Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays

For Barthes, ideologically tied to a post-Marxist analysis, a bad reader was a consumer and an ideal one, a producer. For Nabokov, the reader is neither. Nabokov’s ideal reader is something resembling a butterfly collector, with an interest both empirical and aesthetic. For his ideal reader, the text is a highly particular thing, and the job is to appreciate and note its particularities. If nothing else, in these lectures we find a mirror image of how Nabokov himself hoped to be read. For he felt his own work to be multiplex but not truly multivalent-the buck stopped at Nabokov, the man who had placed the details there in the first place. His texts had their unity (their truest reality) in him.

Consequently, seriously variant interpretations of his novels were only so much poshlust [27] to him, to be filed next to “Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, over concern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.” This makes him a hard author to write about. He seems to admit no ideal reader except himself. I think of him as one of the last, great twentieth-century believers in the autonomy of the Author, as Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the last believers in the Architect. They both specialized in theatrical interviews, struck self-regarding and self-mythologizing poses, all of which would mean nothing (the Author being dead, you don’t have to listen to his self-descriptions) if it weren’t for the fact that they wove the restrictions and privileges of authorship into the very fabric of the things they built. For it’s true that each time I enter Pnin I feel its author controlling (via an obsessive specificity) all my reactions, just as, in Wright’s Unity Temple, one enters through a small, low side door, forced to approach the magnificence of the interior by way of a series of awkward right-angled turns. There is extraordinary, almost overwhelming beauty in Nabokov-there is also an oppressive rigidity. You will live in his house his way. Nabokov’s way means giving up the reader’s traditional linear right-of-way through a novel (starting at the first page and ending at the last) and confronting instead a network of connected leitmotifs, quotations, clues, and puzzles that are not so much to be read as deciphered. Faced with a Nabokov novel it’s impossible to rid yourself of the feeling that you’ve been set a problem, as a chess master sets a problem in a newspaper. I am always tormented by the sense I have missed something-and Nabokov makes me feel my failure. The Author, he claimed, “clashes with readerdom because he is his own ideal reader and those other readers are so very often mere lip-moving ghosts and amnesiacs.” He claimed to be writing, instead, “mainly for artists, fellow-artist and follow artists,” whose job it was to “share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author-the joys and difficulties of creation.” Follow artists! In practice this means subsuming your existence in his, until you become, in effect, Nabokov’s double, knowing what he knows, loving as he loves and hating his way, too, [28]following each nuance, pursuing each reference, in what amounts to a reader’s mimeograph of the Author’s creative act. (And there exist many people who hate Nabokov for precisely this reason.) It is a reversal of the Barthes formulation: here it is the reader who must die so that the Author may live. There is a sensible school of thought that argues all writing makes us do this [29]-but few writers make you feel your subjection as Nabokov does. The only perfect tenant of the house that Nabokov built is Nabokov. [30]

When you teach Nabokov to students, along with the usual complaint that his vocabulary is unnecessarily baroque, they want to know whether all this game playing, all this punning complexity is, in the end, truly for the reader at all. They scrunch up their noses and direct you to a particular passage: “Now, isn’t this just Nabokov basically getting himself off ?” The question is a fair one. The elusive, allusive, pleasures of the Nabokovian text-whose pleasures are these, really? When asked about “the pleasures of writing” in his Playboy interview, Nabokov answered: “They correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading, the bliss, the felicity of a phrase is shared by writer and reader: by the satisfied writer and the grateful reader.”

But isn’t the aside vital? Doesn’t satisfaction trump gratitude? With our twenty-first-century passion for equality, gratitude seems a slavish sort of attitude to take to an author. Is that truly our reward for being Nabokovians, for reading and rereading, pursuing every butterfly, every long-vanished Russian émigré poet? Nabokov thought so; he felt that what he offered his reader, and especially his rereader, was not the antic pleasure of their own interpretations, but the serious satisfaction of twinning the emotion of creation :

I would say that the main favour I ask of the serious critic is sufficient perceptiveness to understand that whatever term or trope I use, my purpose is not to be facetiously flashy or grotesquely obscure but to express what I feel and think with the utmost truthfulness and perception.

By following all his threads, you are doing more than reading, you are given the opportunity to precisely reconstruct the bliss of vdokhnovenie , of Nabokov’s own writerly act . (And maybe even a trace of vorstorg . Nabokov thought that the “force and originality involved in the primary spasm of inspiration is directly proportional to the worth of the book the author will write.” We might hope, then, for a trace of the propellant to be left after the explosion.) The difference is that Nabokov asks that we admit it is the author’s gift in the design, rather than our gift at connecting the dots, that is truly meaningful, and meaning producing. No matter how I try to slot them together, Nabokov goes a certain way along with Barthes and no further. Reading is creative! insists Barthes. Yes, but writing creates, replies Nabokov, smoothly, and turns back to his note cards.

Maybe we can say that Nabokov makes his readers so very creative that we are liable to feel that we ourselves have made something. Pnin rereaders can follow the Lermontov hints (to a poem called “The Triple Dream”) and the Tolstoy hints (to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”) and find in those texts miniature versions of Pnin’s Russian doll structure, mise-en-abymes placed by Nabokov into his novel with the care of Van Eyck. [31], [32]They are so hard to see, such particular details, that you feel you placed them there yourself. And the experience of rereading Pnin is never perfect or finished-there’s always some new detail to fondle. A newcomer to Nabokov will notice only the actual butterflies fluttering around; as you get further in, you’ll start to notice the entomology sunk deep into the weft and weave. Those Nabokovian words, pressed into service for quite other purposes, which, upon closer inspection, reveal their hidden wings and abdomens (bole, crepitation, Punchinello [33]). And it’s only on this most recent rereading that I think to kneel in front of my desk, place a glass of water at eye level and position a comb, on end, behind it. Zebra cocktail! [34] Nabokov saw it-now I do. And it’s beautiful. Gratitude does not seem out of place.

Whether one quite approves of it or not, it’s a Nabokovian assumption that if you work to give him back what he has given to you, this should be reward enough (for you). His students learned this soon enough. [35]And of course Vera lived it. (The character most closely modeled on Vera-Zina, from The Gift -is praised by the narrator for having a “perfect understanding… for everything that he himself loved.”) Here Barthes comes up against a wall of pure Nabokov. Barthes scorned that “image of literature, to be found in ordinary culture, [which] is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his hates, his passions.” And then Foucault, in the essay that answered Barthes’s own, and deepened it, identified the Author (or “Author-function”) as “the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.” [36]In Nabokov’s case, the arrow hits its bull’s-eye: this author’s high-handed rules about reading, his various strictures concerning interpretation, and his defensive humiliations of his own potential readers (especially on the topic of Freudian critics and Lolita [37] )-these all work to “impede[s] the free circulation, the free manipulation, the composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.” [38]But a question I never asked as a college rereader, now bothers me as a writer: and what of it?