CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE
SPIRAL STRUCTURE IN THREE NOVELS
BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in
English, Honors
by
Mary Janet Jenkins
January, 1984
9
The Thesis of Mary Janet Jenkins is approved:
Honors
California State University, Northridge
ii
'
DEDICATIONS/ACKNOWLDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Dr. William Anderson for
his patience and kind assistance, also Dr. Louis
Owens for his helpful suggestions for revisions.
I want to thank my mother, Catherine Jenkins,
for her limitless
patience~
iii
This thesis is for her.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Dedication/Acknowledgements ......................
iii
Abstract. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
v
Introduction.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1
Invitation to a Beheading. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
15
Look at the Harlequins!..........................
30
Pale Fire. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
46
Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
63
Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
69
Bibliography.....................................
76
iv
ABSTRACT
SPIRAL STRUCTURE IN
THREE WORKS BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
by
Mary Janet Jenkins
Bachelor of Arts in English, Honors
This study examines Vladimir Nabokov's pervasive use
of the spiral as a literary image of time.
First, the
spiral functions as an emblem of the fluid progression of
time and the relationships among memory, art, reality, and
death.
Second, the spiral's pattern of thesis, antithesis,
synthesis provides the means to gain insight into the
labyrinthian patterns of Nabokov's novels.
Although the three novels examined
~eheading,
Invitation to a
Look at the Harlequins!, and Pale Fire-- differ
in style, they all demonstrate the spiral as representing
time.
Whether tragic or transcendent, each novel's con-
clusion depends upon the state of the spiral's volutions
a circle in a flat plane represents artistic sterility, the
progressive spiral shows the fulfillment of time in the organization of art.
v
The introduction surveys the major critical theories
that have previously been used to explain Nabokov's novels.
Critical debate centers upon the artifice and the artist
within Nabokov's fiction.
This thesis posits that the es-
sential and creative importance of the spiral, so often
underlined in Nabokov's literary philosophy, has been consistently underestimated by critics.
Subsequent chapters present analyses of Invitation to
a Beheading, Look at the Harlequins!, and Pale Fire respectively.
Of the three novels studied, Invitation to a Be-
heading most clearly follows the spiral progression.
Look
at the Harlequins! presents the irony of a conscious denial
of spiral time.
Pale Fire revolves around Charles Kin-
bote's thwarted and desperately circular life, displaying
both the liberating spiral and the constricting circle.
The conclusion connects all the themes of time, art,
memory, reality, and death within the dominant spiral
structure.
Nabokov weaves apparently disparate elements
so that his novels can, at their finest moments, carry the
reader to an epiphany concurrent with the main character's
transcendence.
vi
INTRODUCTION
The narrators in Vladimir Nabokov's novels weave
dazzling tapestries from themes of time, memory, reality
and death.
Nabokov's artistry connects these separate
themes within the central construct of time as a spiral
that allows for the characters' liberations from meaningless and empty existences into a fulfilled state of artistic perfection.
This unifying device of the spiral
whether by coiling upward from memory into the future, or
by remaining one-dimensional in a flat plane of futility -defines Nabokov's themes within each novel.
The narrative
serves as a lens that shows characters caught either in
their distorted versions of time, or as reaching towards
the perfection embodied in the spiral, the spiritual opposite of the circle of sphere.
The narrative voice and the
illusive characters finally are defined by whether they
portray a time that spirals or whether one that remains
merely two-dimensional in a circle.
The spiral, then, is a
central image in Nabokov's complex art.
In this present
study, the novels Invitation to a Beheading, Look at the
Harlequins and Pale Fire will be examined to show their
variations upon the spiral structure, the perfect spiral
pattern of Nabokov's life as portrayed in his autobiography, Speak_,_Metnory, serving as the fundamental basis of
1
p
2
comparison.
In that autobiography, Nabokov establishes the importance of time as a spiral in creating coherence, identity
and sanity:
The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the
·spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound,
has ceased to be vicious, it has been set free.
I thought this up when I was a schoolboy, and
I also discovered that Hegel's triadic series
... expressed merely the essential spirality
of all things in their relationship to time.
Twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is
the thesis of the next series.l
Invitation to a Beheading, Look at the Harlequins! and Pale
Fire operate within Nabokov's spiral principle in two ways:
first, the spiral forms an enveloping frame for the themes
of time and memory; second, the patterns of thesis/antithesis/synthesis form an analogy for the cathartic denouements that ideally occur 1vithin the artist or narrator of
each book.
As Nabokov says, they escape the vicious ori-
entation of the circle and achieve a spiritual freedom previously impossible for them.
The depth of the spiritual
abyss dividing the circle and the spiral is most strongly
evident 1vhen the author metaphorically identifies the two
images as hell and paradise.
Nabokov's many allusions to
the circular shape of hell shadmv the images of the
spiral's nirvana.
Although not within the domain of this thesis, the
novel Pnin -- Nabokov's most accessible novel -- furnishes
examples of the function of spiral time as a key to unlock-
'
3
(l
ing the mysteries of plot and characterization.
The
protagonist sweeps back through his memories to the Russia
of his childhood and weeps from the tang of bittersweet
recall.
The spiral's next volution pulls him through vivid
flashes of a former lover's death.
Each backward loop of
n1emory renews the original emotional experience and merges
it with the forward sweep of present action to synthesize
a cathartic future.
Pnin's catharsis, as a spiritual re-
ward for enduring the purgation of memory, gains him independence from the narrator and the novel as he continues to
grow into the successful future glimpsed in Pale Fire.
The spiral also controls the actions of Lolita and
Pale Fire.
In the former novel, Humbert Humbert's memory
does not progress to a new plane, but relentlessly and
frustratingly returns him to the dead image of Annabel, his
Riviera love.
From his obsessive concern with the past,
the spiral structure then builds toward his compulsive
need to murder Quilty.
The synthesis of memory and action
is portrayed in Humbert's writing of his memoir.
The ar-
tistic creation of that document functions as Humbert's
cathartic advance into present, although tragic, time.
In
Pale Fire, Kinbote's spiritual synthesis occurs within the
Zemblan eulogy to John Shade.
Less redeemed than Humbert,
however, Kinbote fantasizes a spiral that turns around the
approach of Gradus and death -- but with possibly the prefiguration of an afterlife.
Kinbote's morbib fascination
4
with death destroys the health of the Zembla spiral,
leaving him doomed to suicide as the only possible synthesis.
Time and memory form a coil within the plot of Look at
the Harlequins!
Vadim always hovers on the edge of madness
as he seeks liberation from a linear and segmental misconception of time.
Vadim's narrative voice-over presents his
life's search for a spiralling reality, and the concluding
epiphany comes from his final recognition of spiral patterns.
Vadim's desire for a sane pattern parallels that of
Cincinnatus of Invitation to a Beheading, who emerges as
the only character that seeks a spiral liberation from the
circularly stagnant time worshipped by his society.
Nabo-
kov presents the execution as a fitting transcendence of
Cincinnatus's life of tedious ugliness.
Nabokov's dominate themes of art, reality, death, time
and memory evolve out of intricate structures, such as the
spiral.
As Mary McCarthy said of Pale Fire, ["It]is a
Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a trap to
catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself
novel." 2 Although Pale Fire remains one of his more complex efforts, it typifies the personal concentration Nabokov's novels demand from the reader.
The reader must not
only comprehend the plot but also tackle the machinations
of style to fully enjoy one of Nabokov's works.
indicates his priorities in the statement:
Nabokov
"Style and
5
structure are the essence of a book, great ideas are
hogwash."3
He assigns primary importance to the artistic
texture rather than the text, and creates "do-it-yourself"
novels to force a more intense reader response.
No casual
attempts can reach the spiral heart of Nabokov's works.
The loving wonder that Nabokov centers upon the
aesthetic beauty and style of carefully crafted art produces the spiral as the perfect combination of practical
function and luminous aesthetics.
Like the contrapposto
curve of classic sculpture, the spiral's beauty balances
curves and opposing forces within the novel.
This dynamic
interaction contrasts with the temporally linear structure
of more accessible novels.
The innovations of Nabokov's
style, however, maintain a close stylistic kinship with
the impressionist schools of painting and literature who
attempted to present a living although distorted image of
a character or object, rather than a merely realistic
representation.
Nabokov's goals can be said to echo the
goals of impressionism:
[The impressionists] revolted from ...
conventional and academic conceptions ...
and held that it was more important to retain
the impressions an object makes ... than
meticulously to present the appearance ...
by precise detail, and careful, realistic
finish.4
His adherence to impressionism comes perhaps from his revolt against the definite emotional and intellectual restrictions of the realistic-naturalistic school.
6
Strict verisimilitude offends Nabokov because it
limits reader response to situations as it forces everything to accord with the laws of nature and objectified
logic.
Realistic novels usually offer a limited range of
interpretations for events; Invitation to a Beheading and
Pale Fire, by contrast, allow dozens of interpretations.
Realistic novels portray characters who function according
to the reader's expectations, whereas Nabokov's artistic
doctrines, of art as art rather than "life," make him overturn the reader's expectations about the seemingly established reality.
Nabokov's tight control of the situations
within his novels enables him to lead readers away from
simplistic analysis to a spiritual epiphany with the main
character.
Nabokov compares his control over his charac-
ters to a commander's control over galley slaves,5 a
stringent hold which has caused critics to censure him
erroneously for mechanical situations and sterile characters.
Although Nabokov uses characters to present his
themes, they do so only through his express consent and
di.rect purpose.
This harsh authorial control contrasts
with earlier impressionistic authors such as Henry James,
who felt that the characters controlled the situations and
5
the plot's directions.
Nabokov considered this ridiculous, as it detracted from the cleanly direct attainment of
a recognizable pattern of reality which is the object of
true art.
7
Nabokov's search for patterns in his own life's spiral
probably led to this use of coded sequences to orchestrate
his characters; he connects scenes in shifting systems.
As
Page Stegner says in Escape into Aesthetics:
He uses impressionistic devices in his own
private way for his own anti-realistic,
anti-naturalistic ends -- to create a world
in which images, languages, magic flights
of illusion and all~sion, and imagination
constitute reality.
Nabokov's privately-modulated impressionism may seem to
produce a fractured style when compared with James's smooth
and flowing prose.
James roots his works in standard time
which progresses linearly; any rare flights into imagined
versions of time return to chronologically predictable
structures.
By contrast, Nabokov's narrative follows not a
linear but a spiralled construct that unifies time, memory
and meaning into a single device.
Nabokov also employs a cubistic orientation for Invitation to a Beheading, one which functions as a variation
upon his impressionism.
"Cubistic" aptly labels this novel
because Nabokov adopts the cubistic method of blending
several simultaneous viewpoints.
The third person narrator
spirals around each event and records several, often conflicting, views of the same moment.
The shifts in view-
point, and the resulting situational variants, come from
conflicts within Cincinnatus's .attitude towards his plight
in an insane and hostile reality.
The variations in his
character also explain his "doppelganger" aspect; each
8
moment's consideration produces a new response, which
necessitates a different facet of character to carry it
out.
Cincinnatus alternately fights or submits to the
humiliating rituals of his imprisonment.
Other multiple
exposures spring from the narrator's playful manipulation
of the book's physical environment and clockwork characters, such as the different disguises he puts on Rodion.
These unexpected changes keep Cincinnatus's emotions bared
to the bone and his mind at a fever pitch to await the moment of cathartic execution.
Invitation to a Beheading's cubistic presentation
refines away extraneous material.
Nabokov spotlights Cin-
cinnatus with the precise scientific detachment of a researcher examining a butterfly pinned to a board.
The
cubistic mode records multi-dimensionally Cincinnatus's
struggles on the pin.
His emotional and intellectual
agonies then mesh with the unifying themes of art through
the spiral pattern established by the narrator.
Cincinna-
tus's abortive journal helps connect his thoughts and the
shifting scenes with the spiral design of the narrator so
that it all resembles "a figured rug whose folds can be
7
gathered in such a way that the two designs meet."
A
spiral pattern of time successfully interprets this blend
of cubistic narrative and spiritual purgation which surrounds the focal point of the execution.
Nabokov's enigmatic characters and plots have stimu-
9
lated a wealth of critical commentary.
Two of the finest
studies, those of Page Stegner and Julia Bader, posit contrasting theories concerning the theme of art within Nabokov's novels. 8 Stegner maintains that art within the novel
forms an escape for the characters from the vulgar morass
of casual life and from a time-confined consciousness; further, the author also escapes vicariously.
For Stegner,
the narrator's escape into a personally-constructed fantasy
world of beauty constitutes the central aspect of Pale
Fire, Pnin, Bend Sinister and The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight.
Stegner's interpretation is flawed by his insist-
ence that the escapist world of art must exist parasitically upon the real world it appears to shun.
Such a depend-
ence nullifies the creative purpose of art and fails to
consider the spiritual transcendence -- an epiphany superior in tone to a worldly escape.
The nature of artifice in Pale Fire, however, supports
Stegner's interpretation.
that a madman/fellow poet
In Pale Fire, John Shade states
11
deliberately peels off a drab
and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention."9
Yet, the fragile brilliance and beauty of Charles
Kinbote's Zembla cannot support him when the realization of
his solitude shatters his carefully-wrought crystal kingdom.
According to Nabokov, once Kinbote finishes the in-
·
· · d e. lO
d ex, h e commLts
su1cL
A comp 1 ete d art1. f act no 1 onger
forms an outlet for his creative, unbalanced energy.
(1'
10
Nabokov makes a relevant comment upon the idealistic,
escapist character of Glory's Martin Edelweiss:
Among the many gifts I showered on Martin,
I was careful not to include talent. How
easy it would have been to make him an
artist, a writer; how hard not to let him
be one, while bestowing on him the keen
sensitivity that one generally associates
with the creative creature, how cruel to
prevent him from finding in art -- not an
"escape" (which is only a cleaner cell on a
quietel floor), but relief from the itch of
being! 1
Nabokov's assertion that Martin seeks relief from an agonizing, compelling itch implies a different emotional context than a soothing escape.
The artist's search for
aesthetic relief puts him into a new, challenging pattern
of reality.
Not only does "being" possess so many commands
and responsibilities that some outlet must form to ease the
pressure, but the means to that ease emerges as central to
the artist's survival.
Suicidal impulses, such as Kin-
bote's, are tempered through art.
Martin sought that out-
let through his desperate passage into Communist Russia
because he could not reach it artistically.
his inescapable, insatiable reality with him.
But he took
Kinbote
follows Martin's pattern as he obtains the desired release
momentarily, but loses it at the practical conclusion -- a
polished Zembla.
Nabokov clearly presents the parasitical
aesthetic escape as futile; no salvation results from a
postponed doom.
He, therefore, constructs a spiral to
answer the questions and despairs of his characters as it
11
provides spiritual liberation into a parallel universe of
artistic fulfillment.
Julia Bader's views conflict with Stegner's because
she contends that Nabokov's novels work as microcosms.
Each contains self-sufficient themes and coherent motifs
which neither require nor produce escape.
Some of these
motifs, labeled little "universes," extend throughout most
of Nabokov's works.
The connecting motifs help show the
main characters' relationships to art.
Bader explains the
novels' swirling and conflicting realities by describing
them as hung precariously over a chasm produced "beneath
the pleasures of language, sensuous awareness, and artistic creation."l 2
Although the chasm may disappear momen-
tarily behind Nabokov's verbal pyrotechnics, it opens
through the deliberate narrative shifts of voice which
reveal authorial presence.
The chasm keeps the reader from
perceiving the novel as realistic-naturalistic entities.
Bader defines the reader's forced awareness of artifice as paramount to Nabokov.
She states that the reader
must acknowledge that, just as the characters are reduced
to galley slaves, they also owe each breath to authorial
supervision.
Bader observes:
Nabokovian characters have intermittent,
temporary personalities brought to life by
a trick of lighting, by a transitory sleightof-hand. This deliberately discontinuous
technique of characterization implies that
the se~f iy only alive when observed and
observ1.ng. 2
12
Although her observation holds true for explicitely
ephemeral characters, such as the interchangeable figures
populating Invitation to a Beheading, it undervalues the
fully-developed characters of the later novels.
For exam-
ple, Pale Fire's John Shade develops beyond parody into a
valid individual, and apparently continues to exist spiritually even after his death.
Bader may lose track of some
nuances because she views them as strung over an abyss.
Rather, they swirl in a spiral which can add deeper significance as it coils past the implicit time of the novel, as
in Look at the Harlequins!.
The narration establishes the characters and their
t~v-isting
patterns, relating them through variations of the
spiral to Nabokov's artistic and temporal themes.
In
novels with third person narration, the focus cuts the
figures sharply and sometimes mercilessly.
The resultant
stark characterization contrasts with that diffused through
the eyes of a confused first person narrator.
Harsh fig-
ures, such as Franz and Martha of King, Queen, Knave, perform on the third-person stage, but when removed from that
spotlight, they revert into Bader's non-characters.
They
function merely as artistic creations since they drain away
their own chances to be vital and energetic beings by
living vulgar, unimaginative lives; they lack humanity.
Invitation to a Beheading's Cincinnatus C. falls into
Bader's category of ephemeral characters, but for different
13
reasons.
The narrator focuses attention exclusively upon
Cincinnatus; he never leaves the stage.
Any lack of clar-
ity or humanity in his character comes from the dream-like
state of his spherically-imprisoning life.
The depths of the abyss appear through the narrators
who direct the reader's attention like a magnifying lens.
Stegner details a dominant feature of this lens:
Nabokov's purpose in placing the point of
view in a confused observer ... seems clearly
intended to break down the reader's conviction
that reality and truth are scientific facts,
to point out that reality is an infinite
variety to stimuli.l3
Stegner's analysis of Nabokov's purpose -- to challenge
reader attitudes -- gives a definite function to the insane
first person narrators, and to the cubistic presentation of
Invitation to a Beheading.
Nabokov desires to stir readers
past easy answers and simple explanations because they,
otherwise, cannot reach the germ of artistic inspiration
that produced the book.
When art appears as art, it wel-
comes the careful scrutiny of the alert reader.
Nabokov's
chosen format -- memoir autobiography or theatrical biography -- heightens the dramatic attainment of his purpose.
The subtle parodies yielded by the narrator's varying selfawareness combines with the spiral structure to confound
reader expectations about the proper process of character
development.
The reader experiences the character's
epiphany from the synthesis of the unique narrator and
14
spiral time's unfolding surprise.
Neither Stegner nor Bader gives sufficient attention
to this synthesis of narrator\ and spiral time in their
explorations of Nabokov's labyrinthian art.
Such an omis-
sion is curious, particularly when one considers the overt
statements regarding time as spiral in Ada and Speak,
Memo~.
The present study proposes an examination of Invi-
tation to a Beheading, Look at the Harlequinsl and Pale
Fire from the thesis that time's texture, either as spiral
or flat plane, informs the artistry of these novels.
INVITATION TO A BEHEADING
Time in Invitation to a Beheading has lost the vigor
of a healthy spiral of progression, and serves as a spherical and constrictive prison for Cincinnatus.
As the main
character, poetical Cincinnatus C., desires to escape suffocation in the stagnant time that saps the inidividuality
out of all the other characters, leaving them as transparent ghosts and malfunctioning dolls.
The novel's beauty
and horror come from Cincinnatus's struggles against the
overwhelming fear and loneliness he suffers as an artistic
and human individual in a society of powerful but soulless
ghouls.
Nabokov intensifies this horror by shadowing the
events with allusions to classical hell -- Nabokov's vision
of non-spiral time.
Blighted linear time and the cankered souls condemned
to its nonprogressive purgatory, define and paralyze Cincinnatus.
He twists within a hopeless morass of personal
and artistic incapacity, desiring but missing the release
of art -- an escape central to Stegner's thesis.
Cincin-
natus's frustrated helplessness detonates in the concluding
ecstatic transfiguration when his dreamy, futile sensitivity blossoms into a power of decisive talent.
Cincinnatus
finds a home in the parallel universe Nabokov opens up for
him.
The incisive flair with which redeemed Cincinnatus
0
16
dismisses the hollow creatures of his previous world contrasts with the previous ineffectuality of his talents.
His complete artistic ineptitude had strangled him with
despair.
When considering the "ancient inborn art of
writing," he thinks, "While I sense the nature of this kind
of word propinquity, I am nevertheless unable to achieve
it, yet that is what is indispensable to me for my task."l
As a result, Cincinnatus fumbles with writing throughout
the book.
His society cauterizes any ability and leaves
him with an incredible void of insatiable, aimless longings
which coalesce into a frantic desire for spiritual and
physical freedom. This "fierce longing for freedom" 2
merges with Cincinnatus's thwarted artistic fire to free
time from its encapsulated tomb into a living spiral.
The artist's release into a true spiral of time in
Invitation to a BeheadinE parallels the culminating beauty
Nabokov found in the works of Kafka and Gogol, whose works
center on the drive to descend the weary, debased world
enclosing the artist:
The beauty of Kafka's and Gogel's private
nightmares is that their central human
characters belong to the same private fantastic world as the inhuman characters around
them, but the central one tries to get out
of that world, to cast off the mask, to
transcend the cloak or the carapace. 3
Although Cincinnatus achieves a transcendence into spiral
time when he dies, he does not do it alone.
The author
strengthens him for that instant by pulling him through a
'
17
shifting, spiral pattern back through his earliest memories
and then onward to the events that culminate in his conviction for "gnostical turpitude." 4
Within this web,
Nabokov juxtaposes past and current realities to create
conflicting temporal views (essentially Cincinnatus's vs.
M1 Sieur Pierre's).
The narration's cubistic, many-faceted
approach to time meshes with skewed events; everything
reduces, starkly and horribly, to its torturing essentials,
with Cubism redefining spatial expectations:
This space is based on the principle of
basic simplified forms and a shifting point
of view, but with the latter feature expanded
to the point where the Cubists presented
an object as if seen from several markedly
different viewpoints ... Cubists wished to
present the total essential fo~ so ordinary
vision was no longer important.
Such literary cubism forces the reader to strain for comprehension by forcing him to take on the artist's intuition.
Nabokov's use of cubism enhances the novel in sever-
al ways.
This style forces the reader to combine the
narrative tones of sympathizing, loving and scoffing with
jumps in reality and perspective to produce a crazy-quilt
environment.
Also, Cincinnatus's personal agonies parallel
the cubist's search for "essential reality."
Through
cubism's unearthly mixture of conflicting views, Nabokov
conjures a claustrophobic atmosphere which functions as
part of the constricting sphere of time
nemesis.
spiral time's
Nabokov heightens the mood of restraint with
18
strange narrative voice-overs, such as repeated cries of,
"0 horrible!" 6 These abrupt, simplistic connnents increase
the unreality and unite it in tone with the clock-work
characters.
Under a "dismantled moon," the author places
Cincinnatus helplessly on the center stage so that he
appears as the only living, cohesive being in the devious,
directionless circus/play.
Cincinnatus remains the narra-
tor's puppet on the stage until the concluding catharsis
when he gains the artistic talent to establish his own
course.
Cincinnatus's weakness in imagination and talent
nurses the multiple viewpoints of his own consciousness,
although additional outlooks
even mad ones -- give him
the perspective he must have to ask, "w"Tby am I here?" 7
Cincinnatus acknowledges this need for added insight and
perspective when he wishes for "a third eye on the back of
[his] neck, between [the] brittle vertebrae:
eye .••• "B
a mad
His desire for an additional eye represents more
than a panic-stricken need to watch the falling axe.
In-
stead, it underlines his conscious hunger for a pattern.
A
vision beyond ordinary vision helps establish a pattern and
possesses primary importance, as shown below.
Cincinnatus's desire to perceive a pattern in chaos
ironically echoes the function of the all-seeing narrator,
who answers Cincinnatus's need for a coherent structure by
giving shape to the topsy-turvy incidents.
Depending on
19
the cubistic angle taken by the narrator, Cincinnatus's
reality changes into radically different subjective perspectives, as the doomed man becomes the focal point for
all of the plot's shifts in time and space.
In the same
vein, Nabokov has said that a tree appears differently to a
city man than to a botanist because their subjective knowledge and attitudes are different. 9 Cincinnatus's reality
varies constantly because of the odd, spiral jumps in time,
memory and mood made by the narrator:
reality is a dream
populated by blank-minded dolls; reality is a play/circus.
The dream reality springs directly from Cincinnatus; the
play/circus comes to him from his malicious, inhuman surroundings.
Contrasting views place poetical Cincinnatus
in dynamic confrontation ·with the vampiristic world which
has drained him of artistic substance (his vague, desiccated scribblings scatter aimlessly at the book's conclusion).
The confrontation helps prepare him for his rebirth
into the spiral.
The dreaminess portrays Cincinnatus's personal ineffectuality.
The narrative voice carefully establishes his
incapacity as it examines him, appropriately, in his sleep:
The subject will now be the precious quality
of Cincinnatus; ... the fact that the greater
part of him was in a quite different place,
while only an insignificant portion of it
was wandering, perplexed, here ... trusting,
feeble and foolish as people are in their
sleep.lO
This trusting state of sleep hints at the afterlife to
20
which liberated, spiral time whirls him at his death.
He
appears because of this hint to be entering some sort of
parallel world where the majority of his soul had always
existed.
The dreamy, ephemerally soft remainder tries to
live a fairy-tale and escapist existence in Tamara Gardens.
The narrator blends the dreams with elfish images that
whirl Cincinnatus out of his life's arid context:
There, ... whenever life seemed unbearable,
one could roam with a meal of chewed lilac
bloom in onr's mouth and firefly tears in
one's eyes. 1
Cincinnatus's bittersweet dreaminess collapses, however,
and leaves him in the nightmare of his imprisonment.
His
fantasy saps his courage until he cannot resist the horrible brutality of the nightmare's imagery.
The dreams are
dead ends because they lack the power of spiral time's progression, being formed out of aimless, anguished longing.
Because Cincinnatus's fragmented dreams, however,
possess the germ of his thwarted artistic power, they influence the book's other realities.
As the dreamer pro-
duces the image of his own dream, Cincinnatus's soul contains strength to support the parasitical characters.
Cin-
cinnatus also directs the horribly doll-like personalities
of the parasites:
the novel becomes a toy maker's night-
mare.
Rodrig, for example, appears as a cotton-padded rag
doll.
As an illustration of his dreamer's power, Cincin-
natus shows his intimate knowledge of their composition by
21
stating contemptuously, "I am an expert in dolls.
not yield."12
I shall
From the dollhouse shelves of his prison
comes the larger-than-life stuffed acorn that lands enigmatically on his bed.
The doll images entwine with Cincinnatus's false view
of the past and each image or view strengthens the spherical trap that forces him into spiral catharsis.
At the toy
shop he falls in love with an idealized nineteenth century.
He escapes briefly by making cute, rag Puskins and Tolstoys -- artists capable of grasping the easeful productivity that eludes Cincinnatus -- but his vicarious love of an
unreal past deepens as he daydreams over glossy, ancient
magazines.
Because Cincinnatus exists in a temporally dis-
eased society; he cannot differentiate bet-v1een the real
artistic promise of relief, as offered by Puskin and Tolstoy, and the pointless graphics of tawdry magazines.
His inability to break out of spherical, dead time operates
as a refinement of the hell that comprises his non-spiral
and doomed society.
Nabokov illuminates Cincinnatus's false dependence
upon impractical and nonprogressive images of time and the
past.
These false and seductive images fuse with Cincinna-
tus's dreams to encase him in the spiral-negating circle.
He blurts out to the shadowy librarian, "Hith this weighty
volume I went down ... as with a ballast, to the bottom of
time."
The librarian, as the only character who empathiz-
22
I
es with Cincinnatus, rejects this debilitating attachment
to non-spiral time with a curt, "No." 13
The narrator heightens the horror and unreality of the
novel by weaving images of classical hell with the stageplay/circus and dream motifs.
The conflict of power and
paralysis within Cincinnatus -- dreamer and participant in
the circus, and a doomed soul in the purgatory of some
other dimension's hell
represents his relationship to
the confused realities of the novel.
The parallel world of
Cincinnatus's society never attains catharsis and he,
therefore, dreams dreams that whirl without a focus or
spiral purpose.
The nightmare that results must torment
him as an artistic hell.
The spherical world that contraverts the spiral tempts
Cincinnatus directly through the vulgar M'sieur Pierre,
and subtly through its siren song of lassitude.
M'sieur
Pierre forces Cincinnatus to the ritual dinner with the
city officials where he tempts him to eat and drink, as
Hades tempted Persephone in Hell.
Unlike Persephone, Gin-
cinnatus must have the wine of "bruderschaft" dripped on
his head as he never submits willingly to any indignity.
As he nears the moment of spiral transcendence, Cincinnatus grows more resistant to the circle's fatal allurements.
Yet, its narcotic and hypnotizing presence possesses the
power to overwhelm him into its languourous, deceptive
trap.
Nabokov presents the hellish emotional influence
'
23
held by false circular time in contrast to the glorious
thrill of relief Cincinnatus experiences in his final catharsis.
Images of the past scrap raw Cincinnatus' artis-
tically sensitive nerves.
These images whirl him to a new
level of torture and disorientation as he reads the glowingly lovely old magazines:
Reveling in all the temptations of the
circle, life whirled to such a state of
giddiness that the ground fell away and,
stumbling, falling, weakened by nausea and
languor -- ought I to say it? -- finding
itself in a new dimensioy .. Yes, matter
has grown old and weary. 4
The new dimension -- the hell of non-spiral time
attempts eternally to enthrall Cincinnatus.
The nauseating
exhaustion that follows his temptation by the spherical
hell of his society echoes the emotional exhaustion and
desire for escape he experienced when as a child he faced
the unhealthy circle.
He watched a strident teacher force
children to violent movement in a Maypole game:
11
With the
squeamish horror that never left me I watched her give the
smallest children shoves to make them whirl faster. 11 15
The
revulsion he experienced precipitated a dream escape from
the crisis -- Cincinnatus floated out the window.
He
flinched away from the evil coercion of children into a
false and deadening imitation of trapped time's circular
movement.
The Maypole incident, ·replete with the irony of
his sterile society's vicious imitation of a fertility
ritual, and the magazine trauma parallel one another
"
'
24
because they emphasize all the horrible aspects of circular
time:
sterility, pain, disorientation and a vacuum of aim-
lessness.
Brittle mechanical time, drained of an earlier "universal fluidity," gets chopped up into worthless segments
and put on M'sieur Pierre's calendar.
time is M'sieur Pierre's milieu.
Dead and aimless
His artificial division
of time into threatening but meaningless days functions as
but another refinement in Cincinnatus's tortures in purgatory.
The headsman loves this false division because it
parallels the ruthless division he makes between head and
body, stopping life's spiral progression.
M'sieur Pierre
attempts to make the calendar into a hideous work of art
as he circles, in crimson ink, the date of execution.
Rodrig earlier flaunted the same calendar before Cincinnatus.
"It's a cute calendar ... isn't it?
this isn't for you." 16
A work of art.
No
The false art of the clock's paint-
ed "tarbrush time" combines with the art of the calendar to
ill·ustrate the complete aesthetic void of circular time,
wherein M'sieur Pierre revels.
Although the headsman terminates Cincinnatus's consciousness -- the medium of personal reality -- the headsman loses control of his victim at the moment of his triumph.
Robert Alter interprets M'sieur Pierre's transitory
triumph as follows:
25
If consciousness is the medium through which
reality comes into being, the sudden and
final obliteration of consciousness through
mechanical means is the supreme affirmation
by human agents -- the r7ecutioner -- of the
principle of unreality.
However, Alter fails to perceive the importance of Cincinnatus's brilliant liberation.
Cincinnatus acts against the
principle of unreality and false circular time by seeking a
spiral release.
The spiral structure that eventually
sweeps him from the novel works in two ways:
first, the
narrator coils Cincinnatus within his past and prepares him
for the grand step; second, Cincinnatus's mind and memory
take him on escapes into the city, which prepare him for the
actual spiritual escape on the scaffold.
At that moment he
transcends the alien dimension of old and weary time into a
parallel dimension, leaving the evil world of his society
to remain as part of the false and dingy artwork lying "in
the artificial remoteness behind the glass." 18 Cincinnatus's soul goes to join "the greater part of him ... in[the]
19
quite different place."
The narrator helps prepare Cincinnatus by taking him
from the cell and returning him to his earliest memories as
a state orphan when the doomed man's only enemies were relentlessly linear time and his own emerging opacity:
"In
the course of time the safe places become ever fewer." 20
From these early uncertainties the narrator pulls Cincinnatus forward in a chronological sweep.
The spiral of the
26
narrative vision overlays the original, linear progression
of Cincinnatus's life.
"Twelve, thirteen, fourteen," the
years flow toward the denouement of the execution; "nineteen, twenty, twenty-one," Cincinnatus weds whorish Martha
and forfeits his chances for anonymity in the false past of
library books. 21 Although the original, inexorably linear
progression through his life had paralyzed Cincinnatus, the
narrator's spiral second-look at the disaster helps to heal
Cincinnatus and prepare him for rebirth.
The narrative's multiple viewpoints validate this
otherwise incoherent sequence of escapes.
The cubistic
presentation of the spiral explains why Cincinnatus's mind
and memory must free him six times from his cell -- the
many views of false freedom prepare him for the "essential
reality" of the true and final escape.
The six abortive
escapes compare to the unprogressing circle as they always
land him back in his cell:
the narrator inverts the pri-
soner and the prison director, allowing Cincinnatus to
•..vander around the town; Cincinnatus leaves by recalling the
little spiritual transports of his courtship; Little Emmie
treacherously helps him "escape"; Rodion shoos Cincinnatus
out the door while he cleans the cell; Martha's family
brings absurd fragments of the outside world with them when
they come to torture Cincinnatus; M'sieur Pierre forces him
to Tamara Gardens for a farcical dinner with the city
officials,
These false escapes reach a climax when Cincin-
27
natus transcends their dinginess and falsehood on the
scaffold.
All of these apparent escapes are vicious circles.
Running uselessly, like a mouse on a wheel, Cincinnatus
gleans only a sense of despair and futility before he winds
up back in his cubicle.
The dinner with the chief offi-
cials appears as the penultimate illusionary escape, and
the play/circus motifs flurry to a burlesque finale as
acrobatic waiters leap across the banquet table.
The
knife's final twist agonizes Cincinnatus as the beloved,
dreamy hills of Tamara Gardens mock him with gem-colored
lanterns twining his initial with M' s.ieur Pierre's.
Death
remains as the only escape truly capable of whirling him
beyond his bitter and htL."Tliliating attempts; "death" is the
final word that Cincinnatus writes.22
Cincinnatus knows that death looms, in the form of the
headsman's axe, as the thrust needed to propel him out of
life's breathless space, as he suggests when he says, "The
sphere of my own life still limits and eclipses my be• - 1123
1ng.
His sparse hopes for a new existence develop in
the final pages through positive sight imagery.
The ubi-
quitous, multiple views of the narrator fleshes Cincinna·tus' s hopes through the contrast of positive sight and
M'sieur Pierre's eyelessness.
The executioner's blind and
selfish ignorance -- a contributing factor to his spurning
the spiral -- glares out at the official dinner party/-
28
Hades-like scene.
A flash of light reveals Cincinnatus's
clean and whitely-outlined profile opposite the "eyeless"
face of M'sieur Pierre.24
The fiend's horrible eyeless-
ness, burdened heavily with a gut-wrenching taint of physical deformity and ghastly mental deficiency, starkly embodies the narrator's view of Pierre's malignity.
M'sieur
Pierre's homicidal misuse of time brings him to an animal's
blank state of consciousness.
Nabokov follows the abominable dinner party with a
positive vision.
Rodion carries a great, dusky moth into
the cell moments before Cincinnatus's trip to the scaffold.
The moth represents one of Bader's "little universes" -the lepidoptera motif.
Nabokov touches his characters di-
rectly through the butterfly's signals, as he touched Pnin
during that character's crisis.
In Pnin, "a quiet, lacy-
winged little green insect circled ... above Pnin's glossy,
bald head." 25 In that novel, the moth brings serenity.
Nabokov uses Cincinnatus's moth, however, to illustrate the
prisoner's superior vision as Cincinnatus tenderly admires
the one thing of gentle reason brought within his cell.
The moth's "visionary wings," with their "perpetually open
eyes," empower it with sight's healing virtues. 26 Cincinnatus's own vision, paralleling that of the all-seeing
narrator, follows the moth to its hiding place, beyond Rodion's faulty sight.
Not only does Cincinnatus's ability
to unravel the moth's vanishing act imply his power to
29
unite other disparate elements, but it reflects his budding artistic intuition and ability to travel through the
spiral into the separate dimension of "real" time.
His
artistic fire flashes forth at the execution to spiritualize the trapped time of the circle.
The moth presages the
cathartic spiral when it escapes out the broken window,
which separating glass pane shatters when Rodrig dismantles
the cell.
The moments immediately before the execution unveil
the vitality of Cincinnatus's approaching freedom.
M'sieur
Pierre almost drops his watch in anger, and he literally
loses his constrictive control of time at the end to become
once again a loathsome larva.
The whole artificial con-
struction of M'sieur Pierre's society shudders and collapses at Cincinnatus's imminent transcendence into spiral
time's parallel universe.
The sky cracks, trees fall,
painted scenes crumble and chaos rules in the lightning.
During the last moments before his death, Cincinnatus
stops considering the unnecessary count-down, similar to
the worthless division of time into seconds and days.
He
achieves new vision by looking about him after his death/rebirth and then goes to join "beings akin to him."
The
apparently finished, circular structure of the event explodes into a spiral; confusion reigns for the transparent
and useless subhumans while Cincinnatus escapes -- visionary and clarified.27
"'
LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!
Nabokov uses the narrator of Look at the Harlequins!,
Vadim N., to present in a mock autobiography a life confused in time and space. Vadim's muddled "duration and
direction" 1 -- a subconscious denial of the spiral -- spins
across his life, tying together his moods of love and madness.
His physical and emotional turmoil arises from this
refusal to recognize time's true spiral shape.
Ironically,
the circle that exists as the spiral's spiritual opposite
represents to Vadim the constrictive shape of hell.
Nabo-
kov implies that Vadim's ignorance of time's spiral contrasts with the ideal possibilities of progressing and
flowing artisLic consciousness.
The author presents this
contrast -- the circle's hell with the spiral's nirvana-by drawing transparent analogies between Vadim's tortured
life and his own artistically perfect existence.
Vadim's narration, an exposition from memory meant to
spoof Nabokov's own Speak, Memory, unveils examples of past
'temporal blindness to the scrutiny of current knowledge.
The omniscient tone, along with confident, casual asides to
an unnamed "You," causes the reader to accept Vadim as a
reliable narrator, despite his occasional collages of remembered madness.
Vadim carries the reader through the
narrative to an epiphany that occurs simultaneously \vith
his own.
The concluding catharsis drifts Vadim out of the
30
31
novel to a perfect parallel universe of acknowledged spiral
time and memory, at the same moment that the reader perceives the solution to the novel's puzzling format.
Vadim speaks, in 1974, from a realm beyond the novel's
physical frame, 'tvhich ended four years earlier -- after his
seizure on June 15, 1970. 2 His assumed wedding ·with "Reality,"3 and the conclusion's cathartic paralysis
his
body's final revolt against his misconceptions of time -catapult him out of the novel into the spiritualized realm
of "real" spiral time. Vadim recovers at a hospital in
"Catapult, Cal.," 4 a locale that prefigures the final step
in his spiral evolution.
The reader guesses that Vadim,
whose life closely parallels Nabokov's, springs beyond the
n.ovel to spiritually shadmv the author; he shares Nabokov' s
ironic perspective and borrows his dry wit.
The fact that
Vadim speaks above the time of the novel explains how he
produces an imaginative creation that had eluded him prior
·to his seizure.
His extranovellar existence also illumin-
ates the title, Look at the
Har~equins!
Nabokov uses the
fanciful connotations of harlequins to establish a colorful reality developing from an unreal and timeless context.
Vadim's rattled, old grand-aunt cried out the title's command to the somber, hysterical young artist.
"Harlequins"
mix reality and imagination within Vadim's eccentric mind
to form a dancing metaphor for art.
him, "Invent the world!
When she next commands
Invent reality!," 5 Vadim takes her
32
instructions as seriously as Lolita's Humbert Humbert
receives his crazed aunt's dicta.
Vadim complies by creat-
ing the Reality that would be his last lover, the spiral
progression of his wives, and his own grand-aunt in literature.
Vadim recognizes his shadow existence as a literary
character designed after Nabokov himself.
Vadim also al-
ludes to the author's control of "galley slave" characters
while constructing a metaphor for his own life, as he lives
in the nonspiral parallel universe of misconceived time:
My life is a parody, an inferior variant of
another man's life, somewhere on this ...
earth. A demon ... was forcing me to impersonate
that other man, that other writer who was
and always would be incomparably greater,
healthie~ and crueler than your obedient
servant.b
Vadim hints at his self-conscious existence as a parody
formed to confound readers.
The hell of the circle also
tints this passage as the cruel demon of Nabokov's muse
forces Vadim to spin neuroticaly within its disorienting
boundaries.
Vadim, his three wives, and his daughter cir-
cle the vortex like "five silvery peas ... coaxed by judicious turns ... into the center of the helix." 7 This trapped
artistic state parallels Vadim's place in faulty, nonspiral time; he whirls with the other characters within a
memoir.
Nabokov develops the reader's conception of arti-
ficer/artifact interaction by visibly swaying the strings
of a pet "author," who in turn moves his created "charac-
33
ters."
Vadim not only moves within an artistic cage of
Nabokov's devising but also writhes in a personal trap of
linear time.
His sequential, segmental approach to life
almost destroys him.
Only when Reality liberates him with
her "exquisite quibble," does he integrate spiral time into
his view of space and escape from the malignant, reductive
approach to time that had characterized M'sieur Pierre's
world.
After Reality's revelation, Vadim's memory forms a
pattern of thesis, antithesis and synthesis to bring his
autobiography to fruition.
Without the spiral, he lacked
the necessary perspective:
"I tried to write The Invisible
I=_~!=h,
a book similar to that in the reader's hand.
d oubt I was no t rea d y f or~•t .... n8
No
He needed to -.;vri te
"something miraculous and unique, [that] would at last
answer fully the craving, the aching thirst." 9 His progress towards Reality prepares him to write the ultimately
gratifying novel.
He illuminates the steps, through the
spiral advance of his wives, in his address to the woman
named "Reality," the unnamed "You" mentioned above:
My previous loves are not dulled or
coarsened when directly contrasted with
the purity of your being, the magic, ...
the reality of your radiance. Yet, 'reality'
is the key word here; and the gradual
perception of that reality was nearly fatal
to me.lO
Vadim's perception of Reality's place within his life
causes his great seizure as he painfully must expand
34
his constricted circular view to fit the purity of a
spiral structure implicit in that perception.
His life's
mad undercurrent spends its stored energy in that twentyday burst.
Vadi.m does not die at the conclusion, stylisti-
cally or physically, as H. Grabes suggests.ll
If Vadim
dies at all in the book, he dies at the seizure's first
spasm as his memories of that moment seem to come from the
icy and final perspective of the nether world:
"I wished
to go back to you Reality, to life, ... and I could not." 12
He wants to return to Reality because she shone with all
the true love that he never possessed -- she combined all
of his other contrasting wives' best traits, indicated by
the pattern of Irises on her skirt.l3
But the spasm's
brief obliteration holds only until she frees him and
starts time anew in his hospital room.
Vadim regains con-
sciousness and welcomes the post-seizure world:
A small soundless move that came to a brief
soundless stop and then was continued in a
slow, infinitely slow sequence of suspension
dots in diamond type. I emitted a bellow
of joy, and Reality entered.14
The ndots in diamond type" combine the literary, harlequin
reality of Vadim's imagination with the true world's reality, where he can be only a character in a novel.
Reality's
entrance prepares him for the final lines -- when true
reality merges with aesthetic, subjective reality -- where
he fades out of the narrative, "mumbling comfortably, dropping off, mumble dying away --
"15
At that instance he
35
moves to the spiritual nirvana of the spiral that he attains after he has transcended the hellish constriction of
the circle.
As a character who flows over the line of the novel's
reality into that parallel existence of spiral artistic
consciousness, Vadim combines Nabokov's sleight-of-hand
with his own distorted perceptions of reality.
Vadim
dreams with eerie prescience of a "plotter who not only
knew nothing of [his life's] real object but insisted on
making inept moves that seemed to preclude the slightest
possibility of success." 16 Not only does Vadim, as narrator, force the reader into an awareness of the omnipresent
author, but he starts the reader on the trail to finding
the real flaw of the narrative-- Vadim's confusion of time
and space.
Only later does the reader discover that Vadim
catapulted beyond the novel's linear frame and its accompanying perception problem.
The surprise of this discovery
helps shock the reader out of his own non-spiral hell of
linear, unimaginative reading.
Vadim hints at the head-
spinning trickiness of the plot in the first paragraph:
Yet out of those very mistakes he unwittingly
wove a web, in which a set of reciprocal
blunders on my part caused me to get involved
and fulfill the ~7stiny that was the only
aim of the plot.
The reader works to the end and transcends the novel and
the myth that characters must maintain a predictable and
stable orientation.
36
Nabokov uses Vadim, however, as more than a delightfully mercurial creation; manipulated by the author, Vadim
convulses under time's powerful effects.
Vadim's evolution
to a clearly spiral temporal outlook manifests itself in
aspects of his aging body and in his incipient madness.
H.
Grabes relates Vadim's spiritual evolution towards reality
with his marriages.l8
Vadim's body writhes to the tension
of time and space as they oppose one another within him.
His erroneous, spherical time frame -- similar to that in
Invitation to a Beheading -- causes him painful vertigo as
it deflects the intruding thrusts of actual time.
For
example, Vadim's youthful perceptions of his own body disturb him to the point of hysteria.
As a drivingly physical
man, Vadim keenly enjoys his sexuality.
But his naked
body, reflected in Iris's boudoir mirror, shocks him into
one of the book's detailed seizures.
Vadim never consid-
ered his genitalia as ugly, but his disgusted perception of
the source of one of his highest pleasures combines with
the day's artistic failures:
A warning spasm shot through my nervous
system. The fiends of my incurable ailment,
'flayed consci~~sness' were shoving aside
my harlequins.
The seizure crushes him completely when he receives his
publisher's rejection letter.
Since the literary failure
overlaps the sexual revulsion, the buffeting of these two
closely-linked drives nearly shatters him.
Sexuality and
37
art blend with the lost harlequins of imagination to produce the attack while Vadim is still too young and confused about time to fend them off.
The scene's importance becomes apparent when Vadim
repeats the pattern later, minus the revulsion and spasm.
The aging process and an evolution towards reality calm
Vadim's nerves.
He gives his face and body letter grades
when he views his naked reflection before proposing to
Reality.
He then juxtaposes his physical features with his
Russian and English novels.
At seventy-one, he reaches the
point where he can view his C-minus face and C-plus body in
conjunction with his unfulfilled literary repertory without
suffering a debilitating revulsion; time and reality are
almost within his grasp.
After a lifetime of agonizing, Vadim also changes his
attitude about revealing his mental instability to his
lover, which indicates his progress towards mental health
and the healing spiral:
"I ... knew that its display was a
mere formality on my part and could not obstruct the natural flow of our common fate."20
Reality helps him overcome
the spatial delusions that had spawned his youthful madness.
The other women in Vadim's spiral progression of
wives -- a progression indicated by the offhand reference
to them as his "three or four successive wives" -- fail to
guide or support him.
They either ignore the problem or
think him neurotic and silly to worry about the substance
38
of space.
Despite the ignorant and uninterested opinions of
Iris, Annette and Louise, the overall importance of Vadim's
insular view of time prevents him from properly assembling
life's components:
My battle with factual, respectable life
still consisted of sudden delusions, sudden
reshufflings -- kaleidoscopic, stained
glass reshufflings -- of fragmented space. 21
Vadim's spatial views needed redefining with spiral time
functioning as the fluid, connective filament.
Without
that filament, the reshuffled scenes lie flat as snapshots
of frozen space.
Sometimes cinematic images snap around
within his mind -- struggling to cohere with actual time
resulting in mad, disjointed tableaus, such as the dentistoffice party. 22
The inherently spiral process of memory -- the thesis
of the past combining with the antithesis of the present
into a synthesis of recall -- also evades Vadim.
His sta-
tic memory, also reminiscent of snapshots, does not work
smoothly with her sister of preconception.
They mirror the
past, but do not intertwine it with the present and future:
The forefeel of fame was as heady as the
old wines of nostalgia. It was remembrance
in reverse, a great lakeside oak reflected
... in such clear waters that its mirr~3ed
branches looked like glorified roots.
Only after Vadim S'tvirls to Reality's culminating revelation
do the static images of the past lose their deadening
39
stiffness.
Without their newly-born dancing freedom, which
liberates his memory from simply reflective recall into a
i:rue source of artistic insight, the autobiography in ques·tion would have failed like The Invisible Lath.
Without spiral time, Vadim also conceives of eras of
his life as static and solitary.
For example, he leaves
the whole first part of his life behind when Iris dies,
stating, "I simply abandoned the flat, telling the maid to
dispose ... of all those unwanted things." 24 He cannot
connect the catastrophic segment of his wife's murder with
the rest of his life; he excludes time's envelope of sequences that combines past and future into a pattern of
sanity.
The physical manifestation of this denial of time's
enveloping spiral surfaces in ·the guise of a terrible,
convulsive cramp whenever he tries to swim in the ocean.
The wave of time grabs him through the fluid, hauntingly
timeless medium of water:
I have often attempted to explain ... to
learned and ironical doctors, the strange,
hideous segmental quality of those pulsating
pangs that make a huge worm of me with
limbs transformed into successive coils
of agony.25
His body convulses under the pressure of thwarted time,
echoing his actual temporal condition with spiraling loops
of muscular pain.
He nearly dies because of his own self-
imposed, faulty segmentation of time.
The cramp occurs at
40
the moment of greatest crisis in Vadim's life.
He vainly
tries to swim out to Iris, but seizes up in the spasm.
The
woman dies later and time sweeps her permanently beyond his
reach.
Time madly becomes linked to Vadim through such inexplicable seizures, appearing as more intensely colored with
insanity as he ages.
For example, after the narrator
attacks the sadistic Russian agent Orlov, he notes that
their combined ages makes 140, then checks his knuckles and
·watch:
mad." 26
11
I listened to my wristwatch.
It ticked like
The author's severe structuring of those corrnnents,
without any softening transitions, focuses the reader's attention closely upon Vadim's madly linear conception of
time's progression and the violence that accompanies that
conception.
Vadim swerves closer: to madness as he ages because the
pressure builds up within his mind through his suppression
of time's spiral flow.
Ironically, Vadim attempts tore-
sist: time through his. valiant desire to love a woman fortythree years younger than he, hoping futilely that this will
help stave off the incapacitating and finally fatal ramifications of his mortality -- the ultimate twists of time.
But the woman makes time's unalterably relentless nature
all too clear when she explains his main flaw:
His morbid mistake is quite simple. He
has confused direction and duration. He
speaks of space but he means time. His
41
impressions along the ... route ... refer to a
series of time events, and not to block~ of
painted space. Time is not reversible. 7
This shattering message comes from a woman he outdistances
by decades in the flow of time.
It makes the reader aware
that the whole operating principle of the novel-- Vadim's
hatred of space -- is a lie.
The novel merits rereading
from this newly-acquired vantage point of properly aligned
spiral time and space.
Nabokov intends the reader to use
this knowledge as the thesis for a new, triadic rereading
of the book.
The loathing that produces this confusion of time and
space can be traced to an infinitely sad rebellion within
him.
His inner turmoil parallels an observation on Nabokov
made by Douglas Fowler:
'mad'
"Perhaps what he describes as
[Nabokov regarding his own mind] is the refusal to
accept the banal and brutal facts of time and death."28
However, when Vadim's madness becomes clarified into sanity, heralded by the most delicious sleep the insomniac
ever experienced, he acknowledges that he must accept the
pathetic sadness of his affair with Reality.
After his
seizure, and resultant confrontation with time's spiral,
the woman wheels him around in a chair.
Their relationship
alters from one based on mutual admiration and basic physical equality to one centered on a guardian/ward interaction.
Vadim adapts gradually to his fresh perceptions and
depends upon his lover's ministrations to orient him.
42
Although the full importance of time and space emerges
only at that denouement, the reader can detect early their
influence on Vadim's self-imposed trap.
Vadim balances be-
tween madness and an artistic interpretation of time's apparent inconsistencies, but for all his efforts, he finds
only a tissue paper refuge when he seeks to escape:
"Only
the writing of fiction, the endless recreation of my fluid
self could keep me more or less sane." 2 9
vainly against his fluid self
Vadim struggles
a self which contrasts
with the static form he wants to impose on time -- and the
constraints of a circular viewpoint.
The circular, repetitive cycle -- emblematic of Vadim's misapprehended life and denial of the spiral -- unseals for him all the horrors of hell, suggested earlier
through the presence of Nabokov's demon muse.
Vadim gloats
over the invocation of images of that vertiginous torture
for murderous, mindless Starov:
[Starov] remembered ... where a miniature
train ... pursued a circular coarse through
a brambly ... nightmare grove whose dizzy
flowers nodded continuous assent to all the
horrors of childhood and hell .... I am not
vindictive; yet I like to dwell in fancy
on the image of that little green tra~n,
running on, round and round, forever. 0
Echoes of the train's fiendish motion haunt Vadim during
one of his life's crises.
Fanciful elves of his imagina-
tion, living paintings, run circles around him when he
tells future wife Louise about his neurotic conception of
p •
43
space.
They move "like that eternal little pleasure-park
train, brushing the brambles." 3 1 Vadim's dread over
Louise's possible response expresses itself in a vision of
an entrapping circle of insane art.
He connects his crea-
tion then with a claustrophobic, weed-lined avenue of hell
that momentarily leads him farther from unification with
the healing spiral.
The allusions to Starov's torment
come significantly at a moment when Vadim concentrates upon
his temporal delusions.
Circular, unproductive motion, reminiscent of his own
spatial/temporal malfunction, causes Vadim sensations of
vertigo and terror.
Waves of nausea buffet him when he
considers rearranging a "spiral of space" for Louise which
would entail an upheaval of his daughter, Bel.32
Although
the actual terror probably stems from concern over inconveniencing Bel, it relates directly to his static domestic
scheme (new wife, happy home, etc.) which stifles his
passive temporal vice.
Vadim's entire domestic history,
from Iris through Annette and Louise, gyrates uselessly to
the theme of one-dimensional time.
Each woman forms the
antithesis of the previous, but the process never resolves
itself until Reality enters as the synthesis.
Nabokov en-
dows her with time's actual spiral power to release Vadim
from his redundant, matrimonial trap.
She also emerges as
the cohesive, guiding force of the novel, thus transcending
her role as the next lover in Vadim's series.
44
Reality organizes and instigates the changes within
Vadim.
She channels his energies into the writing of Look
at the Harlequins!, as his frequent asides to her indicate.
Without her connecting presence, and the catharsis her love
sparks, he could not have maintained the high level of
narrative control.
Her power implies reality's multi-
faceted influence upon Vadim, as it emphasizes time's connective filament.
As the personification of reality, she
holds the missing ingredients of his unsatisfying love
affairs, and the correct temporal orientation sought by his
psyche.
To sanction all of her abilities, Nabokov grants
her the same direct touch as he bestowed upon Cincinnatus
before his execution; the author graces her with a butterfly:
A yellow butterfly settled briefly on a
clover head, then wheeled away in the
wind.
'Metamorphoza,' you said in your
lovely elegant Russian.33
The butterfly validates her later assertions, as well as
alluding to her force of change; she metamorphoses Vadim,
and wheels him out of the novel in a spiral breeze.
Be-
cause Vadim rarely quotes her, the above statement bears
the added impact of novelty and focuses attention upon her.
With the power of an incantation, her words cause the reader to combine the butterfly's significant name with its
actions.
She also directs and restrains Vadim with the
alluring touch of a welcome change.
She reshapes his life
45
with the firm, "No, you don't" with which she met him.34
But the key change comes about when she reads the faulty
chapter of Ardis.
The moment of Vadim's great seizure cor-
responds exactly with the moment she reads his spatial
expose and perceives the nature of his delusions.
After he recovers, Vadim admits to redefined values
and an eased conscience.
The itching questions of his
life, especially the one about his nature as a literary
character, no longer torment him:
"Problems of identity
have been, if not settled, at least set. Artistic insights have been granted." 35 His insights mesh with Reality's "exquisite quibble" about time, which enables him to
write the memoir.
He flashes the flaws of his life upon
its literary screen through the newly-clarified lens of his
perception.
The spiral perspective then glowingly illumin-
ates his whole tortured pattern of growth with the sparks
of health and attained perfection.
PALE FIRE
In contrast to Invitation to a Beheading and Look at
the Harlequins!, which function as coils of spiritual liberation, Pale Fire portrays the miasma that comes from an
insane conception of time as closed and non-spiral.
Pro-
fessor Botkin (alias Charles Kinbote) not only deliberately
and insanely traps himself within a crystal artifact, he
also lacks a balanced conception of time and place to sustain himself once he completes the imaginative construction
of Zembla.
His spherical disorientation accounts for some
of the despair he evidences in his references to the evenings at Cedarn, which haunt him with self-induced spheres
of "rotating malicious music ... a carrousel inside and outside [his] head."l
His erroneous conceptions are compara-
ble to those of the pompous, scholarly Dr. Faustus of
Christopher Marlowe.
Devilish conjuring circles, such as
those that enmeshed Kinbote, also destroyed Professor Faustus.
Nabokov contrasts Kinbote's pathological fantasies
with John Shade's conceptions of time and space.
Shade's
search for the "key to life and death" allows him to exist
beyond the creation of his poetry and maintain his sanity
despite his failure as a father.
Furthermore, Shade's art
serves to alleviate his agonies by channeling them into a
search for answers.
For Kinbote, art replaces existence,
46
47
which misconception makes his one of the "rich monstrous"
b~ains
deriving intense enjoyment and rapturous pangs from
... the distant mountain shapes melting into ... the afterglow."2
Each image surfaces as a supreme moment of art,
just as Kinbote's mad actions lie roundly sufficient within
themselves.
His artistic imagination attempts to constrain
those actions and non-spiral perception of time, without
regard for the true relationships.
Kinbote's segmentation
of events, such as a blissful disregard for the repercussions of snapping another professor's tie, also points out
his misconception of time; he ignores causal relationships.
Kinbote's delusions of non-spiral, snapshot time trap him,
much as Vadim's misconceptions trap him with a segmental
cramp.
However, Shade transcends death through his imagin-
ative conception of a new thesis to compliment the thesis/antithesis/synthesis of this life.
He goes beyond Kin-
bote's end-stopped segmentation of time, which saves Shade
from the ragged traumas of his personal life.
Shade steps past the artifice and its crystalline
sphere.
The control he maintains over his art functions as
the novel's healthy norm; it emerges in the following
But we all know it cannot last,
The mountain is too weak to wait
Even if reproduced and glassed
In me as in a paperweight.3
Shade's balanced view of art admits that each separate
48
creation cannot endure.
The moments of divine conception
and delivery produce a shining artifact, but the stabbing
beauty of the birth must fade.
"The mountain" (each artis-
tic vision) is too weak to bear the burden of a continuous
artistic interpretation.
The sane distance that Shade
maintains from the moment of creation, therefore, separates
him from Kinbote and breaks apart their "two more or less
fused profiles."4
Without Shade's mature detachment from
art, he could have spun helplessly in the same self-pity
that paralyzes Kinbote.
Bader, Stegner and others inter-
pret the two artists' otherwise reflective interaction in
markedly different manners.
But no matter which artist is
the "real" artist in the novel, the controller/controlled
relationship to the artifact orchestrates reciprocally with
the pity and love that move between Shade and Kinbote,
powering the plot.
Nabokov centers upon
Kinbot~,
through the madman's
narration, to establish the irony of breathtaking beauty
joined with the repulsive ugliness of insanity
~-
a dicho-
tomy within effective art -- in the human light of John
Shade's pity for Kinbote.
That pity touches the reader,
who then understands more deeply Kinbote's spiritually
paralyzed state, which compares also with the physical decay of Maud Shade and her terrier.
The constricting paralysis Kinbote endures within his
distorted, spherical reality forces him to dream an escape
49
from a limbo of timeless madness and loneliness.
He shiv-
ers in sensual delight as a child when he beholds a man
transported out of the dreariness and disgust of banal
ex~
istence:
Into (the] roses and thorns there walked a
black shadow: a tall young minister ... .
Guilty disgust contorted his thin lips .. .
His clenched hands seemed to be gripping
invisible prison bars. But there is no
bound to the measure of grace which man
may be able to receive. All at once his
look §hanged to one of rapture and reverence.
Kinbote also longs to escape the roses and thorns (passions and pains) of his imprisoned existence by being
spiritually transported out of life with an ironic touch of
devine madness -- a parody of artistic inspiration.
He
desperately constructs Zembla to counterfeit the minister's
ecstasy and seemingly orgasmic release of tension.
In an
equally striking image, Zembla resembles the picture of
frothy waves seen through a child's sleep-enchanted eyes
that turns out to be one of mournful sheep when viewed
through awake adult eyes.6
reality.
The illusion far surpasses
Kinbote adds mythical madness to the otherwise
bleak Appalachian winter of loneliness that he undergoes,
living next to a meticulous, but basically average New England poet.
The painfully raw emotions and spiritual isolation
that drive Kinbote to construct crystalline Zembla surface
in the following statement from late in the novel, as Kin-
(l.
so
bote nears the moment of his suicide:
And the tender and terrible memories, and
the shame, and the glory, and the maddening
intimation, and the star no party member can
ever reach.7
These phrases encompass the frantic love and desire for
escape with which Kinbote invest
his creation.
His tender
and terrible past drives him into Zembla's fantasy world,
but continues to haunt him there with unreachable stars of
normalcy and sane beauty.
The maddening intimations could
be his sensual longings which always trap him in empty,
homosexual affairs.
However, the conflicts and terrors
within Kinbote keep him from being the mishappen monster,
whose narrative voice croaks unconvincingly, conceived by
Douglas Fowler.8
His madness and homosexuality stem from
the artistic fervor, unable to resolve itself in a spiral
of synthesis, that also separates him from the mediocrity
of Wordsmith.
Yet he tries to overcome some of his frus-
tration, and self-immolating artistic heat, by loving John
Shade.
As stated by Mary McCarthy, "Love is the burden of
Pale Fire, love and loss." 9 Sobs of pity, loss and bursts
of hysterical laughter mitigate the morbidly graphic or
scatological imagery of the novel.
For example, Kinbote
calls Shade on the phone and helplessly dissolves into
tears, overwhelmed by his own loneliness.
Shade emerges
as the novel's most humane character as he changes plans so
51
that he can escort his psychically-crumpled neighbor on a
walk.
Shade's qualities of love and redeeming hope compen-
sate for his failure to be an innovative poet.
Shade's
humanity, and spiral dreams of an afterlife, keep him from
the morass of Kinbote's despair.
The phone call expands upon the controller/controlled
relationship, mentioned above, through its reversal of a
scene envisioned by the artistically-circumscribed Kinbote.
He had planned to be the comforter ("There, there John")
after an emergency phone ca11. 1
Kinbote envisions, but
°
Shade actually creates and performs.
The controlling mechanisms and ideas of manipulation,
however, pale beside the real relationship of love and pity
between Shade and Kinbote.
The intense light of Pale Fire
refracts through tears of pity, such as those Shade weeps
for his daughter Hazel.
Her lack of artistic perspective
augments Kinbote's blindness to form a pattern of constraint.
The author's apparent pity for Kinbote's and
Hazel's spiritually-hobbled state comes through the use of
the same "microcosm" with which he blessed the relationship
of Vadim and Reality -- that of the moth or butterfly.
The
deformed specimen of Kinbote's imagining, however, produces
no healthy effects as it gets roughly knocked down in the
context of the king's lonely prison room:
Around the lantern ... a batlike moth blindly
flapped-- until the punter knocked it down ....
52
The king yawned and the illumined card
~;:i~~~ dissolved in the prism of his
1
Kinbote loses sight of his surroundings because of this
brightly-focusing prism which corresponds to the crystalline eclipsing of his own life by Zembla.
The haunting,
dusky moth of Invitation to a Beheading and the yellow
spright of Look at the Harlequins! make Pale Fire's feeble
representative even more sad because they heralded the joyous transfiguration of their novel's protagonist; this
batlike creature presages only future blindness and death.
The underside of Shade's intense pity, and the occasional soft touches from the author coming through the conn.ective "microcosms," function throughout with filaments of
bracing beauty to offset the agony.
In the words of Na-
bokov:
Beauty plus pity -·- that is the closest
we can get to a definition of art. Where
there is beauty there is pity for the
simple reason that beauty must die: beauty
always dies, the manner dies with the
matter, the world dies with the individua1. 12
Pale Fire's beauty lies in its recognition of its artists'
mortality.
The pity comes in varying degrees from the
state of their personal acceptance of death and reality.
Shade searches throughout his poem for clues to an afterlife.
He never achieves certainty.
But the statement of
hope, blended with a mature knowledge of death, comes from
the first lines of his poem:
53
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. 13
He acknowledges death, especially in the context of dashed
hopes -- a pervasive aspect of Kinbote's, Hazel's and
Shade's lives.
The poem emphasizes the serene quality of
Shade's acceptance of the many defeats of his life.
As
Kinbote notes, "Instead of the wild poetry promised here,
we get a jest or two, ... and ... a wonderful radiance of tenderness and repose." 1 4 The tender quality develops from
the second line as the shadowed fluff of the bird's surviving after-image exists beyond the moment of death.
How-
ever, Kinbote lacks the same calm attitude; he admits his
doubts most strongly in fits of extreme emotion.
Although
he steadfastly claims belief in a standard version of a
Christian God, he edges his belief with stinging fear.
The
obvious contradiction is clarified in his musings on afterlife:
[E]ven the most demented mind still
contains within its diseased mass a sane
basic particle that survives death and
suddenly expands, ... in peals of healthy
and triumphant laughter.l5
Kinbote's apparent confidence constitutes his whistling in
the dark.
He actually cannot conceive of a life after
death that would welcome him any more enthusiastically than
do his scornful colleagues.
There is a tacit assumption
that death somehow takes into account the
~vild
artistry of
54
the insane soul and makes special dispensations for salvation.
But Kinbote hinges the sane particle of his own
deep, perverse difference from those around him.
His self-
knowledge precipitates out into palpable fear:
There is a chance yet of my not being
excluded from Heaven, and that salvation
may be granted to me de~~ite the frozen mud
and horror in my heart.
However, Kinbote's horror eases somewhat as he returns
John Shade's pity with even the pale love that his own
narcissism allows.
Ellen Pifer believes that Kinbote's
self-love renders him indifferent to others. 17 She sup-
ports her belief by citing Kinbote's daydream that Shade
suffers another heart attack, which prompts a grief-stricken call from Sybil; Kinbote wants to play compassionate
neighbor.
However, his thoughtless desire springs from a
bleak need to escape "the crackling of old death in [his]
brain." 18
He could not conceive of anyone calling him
without some disaster sparking the summons.
His doubts
connect directly to fears he holds about his salvation.
Kinbote's loneliness echoes the despair of Smurov in Nabokov's novelette, The Eye.
When narcissistic Smurov tries
to express his love to Vanya, his declaration winds down
into the pitiful remark, "And you are the first person who
has ever told me that I am good .... " 19 Kinbote responds to
Shade's tolerance and pity with a comparable degree of wild
emotion; his warped soul struggles to open for Shade.
In-
55
deed, he gives Shade an invaluable present.
The gaudy silk
robe he presents to Shade on the conservative poet's sixtyfirst birthday, "a veritable dragon skin of oriental
chromas," parallels the foreward, commentary and index to
the poem.20
In tracing Zembla through Pale Fire, Kinbote
imparts to "the rather old-fashioned narrative ... that special rich streak of magical madness which would make it
transcend its time." 21 Kinbote reciprocates Shade's pity
through the gift of color just as Kinbote's artistic fire
overshadows and enwraps the poem.
Also, the beauty of the
commentary, wedded with the poem, transcends the lifetime
of both artists.
Ironically, the poem becomes the pale
fire beside "dazzling Zembla burning in [Kinbote's)
brain. 22 The two poets interact in the only true spiral
of the novel to produce the entwined dance of poem/corrn:nent ..
ary.
Kinbote's and Shade's past agonies resolve into the
synthesis of the art, which survives beyond their limitations.
The loveliness of Shade's pity compels Kinbote to
idealize him.
Nabokov intensifies the tones of Kinbote's
obsession when he juxtaposes them with the love detailed in
"The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn," a poem
translated into French by Sybil Shade.
The narrator placed
all of her forsaken love upon one creature, a fawn shot
down by passing troopers:
Will but bespeak thy
0 do not run too fast; for I/
grave and die." 23
The poem embodies
56
her deep distress over the senseless taking of an innocent
life.
Although Kinbote does not mourn John Shade's death
in the same fashion, he too cannot live without the only
consolation he ever received -- to peek through Shade's
11
jewel bright" windows. 24 His view of those emblems of his
hopeless adoration perhaps sparked the jewel of unattainable Zembla.
Kinbote pens the last line of Shade's poem,
thus joining him in that poetic creation, while also "bespeaking" the poet's grave.
Kinbote concentrates upon a
form of eulogy through the detailed approach of Gradus;
Shade's termination weaves through every step of the insane
assassin.
After the tribute, the ravaging phantoms of
Kinbote's brain attack and carry him off, as the demons
carried off Dr. Faustus.
Kinbote's moments of vague happi-
ness, his sense of "friendships which develop their own
inner duration, their own eons of transparent time," fade
25
to despair.
He must face his own private hell which has
grown steadily in strength and viciousness throughout the
commentary.
Not only does the approach of Gradus signal the death
of Shade, but it must warn of Kinbote's looming suicide,
which the author states must form the undoubtable conclu26
sion to the lonely professor's life.
One of the manifestations of Kinbote's hell appears when the reader understands that throughout the writing of the memoir, Kinbote
knows that Shade is dead.
His support system of pity has
57
disappeared forever.
As in Look at the Harlequins!, the
narrator presents past events from the vantage point of
memory.
Kinbote's awareness of his own absolute isolation
builds from two separate and haunting motifs:
Kinbote's
private hell encloses him in a glass of artifice; Kinbote
compares with Dr. Faustus (mentioned above), who was rent
by devils at the conclusion of his allotted time.
One of the earliest indications that Kinbote exists in
his personally devised, circular hell -- such as enclosed
Starov -- comes from a mythological reference to Cerberus.
The image of the wolf at the gate of Hades appears after
Kinbote's migraines and enervations began to overwhelm him:
The black trunk stands on [an] even larger
one, and there is ... a stuffed fox or coyote
next to them in their dark corner.27
This comment must be read with a strange feeling of chill
as Kinbote imagines the dark dog-like creature lurking next
to his map of the Zemblan palace (suddenly reminiscent of
hell's dark-gated fortress).
Kinbote abruptly ends the
note.
The chill increases because of the grim appearance of
"a headless Mercury, conductor of souls to the Lower
World."28
The apparition lies along the King's escape
route from Zembla.
It foreshadows the death that must
greet him at the completion of his journey and the conclusion of the Zemblan commentary.
The later introduction of
Libitiana, Latin goddess of corpses, adds to the eerie at·-
58
mosphere created by the watchful Cerberus and the decapitated Mercury.
The name of the goddess graces the mansion
where King Charles supposedly dallied with Gordon/Narcissus.
That brief affair relates the destructive nature of
Kinbote's self-obsession.
Narcissus, Gordon and Kinbote
all meet oblivion in the entrapping mirror of self-love.
The haunting procession of these mythical images reveals
Kinbote's awareness, while composing the commentary at Cedarn, that each word inscribed advances the moment of desolation that coincides with the completion of the index.
The narcissistic love of Kinbote for Gordon contrasts
with the love of John and Sybil Shade.
Kinbote invents
Queen. Disa to counterbalance that love, and to reign as
the transcendent emblem for his mythical hell -- his anguished mind.
She stands in his dreams as the perfect love
and model sacrifice that he knew he could never attain in
his world of indifferent affairs.
Kinbote's humanity and
.,
heart-deep longings emerge through his beautiful tribute to
D:i.sa's hopelessly heterosexual love; he yearns for her
normal standard.
But, like all else Kinbote creates within
the spherical vacuum of his misconceptions, Disa evaporates
without leaving a trace of health.
She counterpoints the
strength of "Reality" in Look at the Harlequins!
Kinbote's hell, a crystalline construction, forms his
own destruction and fate.
Kinbote remains trapped within
the glass paperweight artifact that Shade transcended.
The
59
flickering of the Zemblan revolution in the glass factory
presages Kinbote's death; the shivering within the crystal,
even during its construction, produces an explosion that
sends out the ape-like Gradus.
The explosion of the crys-
tal also shatters the maker, encased within its sphere.
The apparently hideous deformity adopted by Odin to escort
the King out of Zembia reflects the spiritual deformity
which will result from the artifact's impending explosion.
A second aspect of Kinbote's spiritual trap, which
elaborates upon his self-imposed hell, grows out of his
tedious existence as a college professor.
His most hyster-
ical cry, "Dear Jesus, do something," follows a paragraphlong sentence enumerating the trivialities of the university's ngreat mansions of madness ... the prison-like edifices."
These structures are juxtaposed with the image of
a "youngster flying -- on a long control line in a droning
circle-- a motor-powered model plane." 29 Kinbote contrasts his imprisoning job with the little plane's controlled circle.
Claustrophobia and despair seize him be-
cause he suddenly perceives the completely leashed, encircled tenor of his life.
The hopeless state of Kinbote's destiny parallels the
life of Dr. Faustus.
Pale Fire seethes with demons and
devils; a literary agent suspects Kinbote of coercing Sybil
to sign the releases in "some peculiar kind of red ink."30
However, Kinbote is not Hephistophilis.
He mirrors the
60
duped Faustus who sold his soul for conjuror's tricks and a
nonexistent kingdom.
Shade functions again for contrast
as he possesses the perspective of time and priorities that
Kinbote and Faustus lack.
Kinbote's corresponding spiritual deadness comes
through in several places.
Although he blusters about fol-
lowing the accepted Christian approach to worship, he emphasizes the name of God rather than the substance.
"In
trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, ... I
submit that the Name of God has priority." 31 He equals
Faustus who had to have the Seven Deadly Sins named to him.
Both scholars lack the real knowledge necessary to make
their education a positively-generative force.
Shade's
strength becomes apparent here because he has needed awareness of the right sort of knowledge.
He enjoyed rambles
with rustic farmer Hentzner because that man knew "the
names of things." 32 Shade also knows the names of the two
true sins, "murder, and the deliberate infliction of
pain."33
His perspective and the prelapsarian knowledge of
Hentzner remain unavailable to Kinbote.
Shade also empa-
thizes spiritually with Kinbote and rejects the uncomfortable epithet "looney''; Kinbote is a "fellow poet."
Kinbote's more dark and devilish side augments his
ignorance, which joins him with Faustus's parody:
I had my demons fill my goetic mirror
to overflow with those pink and mauve
61
cliffs ... I must have made some awful
mistake in my incantations, for the
mountain slope is dry and drear .... 3,
Kinbote spiritually longs for some other power to fill the
void in his heart.
The mountain slope of the paperweight
grows bleak and unfulfilling as the moment of artistic
completion nears.
Kinbote turns then to more frantic in-
vocation of his demon muses.
Faustus summons Helen of
Troy while Kinbote tries to summon images of happy hours
spent wandering the woods with Shade, a name to imply a
conjured demon.
Shade's death precludes the expected joy
and the incantations fail; Kinbote whirls to the conclusion of his soul-bought time.
The agony of his fate also
parallels Faustus's dismemberment.
The horse-courser in
Harlowe; s play pulls off Faustus's s·traw leg.
In Pale
Fire, "a mad Mandevil ... lost a leg in trying to create
antimatter."35
The disastrous results of the demon Man-
devil's conjuring attempts correspond directly to Kinbote's
fate.
He too attempts to create an antimatter, and there-
fore transitory, nation of Zembla.
Although Zernbla results
in Kinbote's destruction, i.t retains the beauty of a polished sphere of crystal.
The reader must perceive Kinbote as hopelessly
trapped.
He sees no escape from his academic duties nor
from his tragic affairs.
His frustrated life compounds
with the pity Shade gives him, which forms the standard of
human beauty that Kinbote vainly attempts to reach.
Once
62
Shade dies, Kinbote has no alternative but to adapt Pale
Fire into a crystal artifact.
He tries to preserve the
poet's human, productive love for himself in a static creation.
The spiral progression is lost.
The poet's death
removes the pity that cushioned Kinbote; Kinbote constructed Zembla in a wild attempt to stave off the cold agony of
Cedarn's lonely evenings.
For Kinbote, Zembla really
answers no questions and serves no purpose.
It remains for
the reader to decipher the meaning behind Zembla's sphere.
Its lovely construction stands as a contrast to the spiral
transcendence of Shade, hinted at by Nabokov.
v .
CONCLUSION
A linear, one-time reading fails to illuminate
Nabokov's novels; it takes a second or third attempt to
realize fully the importance of spiral time in relation to
the temporal illusions and misunderstandings of the narra·tors.
Nabokov makes each novel a coiling puzzle of freedom
and despair that weaves around the triadic series he reveals in Speak, Memory. 1 An inspired reader takes the conclusion back to the beginning of the book and uses it as
the thesis for a second, informed reading, paying careful
attention to the main themes of art, reality, death, time
and memory.
If one considers every word carefully, the
themes within Nabokov's beautifully controlled prose lead
to an epiphany simultaneous with the character's final
moment of catharsis.
The novels revolve around a center of spiral time
which leads to the epiphany of the main characters and
their resultant exits from their respective books.
Al-
though their exits seem to parallel the "escape" central to
Stegner's thesis, the resolution of the plots transcend a
parasitical or unhealthy artistic dependence on this world.
Themain characters go forward into a spiral nirvana of
perfect artistic consciousness.
The confusions and person-
al tragedies of characters such as Cincinnatus, Vadirn, Kinbote and Shade, who wander hopelessly through circular
63
64
hells of constricted time, underline the glorious attainment of spiral nirvana.
The characters' erroneous percep-
tions and questions about their own mortality shadow the
concern that Nabokov displays about his own eventual death:
as Douglas Fowler notices, the death of consciousness revol·ts Nabokov. 2
Each of the three novels examined in this
study delves cautiously into the nether world that Nabokov
envisions as the thesis of the next series -- the parallel
universe of Shade's, Cincinnatus's and Vadim's implied
afterlife.
Either as characters or narrators, they go be-
yond the end of their allotted linear time.
Nabokov's
imposition of a spiral structure upon death eases its anguish and uncertainty as that structure causes it to take
on the healthy connotations of the synthesis phase of any
lively spiral.
The evolution of Cincinnatus's execution
into a new birth follows this pattern, turning that vicious
act into an event meriting an invitation.
spiral time also enwraps Pale Fire.
The process of
Kinbote, through the
guiding purpose of the author, is obsessed with linear
echoes in time and space, such as Gradus' s shadowing ap·proach to Goldsworth through the vehicle of "Pale Fire."
Kinbote can conceive of parallels in one-dimensional time,
but he cannot connect them all into the unifying spiral
pattern that makes a sane "web of sense" out of the seemingly discontiguous facts of past and future, death and
birth.
This non-spiral view prevents him from escaping the
65
fate that time places at the concluding moment of the index.
Kinbote's time, like Faustus's, runs out completely
and stops irrevocably.
Kinbote's inability to organize the
coil of causal relationship -- spiral tendons that connect
the past and future -- intensifies the effects of his hysteria; the false spiral of Zembla's artifice can lead hlin
to no other synthesis than suicide.
Furthermore, Nabokov develops the importance of
causality to underline differences between a true spiral
view of time and death and a statically segmented conception.
Cause and effect are vitally important in Invitation
to a Beheading as Cincinnatus's unhealthy and counterproductive obsession with a technicolor past results, through
a series of accelerating disclosures of his opacity, in
his execution.
Only his hunger for a pattern (the saving
grace of John Shade), and a desire to surpass the patchwork
dolls around him enable him to experience the spiritual
revelation that attends his decapitation.
He transcends
the nebulous hell of his society through the overriding
causal connection of time's true spiral shape that bursts
through the brittle circle.
Circular hells, varying in their horrible strengths,
play an important role in the novels.
They illustrate the
ghastly and morbid results of a non-spiral temporal orientation, forming a contrast to the spiral catharsis experienced by Shade, Cincinnatus and Vadim.
The sphere that
66
comprises Cincinnatus's society tempts him like Hades
tempted Persephone in Greek mythology.
M'sieur Pierre
attempts to seduce Cincinnatus into obeying the warped
rules of a circular world.
quin~!,
Also, in Look at the Harle-
Vadim gleefully recounts the circular purgatory he
envisions for Starov.
Nabokov has Kinbote writhing in an
intensely personal inferno of suffocating insanity, punctuated by ghoulish visitations of nightmare figures from
Greek mythology and allusions to Faustus's dismemberment.
These images of hell, pervading all the novels, present the
darkness to which Nabokov dooms the noncreative mind.
Na·-
bokov balances that ominous darkness with the clear, brilliant: paradise of spiritual catharsis, such as Vadim,
Shade and Cincinnatus experienced.
The haunting promise
of some other existence, one that transcends all the errors
and misconceptions, compensates for the stiffling hell of
circular time.
Nabokov formulates the creative use of memory as one
possible escape from that hell, and from the blank mystery
of death.
In Look at the Harlequins!, Vadim's narrative
voice relates his past blindness from the vantage point of
mature knowledge and temporal awareness.
The kaleidoscopic
uncertainty of scenes from Kinbote's memory, in Pale Fire,
serves as a contrast to the self-satirizing vignettes designed by the literary Vadim, who learned traumatically the
difference between reality and a circular misconception of
67
time and space.
Kinbote's memory leads him to the despair
that befits his futile, hysterical life.
His idealization
of Shade necessarily stands as a block to his continued ex:i.stence beyond the chronicling of the "events" that culminate in the poet's death.
Kinbote's inability to put Zem-
bla's startling energy into a truly spiral way of life,
which would free him from the hell of the circle, commits
him to follow John Shade into death.
Kinbote lacks, how-
ever, Shade's talent of asking life pertinent questions
which could have helped him attain a spiritual redemption
equal to Shade's.
The same artistic insight which saves
Shade gives Cincinnatus his singular opacity.
The epiphanies of Shade, Vadim and Cincinnatus combine
with the despair of Kinbote and transfer to the alert
reader.
Each "special reality" remains the personal prop-
erty of each person who approaches the "subject [and] object of true art. "L!-
Nabokov longs to stimulate those rare
"few ... who will jump up, ruffling their hair." 5 His novels
guide a select group who can apply the dynamic energy of
the spiral's triadic series to everything.
The shadow of
the next phase hovers over the backsweep of each spiral and
functions as a metaphor for continuing questions and the
challenges of time.
Nabokov sums up best what epitomizes
the power that drives a creative, spiral approach to good
literature, a parallel to the gratifying life Vadim finally
achieves:
68
We can take the story apart, we can find
out how the bits fit, how one part of the
pattern responds to the other; but you
have to have in you some cell ... that will
vibrate in answer to sensations that you
can neither define nor dismiss. 6
The connective powers of cause and effect, memory, beauty
and art vibrate through the temporal spirals of Nabokov's
novels.
The creative reader must answer the challenge of
Nabokov's illusions and feints_and take the spiral as the
best literary approach to understanding the novels.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: G.P.
Putnam's Sons, 1979), p. 275.
2Mary McCarthy, "A Bolt from the Blue," The New
Republic, 4 June, 1962, p. 21.
3vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.,
1980), p. xxiii.
4c. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, Based
on the original by William Flint Thrall and Addison
Hubbard, 3rd. ed. (New York: The Odyssey Press -- A Division of the Bobbs-Herrill Co., 1960), p. 26.
Svladimir Nabokov, Interview with Herbert Gold,
Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1973),
p. 95.
6Page Stegner, Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of
yladimir Nabokov (New York: The Dial Press, 1966), p. 59.
7vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, trans.
Dmitri Nabokov (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1959), p. 95.
SHerbert Grabes, Fictitious Biographies: Vladimir
Nabokov's English Novels (The Hague-Paris: Mouton and Co.,
B.V., 1977), p. 117.
69
i'
70
9vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Berkeley
Publishing Co., 1962), p. 159.
lONabokov, Interview with Alfred Appel, .Jr., Strong
Opinions, p. 74.
llvladimir Nabokov, Glorz, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (New
York: HcGraw-Hill Book Co., 1973), p. xiii.
12 Julia Bader, Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's
English Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1972), p. 9.
13 Ibid, p. 11.
14 stegner, Escape into Aesthetics, p. 47.
INVITATION TO A BEHEADING
1 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 93.
2 Ibid, p. 73.
3Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 254.
4Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 72.
5Gardner's Art Throu~the Ages, ed. Horst de la
Croix, Richard G. Tansey, et al,, 7th. ed. (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1980), pp. 818-819.
6Nabokov, ~ ta_!:_~_~:m___to a Beheadip_g, pp. 12 and 20.
7Ibid, p. 222.
8Ibid, pp. 92-93.
9Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 252.
lONabokov, Invitation t~~-B~gead~ng, p. 120.
.
71
11 Ibid, p.
19.
12 Ibid p. 113.
'
13 Ibid , p. 54.
14 Ibid
15 Ibid
'
'
pp. 50-51.
p. 96.
16 Ibid, p. 71.
17 Robert Alter, "Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov
and the Art of Politics," in Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations and Tributes, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr.,
Ne-~.vman
and Charles
(Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, a TriQuarterly Book, 1970), p. 46.
18 Nabokov, Invit~tion to a Beheading, p. 76.
19 ~·
. , p • .,.LLU.
,.. "
.LD~U,
20 Ibid
21 Ibid
'
'
p. 24.
pp. 27 and 30.
22 Ibid, p. 206.
23 Ibid, p. 89.
24Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 190.
25 v1 d. .
. ( New Yor k : Avon Boo k s, Bar d
a ~m~r Na b ok ov, Pnln
ed., 1969), p. 171.
26 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading_, p. 206.
27Ibid, pp. 222-223.
72
LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!
1 vladimir Nabokov, Look.at the Harlequins! (New
York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1974), p. 245.
2 rbid, pp. 168 and 234.
3rbid, p. 250.
4 Ibid, p. 2Lt-7.
5rbid, p. 9.
6 rbid, p. 89.
7 Ibid, p. 18.
8 Ibid, p. 156.
9Ibid, p. 229.
10 Ibid p. 226.
'
11 Grabes, Fictitious Biographies, p. 117.
12
Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!, p. 235.
13rbid , p. 233.
14 rbid p. 250.
'
15
Ibid, p. 253.
l6rbid , p. 3.
17 rbid, p. 3.
18 Grabes, Fictitious Biographies, pp. 106-109.
19Nabokov, Look a~ the Harle~ins!, p. 31.
20
Ibid, p. 233.
21 Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!, p. 85.
73
22
Ibid, pp. 18-20.
23 Ibid,
p. 23.
24Ibid
p. 73.
'
zsibid p. 37.
'
26 Ibid,
p. 219.
27
Ibid, p. 252.
28 nouglas Fowler, Reading Nabokov (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1974), p. 15.
29Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!, p. 97.
30
Ibid, p. 70.
31 Ibid p. 180.
'
32 Ibid
33rbid
'
'
p. 189.
p. 226.
34Ibid
p. 225.
'
35 Ibid, p. 239.
PALE FIRE
lNabokov, Pale Fir~, pp. 5 and 1.2.
2 Ibid, pp. 155-156.
3Ibid
p. 75.
'
4Ibid, p. 90.
sibid, p. 56.
6Ibid, p. 80.
7Ibid, p. 156.
74
8
Fowler, Reading Nabokov, pp. 120 and 121.
9McCarthy, "A Bolt from the Blue," p. 26.
10Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 62.
11 rbid, p. 80.
12Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 251.
13Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 15.
14 rbid, p. 176.
15 rbid, p. 159.
16
Ibid, p. 173.
l7Ellen Pifer, Nabokov and the Novel, (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 111.
18
Nabokov, Pale Fir~, p. 15.
19v1 d' . N b k
a ~m~r a o ov, Th e Eye, trans. Dm'~tr~. ~r~a b ok ov
(New York: Phaedra Publishers, Inc., 1965), p. 104.
20
Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 105.
21 Ibid, p. 200.
22 Ibid, p. 50.
23
Andrew Marvell, "The Nymph Complaining for the
Death of Her Fawn," in Andrew Marvell: the
Comp~ete
Poems,
ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York: Penguin Books Ltd.,
1972)' p. 70.
24Nabokov, Pale Fire, p. 106.
25 rbid, p. 5.
26Nabokov, Strong Opinions, p. 74.
27rbid, p. 69.
75
28 rbid , p. 87.
29 Ibid p . 59.
•
30 Ibid , p. 4.
31rbid , p.
3 2 rbid • p .
3 3rbid, p.
34 Ibid , p.
152.
122.
151.
122.
35 rbid , p. 99.
CONCLUSION
1
Fowler, Reading Nabokov, p. 15.
2Nabokov, ?ale Fire, p. 85.
3Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, p. 8.
4Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 251.
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De la Croix, Horst, Richard G. Tansey, et. al., eds.,
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i'
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