camera obscura and laughter in the dark

Camera Obscura and Laughter in the Dark,
or, The Confusion of Texts
by Christine Raguet-Bouvart
translated from the French by Jeff Edmunds
page two of three

At this stage, complicity cannot fail to arise between the reader and the author with respect to the text, because once completed, a tale is inscribed on paper as on a tombstone. For the author the text is in effect dead once the creative act, which is an act of life, has ended: all is done and the relay must be taken up by the reader. It is the reader who will bring the text back to life even while leading it towards death, since as one reads one approaches death: of the hero, of the tale, and of the text. To prevent the death of the words, an additional intervention is necessary, generally carried out by the reader: here, it will be carried out by the author, who rewrites his text to breathe new life into it, or by the translator, who reproduces the text in a new language so as to open it up to potential new readers. But what counts for the reader is not "the abridged version of a man's life," or more simply knowing the end of the story, but the act of uncovering its details: "detail is always welcome." As in life--and reading is effectively an act of life--everyone knows the end of the story, and what motivates existence is not the desire to know this end, but the pleasure of each moment: this is what I would call the struggle against death. Reading must therefore be hedonistic, rather than informative, in nature, and it is precisely this which justifies the retranslation-rewriting of Camera Obscura into Laughter in the Dark. In this way, Nabokov ushers his text into a new life, and he himself, already the translator of English texts into French and Russian, and of one of his Russian novels into English,13 begins a new life: that of an English writer.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master-that's all.'14

This time the question arises of knowing which words will gain the upper hand and how: whether they will acquire total autonomy with respect to their author and take on the meaning that the reader is disposed to give them, or whether, rather, the author will succeed in imposing his own meaning. The fact remains that Nabokov wrote Laughter in the Dark because the combination signifier-signified Camera Obscura did not correspond to his conception of it and because he wanted it to be impossible for an external will to impose a different sense or sound upon the text. But to combat the power of the words, the author-translator needs to ally himself with the author-reader.Within this approach the act of transstylization will be effected, by means of which Nabokov will carry out a change in style within the same language-English-with the intent of improving the style of the novel itself. This is a matter of aesthetic enrichment, of creating a new enunciation, which, beginning from a base text, will lead to a new series of incarnations.15 Having arrived at a definitive and final phase, however, we cannot content ourselves with viewing the textual corrections as simple variants of an original, but as a replacement, since the reader will note that in this new English version entire sections of text have disappeared and new sections have appeared. We might mention Robert Scholes, who (also referring to Humpty Dumpty) presents the reading-writing relationship as a rhetorical form. Usually definable as the bringing into play by a prose-writer of every means of expression at his disposal to persuade his interlocutor, the term 'rhetoric' can also be applied, according to Scholes, to the practice of reading insofar as it constitutes an exchange around a text.

Under the heading of rhetoric, we shall consider reading as a textual economy, in which pleasure and power are exchanged between producers and consumers of texts, always remembering that writers must consume in order to produce and that readers must produce in order to consume.16

The unusual association of pleasure and power in this reciprocal relationship between the producer and the consumer serves to remind us that power of an economic order is equivalent, in textual terms, to aesthetic pleasure. In becoming aware of the productive force of words, the author-translator must be able to draw nourishment from this power in the same way as does his alter ego, the author-reader, who, in reading critically, must not limit himself to a simple undertaking of systematic demolition. Besides, even though Nabokov deplored Winifred Roy's translation, his reading of it did not cause him to reject Roy's exposition in its totality; his reading was selective, as evidenced by the fact that he chose to retain certain of the modifications that the translator had taken the liberty of imposing on the original. Despite everything, this critical reading caused Winifred Roy's text to disappear forever from the market and thus led it to death, for lack of readers.

Furthermore, in Scholes' remark we find the notion of pleasure as Nabokov poses it to the reader in the second paragraph of the novel, like an invitation to join the author in this narrative introduced like a fairy tale. A fairy tale can of course be told an infinite number of times without the pleasure's ever becoming blunted. Nabokov permits himself this freedom. And yet, in revealing from the outset his choice to the reader, even while urging him to follow and thus to enter into this author-reader-translator game, he does not entrust the reader with the role of creator. In an interview granted to Alvin Toffler in 1963,17 he emphasized that writer and reader partake of the same bliss in the face of a successful text and that the reader's gratitude is analogous to the writer's satisfaction. Reader and writer thus find themselves in a relationship of interdependence, wherein the reader places himself in a position of submission towards a benefactor to whom he is indebted and wherein the author is the master of words, which, as they are read, take on the meaning assigned to them (by him) once and for all. Nabokov's very ambiguous statement does not encourage a reading of Laughter in the Dark, but makes a case rather for Camera Obscura if, in the precise case we are studying, the exchange had not in fact already taken place.

