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

Aesthetic strategies such as Pale Fire may inspire care, creativity, and precision; but we should not leave Nabokov's aestheticism without acknowledging its costs. Calling Nabokov's view of reading "elitist and demanding," Alexandrov cites the 1937 lecture on Pushkin in which Nabokov insisted that "the only valid method of study is to read and ponder the work itself, to discuss it with yourself but not with others, for the best reader is still the egoist who savors his discovery unbeknownst to his neighbors…. The greater the number of readers, the less a book is understood, the essence of its truth, as it spreads, seems to evaporate."40 These conversations with fictions and persons are, of course, the coductions that Booth recommends, and Power to Hurt is designed as just such a conversation with persons and stories. Nabokov, however, warns his readers away from each other. He approves of coductions with art and with oneself, but not with others. The fewer conversing about the truth of a book, the better.

In discussing books as friends, Booth decries the wary maker of a coterie who encourages us to join "a saved remnant looking down on the fools, slobs, and knaves."41 But let us temporarily set aside our egalitarian anxieties and the demographic question "How many?" in order to focus on the virtues of those readers who do, at least temporarily, join the remnant.42 Nabokov's high-handed caveat seems more comprehensible if we agree that the work of reading Pale Fire can be accomplished only by means of an alienistic performance, a purposeful "othering" of the imagination from the pragmatic and the political. Ordinary conversations with "neighbors," even about our "everyday epiphanies," can and do erode and degrade such experiences by domesticating them. Alexandrov's insights (and a rereading of Nabokov's autobiography Speak, Memory) have convinced me that Pale Fire's particular aesthetic strategy does incorporate a conviction about the presence of a transcendent realm, a partially and only momentarily accessible otherworld. But with or without an otherworld Nabokov's strategy, like other strategies of alienation, evokes the foreign, the secret, and the uncanny--as the Germans say, the Unheimlich.

No one can doubt the splendidness, the gleam of Nabokov's artistic craft. When we read Kinbote's commentary and Shade's verse, they become much more than irresponsible, self-aggrandizing scholarship and bad poetry. Insofar as the various elements of Pale Fire are the work of Nabokov, they are delightful and rewarding virtuoso performances of a certain kind. As long as we remain in the region of "Lex," the realm of words in which Gradus loses his way, we can enjoy the aesthetic pleasures of Pale Fire. If we expect Kinbote's discourse to be an explication of the poem, we are disappointed; but if we relinquish our demands for a gloss and abandon ourselves to the world of Zembla, we are gratified. If the metrical contract of Shade's poem leads us to expect a moving elegy, we may feel cheated; but if we join in the gentle mockery and listen for the jester bells, some of the best in the language, we enjoy what is in some sense Nabokov's poem rather than Shade's. Nabokov has earned, it seems, the praise that Booth reserves for extraordinary friends: "your company is superior to any company I can hope to discover among the ordinary folk with whom I live--including myself …. To dwell with you is to grow toward your quality."43

Nabokov's genius inspires a strategy that urges us toward his favored virtues and prods us out of our habituated torpor. (Often, perhaps a bit too much like Pozzo, the author seems to be calling to his reader, "On! On!") If we tire and object to Nabokov's demanding verbal genius, his ludic excesses, we risk reducing ourselves to the level of the Russians in Kinbote's Zemblan fantasy: stupid, to-talitarian literalists who tear the palace apart looking for jewels that are fictional constructs, not real gems. If we ask, "Where would Nabokov have seen such gems?" or "How do diamonds function in a late-capitalist consumer economy?" we "Kinbote" the novel and completely miss Nabokov's discrete performance. Nabokov's index is, among other things, a maze to discourage and frustrate the predatory virtues of a Kinbote or a Humbert. If we are foolish enough, for example, to search for the crown jewels by using the index's directions about the whereabouts of the words "crown jewels," we will be led on a fruitless, perplexing, page-turning quest. We can never find the actual faceted crystals, nor the power they represent, for we are in the bailiwick of the aesthetic imagination, the region of Lex. Nabokov sets about to gull the generalizing reader who does not catch on to the author's peculiar kind of inventiveness; he prevents, in the process, our materialist rush from word to world to word. Nabokov's fiction brings not information, in Percy's sense, but news--"radical, subversive, antirealistic news," as Dale Peterson says.44 Nabokov, I think, takes great comfort in that news, and in knowing that his metaphorical patterns can never be put wholly in the service of repressive political patterns. He has taken care not to propose a counterideology--that is for pedestrian mythmakers such as John Shade--but, instead, he offers a sequestered performance with teasingly public enticements and invitations to participate. Pale Fire is a splendidly insincere reminder that all ideologies suppress the daemonic deceit proper to aesthetic strategies of alienation.

40. Vladimir Nabokov, "Pushkin; or, the Real and the Plausible (1937)," trans. Dmitri Nabokov, New York Review of Books, 31 Mar. 1988, p. 41, quoted by Alexandrov in Nabokov's Otherworld, p. 11, my emphasis.

41. Wayne Booth, "'The Way I Loved George Eliot': Friendship with Books, a Neglected Critical Metaphor," Kenyon Review n.s. 2 (Spring 1980), p. 27.

42. We may well want to ask, Under what social arrangements might more people have the opportunity to enjoy the sort of companionship offered by Nabokov? What reformations in the realm of politics and education would allow more than an elite group of readers to practice "precision-and-creativity," the signature Nabokovian virtue? Such questions about political and social arrangements are timely and crucial. As a literary critic I do not feel qualified to address those questions here, except to say, If we value those virtues, we should do what we can to encourage persons to read Nabokovian works with care, empathy, and joy.

43. Booth, "'The Way I Loved George Eliot,'" p. 27.

44. Peterson, "Nabokov's Invitation," p. 834.