As the author, the teacher, the storyteller, the enchanter, the trickster Nabokov leads the reader into a labyrinth where there are more dead ends than open passages. If we only focus on the little games he plays that are enjoyable, causing us to not only read his novels, but participate and experience them, we miss out on his way of playing a trickster that expresses the quintessential qualities to understanding Nabokov as an author and more. Lewis Hyde discusses the character of the trickster in his book Trickster Makes This World, but he gives one mere desultory and seemingly tangential sentence acknowledging Nabokov as such a character saying, “Or there is Vladimir Nabokov; if you think his deft magic is serious, you’re wrong, and if you think it’s just a game, you’re wrong” (Hyde 209). By looking at a legendary trickster known as Hermes from Greek mythology who strongly resembles what Nabokov accomplishes through his writing, and it becomes clear that tricksters are not just creatures of myth, but working figures of our current culture.
Hermes is commonly known as “Hermes the Thief” however, his thievery is not a product of greed but results from a need “to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by so doing, open the road to possible new worlds” (Hyde 13). The Homeric Hymn to Hermes is where we learn of baby Hermes stealing Apollo’s cattle, walking backwards to try and mislead Apollo, inventing and sharing a method of making fire. Hermes “is simultaneously presenting the human race with the domestic beasts whose meat the fire will cook. A whole complex of cultural institutions around killing and eating cattle are derived from the liar and thief, Hermes” (Hyde 9). Hermes’ thievery is an act of culture bringing rather than motivated by personal gain, - he is the culture hero. Through looking at Nabokov’s Pale Fire we see this trickster quality come into play.
The title Pale Fire, as some scholars believe, was most likely used from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens passage,
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction / Robs the vast sea; the moon's
an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun; / The sea's a
thief whose liquid surge resolves / The moon into salt tears. – (4.3.435-40)
This motif of theft is one applicable to the trickster, as we have seen in Hermes, and to Nabokov. When we read Nabokov’s novels we feel the influences of previous authors, Shakespeare, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Coleridge and more than any one scholar can identify. Nabokov can’t help but steal other images from previous authors, because if nothing is original, then the only way to deal with any sort of anxiety of influence is to embrace it. Nabokov is as Hyde describes trickster as “disturbing the established categories of property” by blatantly emulating previous great authors to open the road to a new realm of literature (Hyde 13). Nabokov writing “Pale Fire” by John Shade within his novel Pale Fire cries out openly in the poem, “But this transparent thingum does require/Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire” (Nabokov 68). Nabokov, through candidly thieving from other authors, is the reader’s own culture bringer. Taking an old image and putting it in a new context as a form of bricolage. Nabokov and Hermes have stolen needed goods to give to the mortals of this world and enliven our lives with mischief and knowledge of the other realm that may not be a place we should go alone and unprepared.
If Nabokov is starting to sound more like a god than human because he is likened to Hermes, it is because he has truly become an immortal figure through the art of his works. Living beyond the end of his human life through the pages he has written. Nabokov truly has omnipresence in his novels, through his own personal habits found in his characters and, for example, the anagram Vivian Darkbloom in Lolita. No longer do you have to become an alchemist to create the sorcerer’s stone, but rather write something worthwhile. One way to live beyond the dark abyss is to achieve immortality. As Humbert Humbert concludes his journal, and Nabokov finishes Lolita saying, “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share” (Nabokov 309). Hermes is the messenger god, an immortal benefiting human kind, as Nabokov has found his own immortality through his novels that are available for people to read and experience and convey a message as an immortal figure.
The wily and light-fingered qualities found in Hermes are not the only way the trickster model enlightens our understanding of Nabokov. As Hermes is designated as the psychopompos by Zeus, the guide of souls from this world to Hades, Nabokov is the reader’s psychopompos who helps the reader in their transition between worlds. Both Hermes and Nabokov are moving us across the threshold as figures of the doorway or the in-between. “Hermes will deliver a soul into whatever world or mental state lies across the line” (Hyde 208). No longer is Nabokov just playing games in his books, he is the guide through the novel, but something much more, he is the guide of our souls. Nabokov leaves clues in Pale Fire indicating that something darker and mysterious is going on by using vocabulary like chthonic, wraith, underworld, stygian, Lethe, Mercury, Lower World (Nabokov 46, 56, 85, 133, 231). Nabokov is the liminal figure, neither one thing nor the other in relation to the reader, moving between the living and dead, guiding us through the experience of his novels or his expressions of the stygian abyss. Nabokov’s novels serve as the limn, because while Nabokov writes he is in the doorway, and we the readers are neither in this world or the next. Kinbote relates to the reader a conversation that he had with Shade where Shade (an anagram for Hades), says, “There is always a psychopompos around the corner isn’t there?” (Nabokov 226). Is the corner the turn of the page, or perhaps the turn of death?
