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Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
1993
Science and Gnosticism in "Lance"
Yvonne Howell
University of Richmond, [email protected]
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Part of the Russian Literature Commons
Recommended Citation
Howell, Yvonne. "Science and Gnosticism in "Lance"" In A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov's Short Fiction, 181-92. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1993.
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SCIENCE AND GNOSTICISM IN "LANCE"
Yvonne Howell
The concept of the "black hole," not to mention several newer
cosmologies, was not yet in the air when Nabokov wrote "Lance" in
1952. For that matter, there were no sputniks or weather satellites in
the air, either. As has been pointed out, one can admire Nabokov's
artistic foresight in correctly depicting certain aspects of interplanetary
travel. 1 This essay, however, will focus on quite a different aspect of
the relationship between science and literature; one which Nabokov
himself highlights in many of his early poems (see in particular,
"Oculus") and other works: two ways of modelling objective reality and
our subjective experience of it.
Scientific theory and discourse provide one way of ordering and
explaining the world; art provides a different set of organizational and
explanatory metaphors. I think we have ample evidence that Nabokov
considered art and science to be two sides of the same supreme human
attribute: the imagination. For Nabokov, imagination-and therefore
both true art and true science-is the redeeming quality of human
beings which enables us, perhaps, to transcend death. Some of the
structural features of science fiction as a genre lend themselves ideally
to Nabokov's theme of self-transcendence. If the goal of selftranscendence involves escaping from the "vortex of the self,"-extricating oneself from all systems, stepping outside of each successive
"frame," reaching a timeless vantage point from which the discontinuity
of reality and its representation can be recognized and overcome . . .
then, at that point, I suppose it doesn't matter: you have become one
with God and can stop reading.
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Yvonne Howell
If you continue to read, I would like to make two points about
science fiction as a generic form which explain the choice of this form
in "Lance" and are essential to a proper understanding of the work as
a whole: (1) the romantic roots of the science fiction genre make it
amenable to the depiction of a spiritual quest; (2) science fiction lends
itself well to a spatial depiction of the discontinuity between reality and
its representation. If the latter proposition is corroborated by an
analysis of the relationship between "levels of reality" in "Lance," it will
provide additional evidence for the hypothesis that science fiction is a
preeminently spatial genre, rather than a literary form whose distinctiveness has to do with time (extrapolation into the futureV
One way to approach "Lance" is to imagine a black hole, a concentration of ostensible nothingness so heavy that its gravity prevents any
information-even light-from escaping it: hence, a black hole, a void
which drains information. We know it exists only by the way it affects
that which is sufficiently removed from its heaviness to be perceived.
In other words, we can learn about a black hole only from the way it
warps the surrounding reality-our "unbearable lightness of being," if
you will. Nabokov is quite explicit about the presence of an absence,
"a gaping hole, a raw wound in my story" (210). This gatrinvisible,
unnamed, silent-is a concentration of enormous spiritual weight,
around which bend each of the story's several levels of representation.
The science fiction plot in "Lance" is very simple: young Emery L.
Boke-the hero who goes by the name given in the title-is about to take
part in the first expedition to Mars. Mr. and Mrs. Boke try to follow
the course of their only son's interplanetary trek with a telescope from
the balcony of their suburban home, a futile exercise which does not
reduce their anxiety as they await his return. Lance's two pet
chinchillas ("Chin" and "Chilla") are less affected by his absence, and
even begin to breed. Finally, the expedition returns. One member has
died, but Lance is fine, to be released from the hospital within a week.
"It was wonderfu~" he says, "perfectly wonderful. I am going back in
November." He begins to tell of "the first thing I saw-", but is cut short
by the nurse, and the sentence is never resumed.
