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!
Five – F. KAFKA, EVERYMAN
1
How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps:
It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.
A naked man among a multitude who are dressed.
A mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham.
Franz was a saint. [41]
Or then again, using details of his life, as found in Louis Begley’s refresh ingly factual The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay: over six feet tall, handsome, elegantly dressed; an unexceptional student, a strong swimmer, an aerobics enthusiast, a vegetarian; a frequent visitor to movie houses, cabarets, all-night cafés, literary soirees and brothels; the published author of seven books during his brief lifetime; engaged three times (twice to the same woman); valued by his employers, promoted at work.
But this last Kafka is as difficult to keep in mind as the Pynchon who grocery shops and attends baseball games, the Salinger who grew old and raised a family in Cornish, New Hampshire. Readers are incurable fabulists. Kafka’s case, though, extends beyond literary mystique. He is more than a man of mystery-he’s metaphysical. Readers who are particularly attached to this supra-Kafka find the introduction of a quotidian Kafka hard to swallow. And vice versa. I spoke once at a Jewish literary society on the subject of time in Kafka, an exploration of the idea-as the critic Michael Hofmann has it-that “it is almost always too late in Kafka.” Afterward a spry woman in her nineties, with a thick old-world accent, hurried across the room and tugged my sleeve: “But you’re quite wrong! I knew Mr. Kafka in Prague-and he was never late.”
Recent years have seen some Kafka revisionism, although what’s up for grabs is not the quality of the work, [42] but rather its precise nature. What kind of a writer is Kafka? Above all, it’s a revision of Mr. Kafka’s biographical aura. From a witty essay of this kind, by the young novelist and critic Adam Thirlwelclass="underline"
It is now necessary to state some accepted truths about Franz Kafka, and the Kafkaesque… Kafka’s work lies outside literature: it is not fully part of the history of European fiction. He has no predecessors-his work appears as if from nowhere-and he has no true successors… These fictions express the alienation of modern man; they are a prophecy of a) the totalitarian police state, and b) the Nazi Holocaust. His work expresses a Jewish mysticism, a non-denominational mysticism, an anguish of man without God. His work is very serious. He never smiles in photographs… It is crucial to know the facts of Kafka’s emotional life when reading his fiction. In some sense, all his stories are autobiographical. He is a genius, outside ordinary limits of literature, and a saint, outside ordinary limits of human behaviour. All of these truths, all of them, are wrong.
[31] Warning: this footnote for
[32] Of course an
[33] All appear in
[34] From
[35] “My method of teaching precluded genuine contact with my students. At best, they regurgitated a few bits of my brain during examinations.”
[36] Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 1969. The English translation quoted is by Joseph V. Harari, first published in 1979.
[37] “Ferrety, human-interest fiends, those jolly vulgarians,” as he called them. And that cagey afterword to
[38] Foucault, “What Is an Author?”
[39] In Nabokov’s case, it’s more like S&M-an experience you’d hope Foucault could get behind.
[40] A largely romantic concept. And wasn’t it always the same examples? Either it was Homer; some unspecified “ethnographic societies” within which “narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’-the mastery of the narrative code-may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’ ” (Barthes); or else the rather weak model of Beaumont and Fletcher.