is the one Kinbote wants to see inscribed and perpetuated, and he has attempted during the period of composition to influence Shade to write an elaborate verse history of the Zemblan revolution and the escape and expatriation of its monarch, Charles the Beloved. Rightly or wrongly, Kinbote believes that he is in fact the exiled King Charles. (We cannot know from textual evidence whether Kinbote is right or wrong--Nabokov does not provide enough clues for us to decipher the direction of influence, thereby frustrating our inclination to neatly package, once and for all, his performance.) At any rate, Kinbote is incensed to find that Shade has not written the Zemblan saga, but a story of his own:

I started to read the poem. I read faster and faster. I sped through it, snarling, as a furious young heir through an old deceiver's testament. Where was Zembla the Fair? Where her spine of mountains? Where her long thrill through the mist? And my lovely flower boys, and the spectrum of the stained windows, and the Black Rose Paladubs, and the whole marvelous tale? Nothing of it was there! The complex contribution I had been pressing upon him with a hypnotist's patience and a lover's urge was simply not there. Oh, but I cannot express the agony! (p. 209)

Nowhere is Kinbote, as the critic bent on making a text his or her own, more reflective of the process of cultural containment than when he likens Shade's poem to "a fickle young creature who has been stolen and brutally enjoyed by a black giant but now again is safe in our hall and park, whistling with the stableboys, swimming with the tame seal." The poem has become for Kinbote a helpless young catamite that has been free of his exploitation for a time but is now back under his dominating influence: "The spot still hurts, it must hurt, but with strange gratitude we kiss those heavy wet eyelids and caress that polluted flesh" (p. 210). Thus Nabokov likens Kinbote's "use" of the poem to an adult's sexual abuse of a helpless ward-conceived by Kinbote, revealingly, as a "creature."

Despite Kinbote's appetitive exploitation of poem and poet, Frank Kermode is right to salvage Nabokov's sympathy for him. After all, Nabokov himself had recently played Kinbote to Pushkin by translating, with the same parasitical apparatus of scholarly notes and commentary, the great Russian poet's Eugene Onegin.19 And Nabokov realizes--perhaps he learned the lesson only too well from his Pushkin exercise--that scholarship unleashed on hapless texts is inevitably a process of domination and control. Like Derrida in his celebrated debate with Foucault, Nabokov acknowledges his own participation in those processes of culture that oppress and enslave.20 Ultimately, however, Kinbote's similarity to Nabokov rests not on his literary scholarship but on his inventive-ness, not on the crimes he commits against Shade's "Pale Fire" but on his ability to escape to "other states of being . . . where art is the norm"--Nabokov's famous definition of aesthetic bliss: "For me," he says in an afterword to Lolita, "a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."21 Like many others, Kermode sees this passage as one of crucial Nabokovian self-definition, and he argues that Kinbote's obsession is actually a state of being where art is indeed the norm.22 "One should not disregard … a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention," Shade says, defending a minor character who thinks he has become God (p. 169). Shade's endorsement of creativity might well constitute a Nabokovian defense of Kinbote. "The author has to show us," Kermode says, "that Kinbote's activity is the model of his own."23

But what are the costs of such brilliant aesthetic contraptions, of stepping outside the world of power politics and marketplace repressions? Nabokov may succeed in demonizing Kinbote and then "resympathizing" him, but to do so he must strenuously enforce a distinction between the inventing imagination and the quotidian world. There have been various critical debates about whether Shade creates Kinbote or Kinbote Shade, but how do such puzzles reveal Nabokov's resistance to appropriation and the costs of that alienistic strategy? The question is, How far is Nabokov willing to go to ensure that the literary imagination will not be contaminated by the mundane?

12. Dale E. Peterson, "Nabokov's Invitation: Literature as Execution," PMLA, 96 (1981), p. 834.

13. Ellen Pifer, Nabokov and the Novel (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 118.

14. At this point it might be worth reminding ourselves that virtue criticism, as described in part 1, posits literary characters not as flesh-and-blood human beings but as strategies that are manifested through the performance of particular characteristics and virtues. Thus to say that Gradus "is" relentless or quotidian is to ascribe those particular virtues to the character of Gradus, whether he is considered a product of Kinbote's bedeviled imagination or Nabokov's ingenious one. For virtue criticism it does not matter whether an ethos is flesh-and-blood. Similarly, the "ethical value of the stories we tell each other," as Booth says, does not depend on "whether or not they in fact claim to depict actual events." The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 15; see also pp. 3-22.

15. Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 37.

16. Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 217. Subsequent references will be given in the text.

17. "Freudian faith has dangerous ethical consequences," Nabokov once said, "as when a filthy murderer with the brain of a tapeworm is given a lighter sentence because his mother spanked him too much or too little …" Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 116.

18. A "bot" is the larval form of the parasitic botfly. In the following passage Richard Selzer narrates the encounter of a surgeon with Kinbote's namesake: "No explorer ever stared in wilder surmise than I into that crater from which there now emerges a narrow gray head whose sole distinguishing feature is a pair of black pincers. The head sits atop a longish flexible neck arching now this way, now that, testing the air. Alternately it folds back upon itself, then advances in new boldness. And all the while, with dreadful rhythmicity, the unspeakable pincers open and close. . . A Mayan devil, I think, that would soon burst free to fly about the room, with horrid blanket-wings and iridescent scales, raking, pinching, injecting God knows what acid juice." Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery (New York: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1987), p. 20. Nabokov has chosen particularly terrifying creature to signify the "critic as parasite."

19. Frank Kermode, "Zemblances," New Statesman, 9 Nov. 1962, p. 671.

20. For the debate, see Edward Said, "Criticism between Culture and System," The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 178-225.

21. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1955), pp. 316-17.

22. Kermode, "Zemblances," p. 672.

23. Ibid., p. 671.