Mr. Boke, Lance's father, is described as "an old professor of
history, a brilliant medievalist, whose white whiskers, pink pate, and
black suit are famous on a certain sunny campus in the deep South, but
whose sole asset in connection with this story ... is that his appearance
is out of date."3 When Mr. Boke is located within one of the many
Science and Gnosticism in ''Lance"
183
narrative frames comprising this story, the picture we get of Lance's
adventures consists of names and images from the medieval romance:
If Boke's sources are accurate, the name "Lanceloz del Lac"
occurs for the first time in Verse 3676 of the 12th cen. "Roman
de Ia Charrete." Lance, Lancelin, Lancelotik-diminutives
murmured at the brimming, salty, moist stars. Young knights in
their teens learning to harp, hawk, and hunt; the Forest Dangerous and the Dolorous Tower, Aldebaran, Betelgeuze ...
The field glass is not much good, the chart is all crumpled and
damp, and: "You do not hold the flashlight properly"-this to
Mrs. Boke. (204)
An "out of date" narrator, whose relationship to the author is once or
twice removed, is necessary if the details of Lance's interplanetary
travels are to be described. The author-("Boke" with the na and
ov)-who remains outside this particular frame, calls Lance "a more or
less remote descendant of mine" and insists that
there is nothing extraordinary in the tendency to give to the
manners and clothes of a distant day (which happens to be
placed in the future) an old-fashioned tinge, a badly-pressed,
badly-groomed, dusty something, since the terms "out of date,"
"not of our age" and so on are in the long run the only ones in
which we are able to imagine and express a strangeness no
amount of research can foresee. The future is but the obsolete
in reverse. (202)
We are made suddenly aware that the expression "out of date" has no
time vector; it applies equally to the future and the past. Moreover,
temporal metaphors can quite easily be converted into spatial
ones-which is precisely what most of science fiction does.4 Time is
projected spatially as geographical layers (Journey to the Center of the
Earth), or as the distance between planets and galaxies. The interchangeability of time and space informs the characteristic structure of
science fiction. This interchangeability is also the source of the genre's
cliches and formulas, which Nabokov systematically pounds to a pulp:
"Inhabitants of foreign planets, 'intelligent' beings, humanoid or of
various mythic makes, have one remarkable trait in common: their
intimate structure is never depicted. In a supreme concession to biped
propriety, not only do centaurs wear loincloths; they wear them about
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Yvonne Howell
their forelegs" (200).5 Science fiction at its worst is notoriously inept
in its pretentions to give the alien, the nonhuman, the Other, a humanly
imaginable form. Yet, as we shall see, Nabokov himself feels the need
to name the unnamable, to give shape to the unimaginable (the invisible, silent black hole) in order to grapple with it, and overcome it. It
is necessary to project a face onto that which we cannot otherwise face.
Nabokov tries various approaches to the "black hole"; he bends at
least three metaphorical systems around it. Simon Karlinsky has given
a concise description of the tri-part structure of "Lance": "Within its
brief span, the narrative of 'Lance' combines three distinct superimposed levels of reality: interplanetary exploration, mountain climbing,
and medieval romance" (N/W 271n). I would argue that there is an
additional metaphorical layer of gnostic imagery, a fourth "level of
reality" not to be overlooked. Already in the second sentence he tells
us that the planet Lance is going to "may well be separated from the
earth by only as many miles as there are years between last Friday and
the rise of the Himalayas." This simile contains in a microcosm the
compositional and conceptual import of the whole. The interchangeability of time and space not only justifies the characteristic plot
structure of science fiction, it is also the underlying theme of the story.
"In the telescopic field of one's fancy," the first paragraph continues,
"through the prism of one's tears, any particularities it [the planet]
presents should be no more striking than those of existing planets."
Therefore, old Mr. Boke's telescope on the balcony can be no more
powerful than his own medieval-studies-warped imagination, and any
description of adventures on the "brimming, salty, moist stars," are best
given through the prism of his tears. The narrative focuses on the
emotions of Lance's anxious parents, in order to convey by indirect
reflection the unimaginable actualities of Lance's interplanetary trip.