Nevertheless, this is almost what occurred in France where, between 1934 and 1992, the sole existing translation was Doussia Ergaz's translation of the Russian text, as if the latter were the only recognized text, and as if it would be pointless to translate an identically written English version of it. Moreover, my honesty as a translator would have been immediately called into question, for why accept the task of retranslating an already translated text whose quality is agreed upon by everyone? And what interest could I have in translating a translation, if I considered the Russian text the original? None of these arguments is valid, however, since the Russian text was indeed translated into English one day, and a new English text replaced this translation. The new text, despite the statements of certain journalists or critics (and even, at times, of Nabokov himself18), cannot be considered the translation of Kamera obskura but must be read as a re-creation in English. This is, in fact, what Nabokov implied elsewhere:

I switched to English after convincing myself on the strength of my translation of Despair that I could use English as a wistful standby for Russian.19

But Nabokov's assessment of Camera Obscura was not swayed by any external article or judgment, and before producing Laughter in the Dark based on the English translation, he played each of the roles, taking up again functions that are normally assigned to the reader alone: he was receiver, discriminator (he critiqued, retained and rejected), and producer (reinterpreting in a polemical way a prior work). Like the reader who assumes the concretization of literary works, which would not exist without him, Nabokov gave form to each of the versions of the novel, in the original or in translation, because of, or thanks to, his critical reading of a first translation. This multifaceted and complex approach is at the origin of the confusion of the two texts in the minds of many readers, although when Laughter in the Dark appeared, Nabokov never overtly criticized, nor even mentioned, the pre-existent English translation. His statements always assigned pre-eminence to the Russian text he himself had translated into English:

I wrote this book in Berlin. First I composed it completely in my mind, which is a very exhausting business, but quite indispensable in my case. This took me about half a year after which I had the book so that I felt every page of it much as a botanist feels the flora of a given place mentioned in his presence-a compound impression which he knows he can at once put down into full detail. The actual writing of the book I did by hand, as I always do. [...] All this refers of course to the Russian original. When translating it, I again had to rewrite it by hand, changing a lot, because I saw it all in another English rhythm and color.20

This stance can be explained by the relationship of power that exists between the author and the words he uses. It implies that writing becomes sacred, and the text inviolable, once committed to paper, to be conserved 'as is' except in cases of intervention by the author and by him alone. At this point, translation becomes a profanation--which Nabokov felt was the case when he read Camera Obscura--and reading a translated text a degrading act, an act which Anglophones and Anglicists were spared in this case by Nabokov's writing a new English text. Moreover, when a translator interposes himself between the author and the reader, power is transmitted to the words not by the author, but by the translator, since the latter becomes the author of the lexical, grammatical, and syntactical choices. Onto the author of the original text is superimposed his 'interpreter,' who completes the work. If in so doing he sows a form of disorder within the order by means of which the communication had initially been transmitted, his disrespect for the initial order, his infraction of the rules established by the author, constitute a violation of the text and are likely to be found unacceptable to the author, who may undertake the task of reinterpreting his work or of re-ordering this disorder: this is what Nabokov did, not to reseize power from the translator, but to empower the words he was appropriating as a budding English writer.

What is the relationship between the work and the reader?
I see him every morning when I shave. The only true reader, the best reader, the model reader, is the author of the book. It is true that sometimes the author is acquainted with people, friends, who he knows are going to understand his book, people for whom writing is worth the effort. I know perhaps a dozen, thirteen people who read my books almost as well as I do. But note that if these charming readers did not exist, I would nevertheless write in complete confidence, cheerfully, for I can always easily invent as many readers as I want.21

Can the text ultimately be liberated from both author and translators to be transmitted to the reader? In reality, a reader reading a translated text is always faced with the problem of authority (in the sense of the text's origin), but also of power--the power of the words themselves. In fact, as noted above, the power of words so troubled Nabokov that he chose to be his own translator. Which text will we be reading when we discover Laughter in the Dark? Are the criteria for the faithfulness to the translation as defined by Nabokov respected? And why do there exist two distinct texts, which I am attempting to differentiate here, but which almost all readers, all critics, even certain scholars confound? The confusion of the text that appeared in English in the United States in 1938 with its Russian precursor remains mysterious. We are thus confronted by a broad array of questions to which no answers are to be found without first going back to the causes of such a situation.

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Notes

13. After being disappointed by the English translation of Kamera obskura, he translated Otchaianie (Berlin: Petropolis, 1936) himself under the title Despair (London: John Long, 1937).

14. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, (London: Puffin Books, 1976), p. 274.

15. On this point see D. Ferrer and J.-L. Lebrave, "De la variante textuelle au geste d'écriture," in L'écriture et ses doubles, Paris: CNRS, 1991, pp. 9-25.

16. R. Scholes, Protocols of Reading, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 90.

17. Interview published in Playboy in January 1964, and reprinted in Strong Opinions, New York: Vintage International, 1990, p. 20.

18. Strong Opinions, p. 189.

19. Ibid., pp. 88-89.

20. Statement published in several American newspapers, including the Times-Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia) and the Times (Portsmouth, Ohio), 1 May 1938.

21. P. Dommergues, "Entretien avec Vladimir Nabokov" in Les Langues modernes, no. 1 (janv.-fév. 1968), pp. 99-100.

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