Changing My Mind (8 page)

I’ve written a lot of essays like this. And found it a wonderful thing, to feel so free. The novel was mine to do with as I wished with, to read upside down, back to front or in entirely anachronistic terms. That kind of freedom makes writers of readers, liberating us from the passive and authoritarian reading styles we are taught in school (
Hard Times
= British education system in Victorian England). When we read instead in an active way we get to reinscribe dusty old novels into our own interests and concerns. There is a joy in getting someone to hand us
their
butterfly so we can spend twenty pages making the case for its being
our
giraffe.

But Nabokov believed in the butterfly qua butterfly. For this reason, when I first read his
Lectures on Literature
I was disappointed.
²⁶
Was this really Nabokov? The apparent analytic simplicity, the lengthy quoting without commentary. The obsession with (what seemed to me) utterly banal details: the shape of Gregor Samsa’s shell, a map of Dublin, the exact geographical location of
Mansfield Park.
And the questions he set his students! What color are Emma Bovary’s eyes? What kind of house was Bleak House? How many
rooms
are in there? You have to reset your brain, away from the overheated hustle of English departments, before you can see how beautiful those lectures are. How attentive. How particular. When it comes to rereading, Nabokov felt, “one should notice and fondle details.” These lectures are a marvelous, concrete example of that principle.

For Barthes, ideologically tied to a post-Marxist analysis, a bad reader was a consumer and an ideal one, a producer. For Nabokov, the reader is neither. Nabokov’s ideal reader is something resembling a butterfly collector, with an interest both empirical and aesthetic. For his ideal reader, the text is a highly particular thing, and the job is to appreciate and note its particularities. If nothing else, in these lectures we find a mirror image of how Nabokov himself hoped to be read. For he felt his own work to be multiplex but not truly multivalent—the buck stopped at Nabokov, the man who had placed the details there in the first place. His texts had their unity (their truest reality) in him.

Consequently, seriously variant interpretations of his novels were only so much
poshlust
²⁷
to him, to be filed next to “Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, over concern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.” This makes him a hard author to write about. He seems to admit no ideal reader except himself. I think of him as one of the last, great twentieth-century believers in the autonomy of the Author, as Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the last believers in the Architect. They both specialized in theatrical interviews, struck self-regarding and self-mythologizing poses, all of which would mean nothing (the Author being dead, you don’t have to listen to his self-descriptions) if it weren’t for the fact that they wove the restrictions and privileges of authorship into the very fabric of the things they built. For it’s true that each time I enter
Pnin
I feel its author controlling (via an obsessive specificity) all my reactions, just as, in Wright’s Unity Temple, one enters through a small, low side door, forced to approach the magnificence of the interior by way of a series of awkward right-angled turns. There is extraordinary, almost overwhelming beauty in Nabokov—there is also an oppressive rigidity. You will live in his house his way. Nabokov’s way means giving up the reader’s traditional linear right-of-way through a novel (starting at the first page and ending at the last) and confronting instead a network of connected leitmotifs, quotations, clues, and puzzles that are not so much to be read as deciphered. Faced with a Nabokov novel it’s impossible to rid yourself of the feeling that you’ve been set a problem, as a chess master sets a problem in a newspaper. I am always tormented by the sense I have missed something—and Nabokov makes me feel my failure. The Author, he claimed, “clashes with readerdom because he is his own ideal reader and those other readers are so very often mere lip-moving ghosts and amnesiacs.” He claimed to be writing, instead, “mainly for artists, fellow-artist and follow artists,” whose job it was to “share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author—the joys and difficulties of creation.”
Follow
artists! In practice this means subsuming your existence in his, until you become, in effect, Nabokov’s double, knowing what he knows, loving as he loves and hating his way, too,
²⁸
following each nuance, pursuing each reference, in what amounts to a reader’s mimeograph of the Author’s creative act. (And there exist many people who hate Nabokov for precisely this reason.) It is a reversal of the Barthes formulation: here it is the
reader
who must die so that the
Author
may live. There is a sensible school of thought that argues
all
writing makes us do this
²⁹
—but few writers make you feel your subjection as Nabokov does. The only perfect tenant of the house that Nabokov built is Nabokov.
³⁰

When you teach Nabokov to students, along with the usual complaint that his vocabulary is unnecessarily baroque, they want to know whether all this game playing, all this punning complexity is, in the end, truly
for
the reader at all. They scrunch up their noses and direct you to a particular passage: “Now, isn’t this just Nabokov basically getting himself
off
?” The question is a fair one. The elusive, allusive, pleasures of the Nabokovian text—whose pleasures are these, really? When asked about “the pleasures of writing” in his
Playboy
interview, Nabokov answered: “They correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading, the bliss, the felicity of a phrase is shared by writer and reader: by the satisfied writer and the grateful reader.”