Presently, though, a new metaphorical system takes over. The
transition from medieval romance metaphors to those pertaining to
mountaineering coincides with the narrator's stepping out of one frame
in order to occupy a larger, or "higher" frame. The switch to a
frrst-person plural narrator (from "the Bokes" to "We") and the
unmarked direct discourse ("Gone! Was it ... ?") would support Nicol's
observation that "ultimately, the real subject of 'Lance' is the present"
(13). Nicol has found a clue to the "real reason for the writing of the
story'' in a letter Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson in 1951, in which
he describes how his son Dmitri "was camping on Jenny Lake in the
Science and Gnosticism in ''Lance"
185
Tetons, in a small tent, and climbing mountains along their most
difficult and dangerous sides. The thing with him is an extraordinary
overwhelming passion. The professional alpinists there are really
wonderful people, and the very physical kind of exertion supplied by the
mountains somehow is transmuted into a spiritual experience." As
Nicol points out, if we take Dmitri Nabokov as not only the probable
model for Lance, but also the intended subject of "Lance," the author's
statement that the story is about "a more or less remote descendant of
mine" must be reread with much more validity attached to the "less"
than the "more." Within this frame of reference, the meaning of the
story coincides with his interpretation: it is about Nabokov's mixed
admiration and apprehension regarding his son's face-to-f<~rP:
confrontation with death during his mountaineering expeditions.
I would see this as just one of the many levels of reality (or
"pictures within a frame") whose depiction provides information
about-but is not equivalent to-the central riddle, the "black hole." To
illustrate this point, let us look at the way in which the spiritual content
of Lance's-or Dmitri's-mountaineering exploits exerts a tremendous
pull on the language and imagery used to describe the alpinists' climb:
Ah, there he is again! Crossing through a notch between two
stars; then, very slowly, attempting a traverse on a cliff face so
sheer, and with such delicate holds that the mere evocation of
those groping fingertips and scraping boots fills one with
acrophobic nausea. And through streaming tears the old Bokes
see Lance now marooned on a shelf of stone and now climbing
again and now, dreadfully safe, with his ice ax and pack, on a
peak above peaks, his eager profile rimmed with light. (206)
What begins with a concrete sighting (still from the balcony)
immediately passes into a different spatial (and spiritual) realm, as
Lance "crosses a notch between two stars." This refers back, on the
one hand, to Nabokov's earlier statement (198) reminding us of the
self-referentiality of all art: "I ... debar a too definite planet from any
role in my story-from the role every dot and full stop should play in my
story (which I see as a kind of celestial chart) ...•" The protagonist is
simply crawling across the author's celestial chart-an activity incapable
of generating much meaning. On the other hand, though, the celestial
chart and the "notch between two stars" suggest the Neo-Platonic
cosmologies, in which ascendence through the successive astral. and
planetary spheres is equivalent to shedding successive layers of one's
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Yvonne Howell
constrictive, material body and approaching the pure, divine spirit,
whence we all originate.6 The adjectives "sheer" and "delicate" lead to
the "mere evocation" of something which is both terrifying and triumphant ("acrophobic nausea," "dreadfully safe"), and fmally, to the image
of a divine being, "on a peak above peaks, his proflle rimmed with
light." In this passage we see Lance climbing about on a celestial map,
which is this story, but which also charts the gnostic journey through
matter and Evil back to the source of divine light (gnosis). The
mysticism breaks through the alpine imagery when Lance's proftle is
said to be rimmed with light, as if he had acquired a halo.
As Lance begins his perilous descent, Nabokov tells us that perhaps
Lance "has swung over those high-angled wet slabs that fall vertically
away into the abyss, has mastered the overhang, and is now blissfully
glissading down steep celestial snows" (206). This passage seems to
affirm my suggestion of a gnostic metaphorical level: the "pure spirit"
sails over the abyss, and "blissfully glissades down steep celestial snows."
The heavenly whiteness evoked by "celestial snows" certainly indicates
yet another level of reality, a topography we have not yet encountered
within the medieval or alpine or interplanetary metaphorical
framework. 7
A short digression is necessary here in order to capture the
importance of the heavily alliterated passages which appear in at several
points in the story. Oscar Wilde once said: "What has actually
occurred is insignificant."
