Changing My Mind (7 page)

In my own reading life, I’ve been pulled first in one direction, then in the other. Reading has always been my passion, my pleasure, and I am constitutionally drawn to any thesis that gives power to readers, increasing their freedom of movement. But when I became a writer, writing became my discipline, my practice, and I felt the need to believe in it as an intentional, directional act, an expression of an individual consciousness. And the tension between these two modes grows particularly acute when I try to read the author Nabokov as the critic Barthes recommends. On the one hand there is Barthes’s radical invocation of reader’s rights (“The removal of the Author . . . is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text or—which is the same thing—the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all levels its Author is absent.”) On the other, Nabokov’s bold assertion of authorial privilege (“My characters are galley slaves”). You can hardly get going at all. This despite the fact that the great critic and the great author have a theme in common: both equally concerned with
jouissance
, with literary bliss (though they define it differently), and the creative act of reading. Barthes spoke of the pleasure of the text, Nabokov of asking his students to read “with your brain and spine . . . the tingle in the spine really tells you what the author felt and wished you to feel.” Barthes, though, had no interest in what the author felt or wished you to feel, which is where my trouble starts.

It’s easy to read “The Death of the Author” as a series of revolutionary demands, but it’s worth remembering that it was also simply a licked forefinger held up to test a wind already blowing. For along with authorial assassination, Barthes lays out his vision for a new kind of “text,” and it is one that the reader of 1968 would have recognized:

This was the thrilling space of the
nouveau roman,
of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute and Claude Simon—the new writing was already with us. To read these new texts properly, though, it was necessary that the Author step aside, and here survey gave way to manifesto. The Author was dead, and in his place came the “scriptor,” born simultaneously with the text (so that “every text is eternally written
here and now
”), and with no real existence before or after it:

Long live the scriptor! Like a lot of rereaders of my college generation, I fell for this “new” French criticism hard (although much of it was already, by the time we got to Kristeva, Foucault, Derrida and the rest, thirty years old.) For myself, I read it enthusiastically and badly, taking a wide variety of complex philosophical ideas as a kind of personal poetic license. Barthes was my favorite, both for his relative accessibility and the unlimited power he appeared to be placing at my feet. If the text was eternally written here and now, well then this surely meant I didn’t have to worry about its historical specificity, and so could turn to
A Sentimental Education
in perfect ignorance of the 1848 Revolution, or
The Cherry Orchard
without reading a blessed word about the emancipation of the serfs. His theory of the text, too, appealed to me strongly: antic, decentered, many-voiced, perverse. I sought out the “new” fiction that would justify and exemplify it. Nabokov, with his unreliable narrators, with his reversal of the traditional life/art hierarchies (“I am no more guilty of imitating ‘real life’ than ‘real life’ is responsible for plagiarizing me,” he once claimed), with that referential style that even the noble-winged seraphs envied—Nabokov
should
have been exhibit number one. But there was, there is, a problem. Superficially the ideal Barthesian
text
suits Nabokov quite well. But what about the man who writes it?
Scriptor?
Stripped of his inalienable passions, humors, feelings, and impressions? It’s difficult to imagine Nabokov in this club or any club.
²³
It’s a brave critic who dares tell Vladimir Vladimirovich that he is “diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage,” no longer “the past of his own book” but only incidental to it. Hard, too, to imagine an all-powerful Reader more able than Nabokov to “disentangle” his own cat’s cradles. “Genius,” he wrote, “still means to me—in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase—a unique dazzling gift.” To Nabokov, an author was more than a bricolage artiste, more than a recombiner of older materials. His sensibility, his sensations, his memories, and his mode for expressing it all—these had to be unique. So proud of his own genius, so particular about his interpretations, Nabokov refused to lie down and die.

Part of the difficulty to be had linking Nabokov with the French criticism is that criticism’s tendentious politics. Barthes’s argument flirts heavily with a leftist aesthetic and this is hard to fit to a man who liked to torture his left-leaning friends with paeans to capitalism generally and the Vietnam War specifically. Where Nabokov saw the Author as the very principle of individualized Western freedom, Barthes saw precisely the same thing, but didn’t like it:

Nabokov, having fled the Communist revolution, was not sympathetic to ideologies that made light of Western freedoms and individual privilege, up to and including the individuality of the author. But in a deeper sense, the disjunction between Nabokov and
la nouvelle critique
is philosophical. It has to do with how Nabokov thought about reality:

But this is a different kind of interpretive hopelessness. For Barthes, hermeneutics and epistemology have been subjected to a twin crisis: there is no
there
there. With the Author dead, no longer the past of his own text, nor its source of nourishment or final meaning, the scriptor merely “traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.” And this crisis in authorship, for Barthes, has consequences far beyond the little world of novels and their readers:

Just as we must give up the urge to know the reality of the text, we must also give up the hope of knowing the world in its ultimate reality. There can be no more “deciphering,” we must settle for “disentangling.” Power is relinquished. Not so in Nabokov’s world. In Nabokov’s portrait of subjectivity you can still decipher by
degrees.
The lily can be
more or less real,
and there
exists
an ultimate reality even if we can never know it. Still, we can come close. To approach the reality of a novel, as readers, Nabokov asked that we bring biographical,
²⁴
historical, cultural, entomological, and linguistic knowledge to the task, not to mention attentive care, empathy, synesthetic acuity, and a keen visual sense. There can be ever more accurate readings of the lily. And there can be, consequently, philistine misreadings, a fact Barthes’s portrait of the prepotent reader (blissed out, picking her way through a riot of potential meanings, constructing a text playfully, without limits) refuses to acknowledge.

But Nabokov was no cold-blooded empiricist and he was not blind to the indeterminacy of writing. For him, too, there existed a blissful, unfettered, nonhierarchical experience of meaning—but it came earlier in the process. Not while the reader reads, but before the writer writes, in a moment that precedes composition: “Inspiration.” Nabokov split this old-fashioned word into two Russian parts. The first half of inspiration, for him, is
vorstog
(initial rapture).
Vorstog
describes that moment in which the book as a whole is conceived:

Here
the author dies, momentarily;
here
meaning is indeterminate and free flowing.
Vorstorg
“has no conscious purpose in view”; in
vorstog
“the entire circle of time is conceived, which is another way of saying time ceases to exist.” But after this comes the second stage:
vdokhnovenie
(recapture). And it’s here that the actual writing gets done. In Nabokov’s experience, the two had quite different natures.
Vorstog
was “hot and brief.”
Vdokhnovenie
“cool and sustained.” In the first you lose yourself. In the second, you are doing the conscious work of construction. And while making the choices good writing requires, the Author exists, he circumscribes, he controls, he puts walls on either side of the playground. The reader, to read him properly, would do well to recognize the existence of these walls. The Author limits the possibility of the reader’s play.

In
The Pleasure of the Text
and “S/Z,” meanwhile, we find Barthes assigning this work of construction to readers themselves. Here a rather wonderful Barthesian distinction is made between the “readerly” and the “writerly” text. Readerly texts ask little or nothing of their readers; they are smooth and fixed in meaning and can be read passively (most magazine copy and bad genre writing is of this kind). By contrast, the writerly text openly displays its
written-ness,
demanding a great effort from its reader, a creative engagement. In a writerly text the reader, through reading, is actually reconstructing the act of writing, a thrilling idea with which Nabokov would sympathize, for that was the kind of active reader his own work required.
²⁵
But then Barthes imagines a further step: that by reading across the various “codes” he believed were inscribed in the writerly text (the linguistic, symbolic, social, historical, et cetera), a reader, in an active sense, constructs the text
entirely anew
with each reading. In this way Barthes reverses the hierarchy of the writer-reader dynamic. The reader becomes “no longer the consumer but the producer of text.”

Hard to know for sure what Nabokov would have made of
that
. My guess is he would have found it unhinged. He disliked literary theory in general. (“Every good reader has enjoyed a few good books in his life so why analyse the pleasures that both sides know?”) It’s probably for the best that he didn’t live to see the kind of post-Barthes (and post-Foucault) campus criticism that flowered on both sides of the pond during the eighties and nineties. Wild analogy; aggressive reading against the grain and across codes and discourses; a fondness for cultural codes over textual particulars. You remember the sort of thing: