Vladimir Nabokov - The Enchanter

The stucco parapet of the Florida terrace where I am writing at this moment—the kind with white paint covering a deliberately uneven surface—is full of random patterns. It takes only a pencil stroke here and there to complete an excellent hippopotamus, a stern Flemish profile, a busty showgirl, or any number of friendly or disconcerting little free-form monsters.

This is what Nabokov, who early in life had seriously considered becoming a painter, could do so well with an ornate lampshade, for example, or some repetitively flowered wallpaper. Comical faces, nonexistent but plausible butterflies, and grotesque little creatures of his own invention gradually came to inhabit hospitable designs of the quarters at the Montreux-Palace Hotel, where he lived and worked, and some of them happily survive to this day, preserved either on our express instructions or by the limited capacity for observation of the cleaning teams that storm, like a defensive football line, through those rooms every afternoon. A few particularly good ones have, alas, long since been deterged from the tiles adjacent to the bathtub that, to Field’s apparent consternation, Father used every day.

Such enhancement and recombination of chance patterns are, in a larger sense, an essential part of Nabokov’s creative synthesis. The fortuitous observation, the reported or imagined psychological anomaly, elaborated by the artist’s fantasy, assumed a harmonious growth of their own as the infant work was gradually weaned from the image, the news item, or the reverie that had jolted its cells into the process of multiplication.

Like certain of Nabokov’s other works, The Enchanter is the study of madness seen through the madman’s mind. Aberrations in general, both physical and psychological, were among the diverse sources of raw material that nurtured Nabokov’s artistic fantasy. The criminal pedophilia of the protagonist—like that of the later Humbert in a new work and a different setting; like the murderous delusion of Hermann in Despair; like the sexual anomalies that are but one element of Pale Fire and other works; like the madness of the chess master Luzhin [13]and the musician Bachmann; [14]like the deformations of the Potato Elf, [15]and of the Siamese twins in “The Double Monster” [16]—was one among many themes Nabokov selected for the creative process of fictional recombination.

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled… in a unique and inimitable way

writes Nabokov in the concluding sentence of his 1925 short story “The Fight.” [17]This early expression, forthright yet undogmatic, of what was to remain an enduring aspect of his aesthetic approach, is, I suspect, destined to be quoted often, and not always in context.

“Perhaps,” the word with which Nabokov introduced the thought, is an important qualifier. As a creative writer rather than a journalist, social commentator, or psychoanalyst, Nabokov chose to examine the phenomena of his surroundings through the refractive lens of artistry; at the same time his codex for literary creation is no less precise than the scientific purity of his lepidopterological investigations. But even if his emphasis is on the “combinational delights” in which an artist is privileged to indulge, by no means does it follow that Nabokov was indifferent to the horrors of tyranny, murder, and child molestation; to the tragedy of social or personal injustice; or to the plight of those who have somehow been shortchanged by Fate.

It is not indispensable to have known Father personally in order to understand this; it is enough to have read his books with reasonable care. For the poet in Nabokov the vehicle of choice was the concrete artistic experience rather than the abstract declaration. However, if one is in quest of quotable bits of credo, the miniature Socratic dialogue of the 1927 story “The Passenger” [18]concedes another rare peek into the essence of his ethos. “Life is more talented than we,” says the first character, the writer. “How can we compete with that goddess? Her works are untranslatable, indescribable.” Hence,

All that’s left to us is to treat her creations as a film producer does a famous novel, altering it beyond recognition… for the sole purpose of having an entertaining film unfold without a hitch, punishing virtue in the beginning and vice at the end,… with an unexpected but all-resolving outcome…. We think that Life’s performance is too sweeping, too uneven, that her genius is too untidy. To indulge our readers we cut out of Life’s untrammeled novels our neat little tales for the use of schoolchildren. Allow me, in this connection, to impart to you the following experience….

At the story’s end, his interlocutor the wise critic replies:

There is much in life that is casual, and there is also much that is unusual. The Word is given the sublime right to enhance chance and to make of the transcendental something that is not accidental.

But the writer’s concluding thought expresses two further distinct, if undivorceable, considerations—artistic curiosity and human compassion:

The trouble is that I did not learn, and shall never learn, why the passenger cried.

One suspects, early on in The Enchanter , that things will not end well, that the cynical, contemptible protagonist will get his due, and, if an obvious moral is needed, this premonition is it. However, besides being part horror story, this is also part mystery thriller: Fate toys with the madman, now thwarting, now abetting, now providing a hair-raising close call; as events unfold we do not yet know from which direction disaster will strike, but we sense increasingly that it is imminent.

The man is a dreamer like others, although in this case a very rotten dreamer. Distasteful as he may be, though, one of the most poignant levels of this story is that of his—occasionally objective—introspection. One might even go so far as to say that the story resides in the introspection; and through this introspection on the basically evil protagonist’s part Nabokov succeeds in transmitting compassion not only for the victims but, to a degree, for the villain himself. A yearning for decency gleams now and then through the man’s single-minded cynicism, and prompts pathetic attempts at self-justification; although the borderlines dissolve under the impetus of his compulsion, he cannot escape the fleeting realization that he is a monster. And while the woman he marries may be a repellent means to a criminal end, and the girl an instrument for his gratification, other nuances emerge. The viewpoint of the text—like many other aspects of the story—may sometimes be deliberately ambiguous, but the madman himself cannot avoid perceiving, in stunned moments of lucidity, the pathetic side of both mother and daughter. His pity for the former transpires, with a kind of reverse Russian, through the very revulsion on which he harps; and there is a moving instant of compassion when we see her, through his eyes, as pregnant “with her own death.” As for the girl, there exists a fragile, decent sliver of his soul that would like to feel a genuinely paternal love for her.

The Enchanter, evil conjuror though he may be, lives partially in an enchanted world. And, common madman or not, he perceives himself on a special, poetic plane as a mad king (for he knows that he is, in any case, mad)—a king who is fleetingly reminiscent of other, thematically related, lone Nabokovian monarchs and is, at the same time, a kind of lecherous Lear living in fairy-tale seclusion by the sea with his “little Cordelia,” whom, for a flicker of an instant, he imagines as an innocent, innocently loved daughter. But, as always, the paternal shades rapidly into the infernal, and the beast within him plunges into a pedophilic fantasy so intense that its consequences cause a female fellow-passenger to change compartments.