However, what recurs in writing is
significant. The best way to explain the significance of Nabokov's
seemingly random word play and alliteration in this story is to defme
it as "noise"-both literally, and in the figurative sense "noise" has in the
discourse of information theory. Essentially, "noise" is anything which
impinges from the outside to muddle the transmission of a message.
In a closed system, the more noise, the less information. However,
living organisms-and, arguably, literary texts-are open systems.
Moreover, they can be seen as autonomous, self-organizing systems,
which means, among other things, that external noise, an ambiguous
message impinging upon a complex system, may represent a loss of
information along one channel, but a gain in the total information of
the system.8 We have, I think, arrived at an intuitively satisfying
conception of what the function of "noise" might be in the literary text.
To paraphrase Atlan, randomness, or "noise" is in and of itself a kind
of order, if it can be made meaningful within the totality of the system
it impinges upon.9 All this being said, what information is imparted by
Science and Gnosticism in ''Lance"
187
Nabokov's use of alliteration? How does the "noisy" repetition of
consonants in certain passages "self-organize" into a new pattern of
information, as opposed to actively disrupting the transmission of
information (as it certainly would in, say, a scientific report), or simply
burdening that information with decorative overload (the impression a
rather passive reader might get from a bombardment of Nabokovian
word-play). The answer is perhaps more obvious in poetry, where
alliteration, like rhyme, may be expected to point to an acausal
relationship between two words. In the story "Lance," patterns of
alliteration organize into patterns of meaningful coincidence, that is,
relationships of cause and effect which may be valid in some other
epistemology, but not in our normal "everyday" world. For instance,
Lance has returned alive, with not much more than a nose-bleed; his
parents go to visit him in the hospital:
Mrs. Coover, the nurse, has blue eyes and no chin.
A ripe silence. Then Lance: "It was wonderful. Perfectly
wonderful. I am going back in November."
Pause.
"I think," says Mr. Boke, "that Chilla is with child." (211)
Strictly speaking, the only reason Nurse Coover has no chin is that two
sentences later Mr. Boke must announce that Chilla is with child. Or
vice versa, the reason Chilla is with child is that Nurse Coover is
characterized by the physical attribute of having "no chin." This
reminder that another epistemology may be lurking behind the veil of
our accepted notions of cause and effect seems more humorous than
mystic. On the other hand, in the passage quoted above, overarching
the abyss leads to the ability to glissade blissfully down steep celestial
snows. Here the coincidence of the "ss" sound in both the word "abyss"
and its opposite-the image of transcendence-serves to reinforce the
religious-gnostic meaning lurking behind the surface, "science fiction"
plot. In short, one system's noise is another system's beauty.
The many varieties of gnosticism have in common an emphasis on
the need to escape from the prison of the material world back to the
original non-material (transmundane) source of the soul's divinity. The
ascent should logically begin only after death, when the soul is at last
freed from its corporal burden. However, the adept might rehearse the
eschatological drama by performing certain religious exercises: "the
external topology of the ascent through the spheres, with the successive
divesting of the soul of its worldly envelopments and the regaining of
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Yvonne Howell
its original acosmic nature, could be 'internalized' and fmd its analogue
in a psychological technique of inner transformations by which the self,
while still in the body, might attain the Absolute as an immanent, if
temporary, condition." 10
To return to our original question, now refmed a bit: how does
Nabokov use the conventions of science fiction to untangle the paradoxes of self-transcendence? It is interesting to juxtapose a scene from
"Lance" with an analogous scene in Invitation to a Beheading, where
Cincinnatus actually divests himself of his body at one point: "He took
off his head ... his rib cage ... his hips and his legs ... what was left
of him gradually dissolved, hardly coloring the air. . . . fully immersed
in his secret medium, he began freely and happily to ..." (32). The
narrative breaks off here when Cincinnatus's jailor reenters the cell.