But isn’t the aside vital? Doesn’t satisfaction trump gratitude? With our twenty-first-century passion for equality, gratitude seems a slavish sort of attitude to take to an author. Is that truly our reward for being Nabokovians, for reading and rereading, pursuing every butterfly, every long-vanished Russian émigré poet? Nabokov thought so; he felt that what he offered his reader, and especially his
rereader,
was not the antic pleasure of their own interpretations, but the serious satisfaction of
twinning the emotion of creation
:

By following all his threads, you are doing more than reading, you are given the opportunity to precisely reconstruct the bliss of
vdokhnovenie
, of Nabokov’s own writerly act
.
(And maybe even a trace of
vorstorg
. Nabokov thought that the “force and originality involved in the primary spasm of inspiration is directly proportional to the worth of the book the author will write.” We might hope, then, for a trace of the propellant to be left after the explosion.) The difference is that Nabokov asks that we admit it is the
author’s
gift in the design, rather than
our
gift at connecting the dots, that is truly meaningful, and meaning producing. No matter how I try to slot them together, Nabokov goes a certain way along with Barthes and no further. Reading is creative! insists Barthes. Yes, but writing creates, replies Nabokov, smoothly, and turns back to his note cards.

Maybe we can say that Nabokov makes his readers so very creative that we are liable to feel that we ourselves have made something.
Pnin
rereaders can follow the Lermontov hints (to a poem called “The Triple Dream”) and the Tolstoy hints (to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”) and find in those texts miniature versions of
Pnin’s
Russian doll structure,
mise-en-abymes
placed by Nabokov into his novel with the care of Van Eyck.
³¹
,
³²
They are so hard to see, such particular details, that you feel you placed them there yourself. And the experience of rereading
Pnin
is never perfect or finished—there’s always some new detail to fondle. A newcomer to Nabokov will notice only the actual butterflies fluttering around; as you get further in, you’ll start to notice the entomology sunk deep into the weft and weave. Those Nabokovian words, pressed into service for quite other purposes, which, upon closer inspection, reveal their hidden wings and abdomens (bole, crepitation, Punchinello
³³
). And it’s only on this most recent rereading that I think to kneel in front of my desk, place a glass of water at eye level and position a comb, on end, behind it.
Zebra cocktail!
³⁴
Nabokov saw it—now I do. And it’s beautiful. Gratitude does not seem out of place.

Whether one quite approves of it or not, it’s a Nabokovian assumption that if you work to give him back what he has given to you, this should be reward enough (for you). His students learned this soon enough.
³⁵
And of course Vera lived it. (The character most closely modeled on Vera—Zina, from
The Gift
—is praised by the narrator for having a “perfect understanding . . . for everything that he himself loved.”) Here Barthes comes up against a wall of pure Nabokov. Barthes scorned that “image of literature, to be found in ordinary culture, [which] is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his hates, his passions.” And then Foucault, in the essay that answered Barthes’s own, and deepened it, identified the Author (or “Author-function”) as “the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.”
³⁶
In Nabokov’s case, the arrow hits its bull’s-eye: this author’s high-handed rules about reading, his various strictures concerning interpretation, and his defensive humiliations of his own potential readers (especially on the topic of Freudian critics and
Lolita
³⁷
)—these all work to “impede[s] the free circulation, the free manipulation, the composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.”
³⁸
But a question I never asked as a college rereader, now bothers me as a writer:
and what of it?

It was meant to be obvious, to the college rereaders we once were, that any restriction on the multivalent free flow of literary meaning was not to be stood for. But to speak for myself, I’ve changed my mind. The assumption that what a reader wants most is unfettered freedom, rather than limited, directed, play,
³⁹
or that one should automatically feel nostalgia for a bygone age of collective, anonymous authorship
⁴⁰
—none of this feels at all obvious to me anymore. The house rules of a novel, the laying down of the author’s peculiar terms—all of this is what interests me. This is where my pleasure is. Yet it must also be true that part of the change in my attitude represents a vocational need to believe in Nabokov’s vision of total control. Nabokov’s profound hostility to Freud was no random whim—it was the theory of the unconscious itself that horrified him. He couldn’t stand to admit the existence of a secondary power directing and diverting his own. Few writers can. I think of that lovely idea of Kundera’s: “Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.” This, in part, is what Barthes had to tell us and what Nabokov wanted to dispute. Maybe every author needs to keep faith with Nabokov, and every reader with Barthes. For how can you write, believing in Barthes? Still, I’m glad I’m not the reader I was in college anymore, and I’ll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged reader—the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate meaning. Which was a powerful feeling, but also rather isolating, because it jettisons the very idea of communication, of any possible genuine link between the person who writes and the person who reads. Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. To this end I find myself placing a cautious faith in the difficult partnership between reader and writer, that discrete struggle to reveal an individual’s experience of the world through the unstable medium of language. Not a refusal of meaning, then, but a quest for it. Whether it is “ultimate” or “secret” meaning, seems to me besides the point and rather a sleight of hand on the part of Barthes; by using such terms he forces a monumental, essentialist, and theological discourse on a relationship that is in fact far more hesitant and delicate than he allows. Nabokov is not God, and I am not his creation. He is an Author and I am his reader, and we are stumbling toward meaning simultaneously, together. Zebra cocktail!