All of Vladimir Nabokov's novels exude delight in the beauty of the perverse. It is no wonder then that he had so many hang-ups.
Nabokov notoriously hated Freudian psychoanalysis
('all my books should be stamped, Freudians keep out'). (
Bend Sinister, xviii) He regarded it as a medieval throwback to a dark prerational world inhabited by subterranean monsters and nightmares. And he also detested psychology in general. His was an aesthetic world. Where structure, metaphor and the art of the novel were the
thing. And the symbolic a trap for pedants, know-it-alls and grad students.
Non-structural elements in general were out in interpretations of his work. In the introduction to
Bend Sinister, he is quite clear that any 'political' interpretation of his novel has completely missed the point. As Nabokov says, the tale is neither Kafkaesque or Orwellian: 'The story in
Bend Sinister is not really about life and death in a grotesque police state. My characters are not "types," not carriers of this or that "idea." (
Bend Sinister, xiii). No, they dwell on a magical metaphysical level: 'all of them are only absurd mirages, illusions oppressive to Krug [the main character] during his brief spell of being, but harmlessly fading away when I dismiss the cast (xiv).'
And it is the participatory presence of Nabokov that
possesses the narration like a tongue-in-cheek
deus ex machina. He refers to himself as 'an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me (xviii).' One who actively interferes in his stories and helps the characters understand that everything is fictional: 'Krug, in a sudden moonburst of madness, understands that he is in good hands: nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution (xviii-xix).' Thus the novel ends in nonchalant digression: 'Krug ran towards him, and just a fraction of an instant before another and better bullet hit him, he shouted again: You, you--and the wall vanished, like a rapidly withdrawn slide, and I stretched myself and got up from among the chaos of written and rewritten pages, to investigate the sudden twang that something had made in striking the wire netting of my window (240).' It is all so sudden. Unresolved. Interrupted. Arrested...Magical...
Speaking of the 'arrested development' of Nabokov means speaking thematically, not psychologically. Whatever psychic dynamics motivated Nabokov, his novels revolved around a mythic sense that either came out in the language, the plot, the themes or the characters--or all together in complex combinations and modulations. Like Poe, a kind of eerie and sublime innocence inundates the tales and connects the parts with the whole.
And no story is more full of Poe then Nabokov's most in/famous.
Lolita. Despite constant misinterpretations to the contrary,
Lolita was not a novel reveling in pedophilia. Nearly asexual himself, Nabokov took great pleasure in mind-fucking the pervs and rubes. The eponymous nymphet was in the story for aesthetic reasons alone. If anything, Nabokov took monkish pleasure in the revulsion he felt while writing the prepubescent sex scenes.
But Poe is always present. Hovering and fumbling and fluttering about like a funny uncle pretending to misplace his hands and pseudo-absent-mindedly standing too close. The rumours of his attraction to tweens is existential foreshadowing like deja vu and astral projection and dreams of falling falling falling down. The rabbit hole. Another Nabokovian fellow emerges. Another supposed pedophile. Mr. Lewis Carroll. He likes the little girls to sit on his lap and nuzzles and coos while his fingers find the wrong pressure points. And the sitter is left unsettled. Like something important just happened fleetingly beyond the edge of sight...
Lolita is largely a tale of arrested development. Hence the haunting fidgeting figures of the man-children Poe and Carroll. Nabokov's own childhood was also unresolved but interrupted differently by the Russian Revolution and the sacrificial assassination of his beloved father. These twin traumas left Nabokov living a phantom half-life which he reworked and remade in his novels constantly.
Like a human child caught in the land of the fae, Nabokov could never leave the dreamworld nor did he really want to abandon its fraught delights. If the obsession with nymphets means anything it is as 'the return of the repressed'. Of this childhood interrupted. Invested and embodied with the mighty magic of all the could-have-beens submerged within Nabokov's personal tragedies.
Don't worry Vlad. None of that dismisses or psychologizes away the artistic glory of your novels. It only provides the necessary condition for the pseudo-real sense of the almost-was atmosphere that hums a half-world into existence in
Lolita,
Bend Sinister,
The Gift,
Pale Fire, etc. etc.
It is this once-upon-a-time-ness that makes a fairy tale. The sinister beauty of lost innocence. Longed for from beyond the interrupting eruption that is puberty and adulthood. Children live in their imaginations in a way that adults just don't no matter how imaginative they are. And it is that imaginary world that haunts the remainder of our lives. And gives us our few and far-between epiphanies.
Nabokov's novels are full of those sublime moments. Even in their most poignantly absurd scenes. Like virtually every line of
Pnin. Or the climactic anti-climax of
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight:
(forgive the lengthy quotation) She lit a small blue-shaded lamp and left me alone. I had a stupid impulse to draw a cigarette case out of my pocket. My hands still shook, but I felt happy. He was alive. He was peacefully asleep. So it was his heart--was it?--that had let him down...The same as his mother. He was better, there was hope. I would get all the heart specialists in the world to have him saved. His presence in the next room, the faint sound of his breathing, gave me a sense of security, of peace, of wonderful relaxation. And as I sat there and listened, and clasped my hands, I thought of all the years that had passed, of our short, rare meetings and I knew that now, as soon as he could listen to me, I should tell him that whether he liked it or not I would never be far from him any more...Oh, I would tell him thousands of things--I would talk to him about
The Prismatic Bezel and
Success, and
The Funny Mountain, and
Albinos in Black, and
The Back of the Moon, and
Lost Property, and
The Doubtful Asphodel,--all these books that I knew as well as if I had written them myself. And he would talk, too. How little I knew of his life! But now I was learning something every instant. That door standing slightly ajar was the best link imaginable. That gentle breathing was telling me more of Sebastian than I had ever known before...
Presently I got up and tiptoed out into the corridor.
"I hope," the nurse said, "you did not disturb hi? It is good that he sleeps."
"Tell me," I asked, "when does Doctor Starov come?"
"Doctor who?" she said. "Oh, the Russian doctor.
Non, c'est le docteur Guinet qui le soigne. You'll find him here tomorrow morning."
"You see," I said, "I'd like to spend the night somewhere here. Do you think that perhaps..."
"You could see Doctor Guinet even now," continued the nurse in her quiet pleasant voice. "He lives next door. So you are the brother, are you? And to-morrow his mother is coming from England, n'est-ce pas?"
"Oh, no," I said, "his mother died years ago. And tell me, how is he during the day, does he talk? does he suffer?"
She frowned and looked at me queerly.
"But..." she said. "I don't understand...What is your name, please?"
"Right," I said. "I haven't explained. We are half-brothers, really. My name is [I mentioned my name]."
"Oh-la-la!" she exclaimed getting very red in the face. "Mon Dieu! The Russian gentleman died yesterday, and you've been visiting Monsieur Kegan..." (202-204)
But even this tragicomic scene is still enchanted. The unnamed narrator concludes:
So I did not see Sebastian after all, or at least I did not see him alive. But those few minutes I spent listening to what I thought was his breathing changed my life as completely as it would have been changed, had Sebastian spoken to me before dying. Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being--not a constant state--that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden(204-205).