Cincinnatus's "divestment" is described as a "criminal exercise."u
In science fiction, the "external topology of the ascent through the
spheres" is projected as interplanetary or inter-galactic flight. Lance
does not divest himself of his own body, but the conventions of science
fiction allow him to travel, bodily whole, through the concentric spheres
of being, until, we presume, he reaches the same proximity to a state
of divine ethereality as Cincinnatus: "It was wonderful. Perfectly
wonderful," he says-but before he can whisper into his mother's ear
what he saw, the narrative is broken off by the nurse, who reminds the
near-criminal: "No contacts, doctor's orders, please" (211-12).
In the fmal pages of "Lance," the narrator offers one more
approach to the riddle of the "black hole"-a description of a recurring
dream he had as a boy. This dream is the most direct evidence we
have of the nature of the "absence" this story-and possibly all art-is
ultimately about. It is also the most enigmatic scene in the story; proof,
perhaps, of the commonly-held notion that "science fiction" is inherently
trashier than "surrealism," or: projecting Time outward into cosmic
space results in clumsier monsters than those produced when Time is
projected inward, as psychological space.
The dreamer sees a "non-committal," "nebulous" environment, "the
indifferent back of a view rather than its face. -the nuisance of that
dream was that for some reason I could not walk around it to meet it
on equal terms" (210).12 The boy who is dreaming sits in his dream
with something like a pail, which he keeps filling up with pebbles, and
his nose is bleeding, but he is "too impatient and excited to do anything
about it." Then an anonymous, rising shriek, which originates in the
Science and Gnosticism in "Lance"
189
dream, and is prolonged by the waking boy, ends the dream. Nabokov
suggests that "perhaps Lance and his companions, when they reached
their planet, felt something akin to my dream-which is no longer mine."
This is quite true. Lance the science fiction hero went to Mars,
collected mineral samples, and got a nose-bleed. But it should be
obvious by now that the affmity between the dream and the other
"levels of reality" we have been confronted with is much more profound,
much deeper than the surface plot.
The impression the reader is left with from the entire collage of
interpenetrating metaphors and frames of reference is that Lance has
striven to transcend his material being and approach a spiritual ideal.
By virtue of his physical courage, intellectual curiosity, and imagination,
he has brushed with death-but also with the divine spark which
distinguishes man from beasts. It is no wonder that he is not at home
in the mid-twentieth century, which has put its faith in mass technology
and mass social solutions. Nabokov's scientist or artist-hero descends
from a different tradition, that of Man as Magus, striving for selftranscendence. He is best described as Asclepius' magnum miraculum,
"a being worthy of reverence and honor. For he goes into the nature
of a god as though he were himself a god; he has familiarity with the
race of demons, knowing that he is of the same origin; he despises that
part of his nature which is only human for he has put his hope in the
divinity of the other part." 13 This type of hero, Lance, has faced the
"gaping hole, the raw wound in my story," but what he saw is by
definition inexpressible, incomplete.
Lance's parents hurry out of his hospital room; through yet another
topography of middle-class mediocrity, 14 and take the elevator down.
In this most mundane contraption for ascension and descent the Bokes
fmd themselves next to a girl with a baby, and with "the gray-haired,
bent, sullen elevator man, who stands with his back to everybody."
Thus the story ends. Nabokov has led us back out of the science
fiction world, out of the world of chivalric romance, out of dream
worlds and possible escape-and left us in an elevator with two symbols:
of birth and of death, of time and eternity. There is nothing here that
needs any more explaining than that provided by a line from William
Blake:
Eternity loves time.
Yvonne Howell
190
NOTES
1. "Nabokov's description of the Earth as seen from space was
prescient and brilliant, and remains accurate today," Charles Nicol,
"Nabokov and Science Fiction: 'Lance'" 11.
2. See Fredric Jameson, "Science Fiction as a Spatial Genre: Generic
Discontinuities and the Problem of Figuration in Vonda Mcintyre's
The Exile Waiting," SFS 14.1 (March 1987): 44-59. The same
problem is broached in his "Generic Discontinuities in SF: Brian
Aldiss' Starship," SFS 1.2 (Fall 1973): 57-68.
3. Nicol suggests that Bake's appearance "generate[s] the chinchillas
that appear in the next paragraph-'cinder-gray, phenomenally furry,
rabbit-sized rodents (Hystericomorpha), with long whiskers, round
rumps, and petal-like ears'" and that "the association with medieval
romance causes the chinchillas to 'roll and kick most lustily' like
Malory's Knights .... The Bakes seem temporarily transported to
medieval times when a message is brought 'up the cobbled street'
by a galloping horseman, and at this point they are directly
compared to the chinchillas: 'the Bakes come tearing out of the
house like two hystericomorphic rodents'" ("Nabokov and Science
Fiction" 14-15).
4. " ... we normally conceive time as a medium analogous to space,
freely substituting the one for the other, as when we say we have
not seen someone in a 'long time,' or when we speak of one place
as being 'ten minutes away' from another ..." Mark Rose, Alien
Encounters: An Anatomy of Science Fiction (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1981) 100.
5. Nabokov's criticism would soon be superseded by the achievements
of Ursula LeGuin, Arthur C. Clarke, the Strugatskys, Stanislaw
Lem, and Sinyavsky in "Pkhents"-authors who succeeded early on
in depicting the "intimate structure" of alien-ness.
6. A good illustration of the Neo-Platonic cosmology is Robert Fludd's
"Angelic Hierarchies, Spheres, and Hebrew Alphabet," reproduced
in Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hennetic Tradition
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964) Plate 10.
7. The imagery is strikingly similar to the second verse of
Mandelstam's early poem ''Peshekhod": "Like an an ancient foot
traveller I Above the abyss, on rotting bridges I I hear the snowy
avalanche grow I And eternity beats on stone time . . ." Osip
Science and Gnosticism in "Lance"
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
191
Mandelstam, Collected Workr (in Russian), ed. Struve and Filippov
(Washington: Inter-Language Associates, 1964) I: 18. This poem
in its entirety has been interpreted as a budding argument against
Symbolism, whose complete reliance on the "ethereal music of
another realm" would "save us from mortal fate," as if this world did
not count. Nabokov, it would seem, is also suspicious of any
attempt to locate all meaning either "here" or "there"; in this he
would certainly have something in common with the Acmeist poet.
See Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (New York: Random,
1984), and James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York:
Viking, 1987). My argument is particularly indebted to William
Paulson's book The Noise of Culture (Ithaca: Cornell, 1988).
Henri Atlan, "Disorder, Complexity and Meaning," in Disorder and
Order, ed. P. Livingston. Proceedings of the Stanford International
Symposium (Sept. 14-16, 1984). Stanford Lecture Series, I (Stanford: Anma Libri, 1984). The following sentence above is also cited
in Paulson 73.
Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1958)
165.
Robert Grossmith cites the importance of this scene in "Spiralizing
the Circle: The Gnostic Subtext in Nabokov's Invitation to a
Beheading' 57.
N.B. Nobody has ever seen God's face. Moses caught a glimpse
of his back.
From the Egyptian "optimistic gnosis," the text of Asclepius. This
passage is quoted in Yates, 35.
The first is the cliched topography of bad science fiction, which
Nabokov likens to "those 'assorted' cookies that differ from one
another only in shape and shade, whereby their shrewd makers
ensnare the salivating consumer in a mad Pavlovian world where,
at no extra cost, variations in simple visual values influence and
gradually replace flavor, which thus goes the way of talent and
truth" (199). The second topography of kitsch is referred to in the
narrator's remark, "how much easier writing must have been in
former days when one's imagination was not hemmed in by innumerable visual aids, and a frontiersman looking at his first giant
cactus or his first high snows was not necessarily reminded of a tire
company's pictorial advertisement" (202). The fmal topography
appears as the Bokes proceed down a corridor, "along its shoddy,
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Yvonne Howell
olive-and-ocher wall, the lower olive separated from the upper
ocher by a continuous brown line leading to the venerable
elevators" (212).