'Lords and Owners': Nabokov's Sequestered Imagination
by William Monroe
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Nabokov would agree with those materialist critics who assert that ordinary, conventional art cannot escape the determinations of its historical moment. Most examples of artistic practice are contaminated by intercourse with a world whose facticity is often brutal, corrupt, and infectious. So it is not a simple matter of art versus reality; the distinction that Nabokov presses is between that which is heavy, wooden, and glandular and that which is "worthwhile art." As Nabokov says in the introduction to Poems and Problems, "chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity."28 Tanner explains how Nabokov stylistically associates the quotidian world with a Gradus-like art: "It is worth noting that when Nabokov/Kinbote is describing the behaviour of Gradus he does so in a style which is minutely factual and detailed. . . . By itemizing his meals, his newspaper, his bowel movements, Nabokov emphasizes the utter physicality of the man--a thing among things--and it seems clear that Nabokov is at the same time offering a low parody of realism and naturalism, as though to demonstrate that such a style is only appropriate for creatures immersed so deeply and mindlessly in the realm of fact.29 This enculturated world threatens the aesthetic bliss of the independent, alienistic imagination. Hence the need for complex, reflexive texts such as Pale Fire, decentering empuzzlements that invite the processing critic and the naturalizing reader to a heterogeneous, exotic, and necessarily frustrating performance.

Even if his com-positional style is a "grade" above naturalism and social realism, Shade too immerses himself in the material world, a world that is the "filthy" realm of politics and murder. The readerly virtues needed to perform Shade's poem are therefore distinct from those needed to perform Nabokov's novel. Shade's error, a crude "combinational" one, is suggested by the penultimate stanza of "Pale Fire":

I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight.
(ll. 970-73)

And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line.
(ll. 974-76)

Nabokov does not make the same mistake. He has created a novel that ambushes routines and rubrics before they can settle in and take over. His multiplicitous patchwork prevents readers from appropriating Pale Fire for their worldly projects, Kinbote-style. In his foreword Kinbote suggests that we read his notations first "and then study the poem with their help," perhaps rereading the notes a third time "so as to complete the picture" (p. 18). Certainly Nabokov does not want us to take anything attributable to Kinbote at face value, but here as elsewhere Kinbote is right for the wrong reason: we might as well start with the notes. Or we could read only the poem without consulting the notes at all. Or we could even start with the index. Kinbote's suggestion that we buy two copies and shuffle the cut pages is another indication of his shameless self-promotion, but it aptly raises the question of how readers should proceed with their imaginative cutting and pasting. Perhaps the game has no objective or even any rules of play. Pale Fire is troubling but not, as Rabinowitz argues, because it "raises difficult philosophical questions, as The Brothers Karamazov does; it is rather that we can't tell precisely what issues the novel does address … [or] what questions it is asking, what solutions it is proposing."30 These uncertainties, I am convinced, are designed to make it impossible for the sluggish reader, thick with cultural categories and preconceptions, to "get" the text in the same way Gradus gets Shade and Kinbote gets the poem. Nabokov uses discordant, competing genres and precomputer "hypertext" as part of his alienistic strategy to check the recruiting, "overstanding" assaults of the ordinary and the utilitarian.

How, then, should we as readers enact his aesthetic strategy of alienation? To what kind of performance does Nabokov call us? The author provides several models of imagination in Pale Fire: Kinbote, the critic who thinks that "Pale Fire" is about his psychotic imaginings; Shade, the poet who makes a versified spiritual autobiography; and Gradus, who is so immersed in the world of banal commonsense that he has no imaginative life whatsoever. But there is at least one other model of the imagination--the one represented by Nabokov himself. Readers of the novel should use Pale Fire to achieve epiphanies like those Nabokov describes in Speak, Memory." 31 As Alexandrov says, Nabokov's "irrational standards," the virtues he would cultivate in the performing reader, "turn out to be a form of maximally enhanced consciousness."32 One cannot help but recall Pater's celebration of the imagination burning with a "hard, gem-like flame."33 Only in such intense and inventive states--"so different from commonsense and logic"--do we "know the world to be good," according to Nabokov.34 Alexandrov underlines the point: for Nabokov, commonsense "typifies all that is gray, tepid, and banal"; the aestheticist performer should avoid "accepted, conventional, and therefore stultifying literary prescriptions" in favor of the "freakish" and "irrational," while discovering "secret connections" within lexical patterns and figures of speech.35 Imagination, that special quality extolled by Carlyle and Coleridge as well as the German Romantics, should have no truck with what Nabokov depreciates as "those farcical and fraudulent characters called Facts."36

If we don the mask, put on the Nabokovian ethos, it becomes more difficult to denounce Kinbote for the capriciousness of his glosses on Shade's poem. We must remember, however, that the virtues of Nabokov are not identical with the virtues of Kinbote. In addition to inventiveness, there are other virtues required for a Nabokovian performance: care, delicacy, patience, receptivity, in a word, precision. Precision is as important as creativity. Indeed, just as he equates artifice and nature, Nabokov would see precision and creativity not as different virtues but as alternative manifestations of the same virtue. "Precision in all things," as Alexandrov says, "is an essential virtue that Nabokov imposes on his readers"; and precision does not cohabitate with lazy estimations or indulgent theorizing.37 For Nabokov, reading is fraught with care. His readers need to be patient and vigilant as well as playful and inventive--Kinbote is the latter but not the former. Access to Nabokov's potustoronnost, the otherworld, the underlying desire of Kinbote as well as Shade, demands artful precision as well as resplendent creativity.

Since no certainties are possible regarding this other realm, Nabokov would say that simple correspondences, autobiographical explanations, and materialistic formulas are all reductive and misleading. Potustoronnost literally means the "other side," according to Alexandrov, and its primary virtue is "irreducible alterity."38 Hence for Nabokov the construction and reconstruction of aesthetic performances takes on the utmost ethical importance. Those enactions are the very exercise of otherworldly powers, the ephemeral and strenuous unconcealing of creativity itself at work. Those who read carefully, precisely, and vigilantly, whether reading events or texts, are saved; those who read stupidly, slothfully, and theoretically are damned. He often associates criminals and murderers with the "moronic," the lazy, and the imprecise. Inferior readers, or performers as we are calling them, depend on encompassing theories and convenient systems, common categories and "step-saving" clichés. Because the true aesthetic performance, at least for Nabokov, partakes of a realm that is persistently unassimilable, it cannot be captured by general categories and conventional modes--not by writers and not by readers: "The main favor I ask of a serious critic is sufficient perceptiveness to understand that whatever term or trope I use, my purpose is not to be facetiously flashy or grotesquely obscure but to express what I feel and think with the utmost truthfulness and [precision]."39 In other words, performing Nabokovian strategies requires Nabokovian virtues: the combining of work with play, tough precision tempering high-spirited inventiveness, imagination continually checking predatory inclinations. These are the salient virtues of Pale Fire, and it calls for similarly complex and labor-intensive virtues in its performers.

28. Vladimir Nabokov, Poems and Problems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), p. 15.

29. Tanner, City of Words, p. 37.

30. Rabinowitz, Truth in Fiction, p. 139.

31. See, for example, Nabokov's description of a sense of "timelessness" standing "among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern--to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal." Speak, Memory, p. 139.

32. Alexandrov, Nabokov's Otherworld, p. 54.

33. Walter Pater, "The Renaissance," Walter Pater: Three Major Texts (The Renaissance, Appreciations, and Imaginary Portraits), ed. William E. Buckler (New York: New York University Press, 1986), p. 219.

34. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, p. 374.

35. Alexandrov, Nabokov's Otherworld, p. 53.

36. Nabokov, "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," Lectures on Literature, pp. 372-73.

37. Alexandrov, Nabokov's Otherworld, p. 5.

38. Ibid., pp. 3, 5.

39. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, p. 179. Alexandrov quotes this passage and suggests in his note that its ending as published, "utmost truthfulness and perception," must have been a misprint. Obviously for my purposes, it is advantageous to accept Alexandrov's reconstruction over the published "misprint." Alexandrov, Nabokov's Otherworld, pp. 11, 236.