Nabokov is concerned with the in-between of life and death, writing about communications of the dead to the living in Pale Fire, and the dead narrating the living in Transparent Things. The question stems from mortality and immortality, what happens after we die? Brian Boyd highlights an important answer to the afterlife question given by Nabokov in his book The Magic of Artistic Discovery, “Asked by an interviewer: Do you believe in God? he answered: To be quite candid- and what I’m going to say now is something I never said before. And I hope it produces a salutary little chill- I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more” (Boyd 248). The eerie elusive answer Nabokov gives relays the notion that he is a religious author in a broad sense, omnipresent, taking us on a journey to the underworld, and communicates the notions of a deeper meaning of “Pale Fire”, the phosphorescent footprints of the deity himself perhaps. Nabokov seems to be a messenger of the gods, as is one of the activities of the trickster Hermes, expressing what he can for us mere mortals reading his novels, delivering secrets from the other world where we cannot go. Nabokov transforms such things that we deem inexpressible into “something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver,” something he ponders in Speak Memory, perhaps Nabokov as messenger and thief works to bring us the salutary chill that runs down the spine at epiphany (Nabokov 212).
Transparent Things by Nabokov is a novel where the lines are blurred between reality and fiction, author and reader. Several specters, who are deceased characters from the novel, in the other world are narrating Hugh Person’s experiences, past, present, future. The deceased Mr. R is helping Hugh Person transition from one world to the other at the very end saying, “This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another. Easy, you know, does it son” (Nabokov 158). Mr. R is present guiding Hugh Person through the transition, a sort of psychopompos, making the mysterious mental maneuver manageable for Hugh Person, because Mr. R has done this before. Nabokov is psychopompos to the reader, you person, as it seems like when the novel talks about Hugh Person, it is really talking to you, the person, the reader. Nabokov breaks the assumed boundaries between reader and author speaking directly to us through the novel as our guide, in short, trickster is a boundary-creator and crosser (Hyde 7).
Nabokov is following in the steps of other great writers whose works he most likely read and subsequently influenced by. The protagonists of the author’s novels communicate with the dead, as in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, Joyce’s Ulysses, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Allusions strongly indicate that Nabokov read these listed works and used their influence in his novels. In Chapter 6 of Joyce’s Ulysses, Hades, for example, covers the 11:00 hour when Bloom and his companions ride through the cemetery towards Patty Dignam’s funeral. This chapter corresponds with Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus goes to the underworld, a visit to Hades, and communicates with “shades” or shadows of the dead. Sounds like John Shade from Pale Fire. The characters in Joyce’s Ulysses correspond with Homer’s characters, Sisyphus with Martin Cunningham, Cerberus with Father Coffey, Hades with the caretaker, Elopenor with Dignam. Nabokov uses Joyce, as Joyce uses Homer. The theft runs deep in the literary world, and is crucial to exploring new ideas with old ones. The concern with the underworld, the afterlife, beyond the pale fire, is explored much as Nabokov likes to explore what happens after we die. The reader is able to safely explore what happens after death through the psychopompos, in this case the author, Nabokov, crossing the boundary between earth and Underworld, the river Styx, through his writing.
The first lines of “Pale Fire” read, “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” (Nabokov 33). The waxwing lives on in the optical illusion created by the glass after dying from the impact; the only way to reach the reflection is to cross the liminal boundary between worlds, of this life and the next, to be a wraith in the pale fire of our world. Nabokov openly reveals his fascination with the black void or abyss before and after this life in chapter one of Speak Memory saying, “Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life...Short of suicide, I have tried everything” (Nabokov 20). He also says that the dark abyss that lies on either side of life, the two eternities of darkness, “are identical twins, [and] man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more clam that the one he is heading for” (Nabokov 19). This helps explain his deep fascination with the notions of the Underworld and mortality that pervade his novels.
Hyde says this of trickster in his book, which we can now associate with Nabokov,
“He is the adept who can move between heaven and earth, and between the living
and the dead. As such he is sometimes the messenger of the gods and sometimes
the guide of souls, carrying the dead into the underworld or opening the tomb to
release them when they must walk among us. Sometimes it happens that the road
between heaven and earth is not open, whereupon trickster travels not as a
messenger but as a thief, the one who steals from the gods the good things that
humans need if they are to survive this world” (Hyde 6).
While Nabokov may not be writing his novels with the intention of being a trickster as he has been described, understanding Nabokov in this way is helpful to comprehending and appreciating his works of literature. Nabokov is the messenger from the other side, wherever that may be, thieving from those before him to bring to us the culture we might have missed, cluing us in on immortality and expressing the inexpressible.
Vladimir Nabokov becomes part of the mythic tradition in terms of a trickster figure: he is not a moral figure, nor do his novels tell us how to behave, but rather they tell us who we might become. If Humbert from Lolita had understood something about Quilty, just as if we understand something about Nabokov we can understand something about ourselves. Quilty is a trickster figure to Humbert, as Nabokov is to the reader. As Hermes enchants Apollo with the homemade lyre and the experience of music, Nabokov enchants the reader with his novel. Nabokov as a trickster leads us through the epiphany of experience rather than meaning.
Works Cited
Boyd, Brian. Nabokov's Pale Fire The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 248. Print.
Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World. New York: First North Point Press, 1999. 6, 7, 13, 208-9. Print.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. 50th Anniversary ed. New York: Vintage International, 1997. 309. Print.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Vintage International, 1989. 33, 46, 56, 68, 85, 133, 226, 231. Print.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory. New York: Vintage International, 1989. 19,20,19. Print.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Transparent Things. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1974. 158. Print.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment