Subject
[NABOKOV-L] James Bonney 's arguments related to solipsism and
tyranny in Nabokov's early novels.
tyranny in Nabokov's early novels.
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Dear List,
To pursue the issue, related to Wilson's criticism of "Bend Sinister," when he exaggerates Nabokov's lack of information and knowledge about political issues, I tried to read other works which dealt with the meanders in the relationship between art, metaphysics and politics.
Off-list I was offered the opportunity to read James Bonney's M.A. Thesis (December 2008) about "Solipsism and the Poetics of Power: Tyranny and Narratological Impasse in Some Fictions of Vladimir Nabokov," which offers an ellucidative perspective on solipsism, its link with tyranny and its impasses.
In his article James Bonney analyses various novels -written by Nabokov while he lived in Germany at the time of Mussolini's, Stalin's and, particularly, Hitler's, ascendancy to power - in order to trace narratological shifts, from the "deus ex machina" stance adopted by Nabokov, to the solution of narratological dead-ends. Bonney demonstrates how the latter is achieved by a move from the representation of "external" tyrannies, towards the "private" tyranny practiced by some of his characters, like Humbert Humbert in "Lolita." In "Lolita" it is no longer the victim, but the torturer who is allowed to narrate his experience.
Bonney also indicates how the individual reader is entrapped by solipsism, blinded by a social discourse or by a character's self-absorbed reductive perception (of the world, of people and of himself). He then indicates how Nabokov manoeuvers the reader into breaking away from his spell, to broaden his perspective following the aesthetic values he professes (curiosity, kindness...),.often only discovered in opposition to and "outside" a literal rendering of the novel's ideology and plot.*.
How a victim "may become a victor," another issue which has been raised in the List, connected to VN's assertions in Pale Fire, is here explained from the literary standpoint and not recurring to ethical systems or metaphysical ellaborations.
........................................................................................................................................
* Excerpts from James Bonney's thesis:
According to Bonney, Nabokov's control over the terms by which his work should be read, and his statements about his rejection of political, moralistic and didactic intentions (although true in a limited technical sense), have created a critical bias towards his aesthetic and moral positioning. Bonney believes that Nabokov's works reveal particular ethical and political concerns in connection with philosophical preoccupations related to them. For him, Nabokov's idea of solipsism became "something of a canon-defining topos" and his "ethics of perception," directed the readers to an "epistemological scale" which helped them to evaluate how his fictional characters recreated "reality" and their positivie or negative states (such as curiosity/incuriosity, tolerance/intolerance, kindness/cruelty ). For Bonney, the lower end of the scale entails perceptual or metaphysical blindness to reality ( solipsism). This overall destructive state is represented both by individual criminal characters and by totalitarian political structures. For Bonney "Nabokov situates solipsism at one end of an epistemological scale, and his representation of criminals like Lolita's Humbert Humbert's obsession, is closely related to his representation of totalitarian regimes, the actions of which are rooted in an almost identically degraded and constricted engagements with reality." In opposition to "solipsism," we find that imagination and criativity are fundamental qualities in Nabokov's epistemological schema.
Martin Amis's description of Lolita as "a study in tyranny." helps Bonney to conclude that "Humbert's solipsization of Lolita is the mechanism by which the asymmetrical and oppressive power relations that define their interactions are ultimately effected." Humbert's kind of solipsism, for Bonney, is also present in the corpus of narratives that have actual tyrannies (in the form of repressive state or social apparatuses) as their subjects: "The Leonardo,"; Invitation to a Beheading; "Cloud, Castle, Lake"; "Tyrants Destroyed"; and "Bend Sinister." He finds in the temporal concentration of texts about tyranny within the period of Nazism's ascendancy, an indication of Nabokov's particular engagement with the historical processes around him.
To be able to determine art's position relative to history, through plots that describe tyrannical powers entrapped Nabokov in a problematic of representation, which he was unable to resolve when he departed from a perspective related to the public dimension of "tyranny." For Bonney, it's Lolita who will mark a narrative inversion that will enable Nabokov "to abstract and resolve those same conflicts on the more manageable level of private relations." A useful model stems from Isaiah Berlin's abstract account of the mode of power relations in public and private spheres which will exemplify the direct assaults on human agency and the autonomy of the self.Bonner connects Berlin's analysis to the representations of tyrannical power to Nabokov's work and to his idiosyncratic conception of solipsism.
In Humbert's narrative, by solipsizing Lolita, Humbert degrades and destroys external reality while, at the same time, he turns Lolita's subjectivity and behavior into an epistemic nullity, an unreadable referent, to narrator and reader alike. Lolita is "encased" by Humbert's solipsizing discourse, which serves "the double purpose of imprisoning the actual person in an artificial, constructed non-self, and establishing something of a lacuna in his narrative," which will eventually entrap the reader. Following Leona Toker's exposition about "distribution of emphasis," he sees in Humbert's verbal (in a grammatical sense) coinage of solipsism a transplantation of this resource from the abstract realm of epistemological theory, to that of praxis. Apart from canceling Lolita's reality within the space of the narrative, his hegemonic discursive strategy is defined by an effort to cancel her reality within the mind of the reader.
In Nabokov's early novels, solipsism is characterized by violations of individual autonomy and violent suppressions of difference, with a degraded and constricted construction of reality as their precondition:
In "The Gift," Nabokov's final Russian novel, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the novel's narrator and protagonist, writes a biographical monograph on Nikolay Chernyshevski, who expresses what had been Nabokov's primary objections to materialism, with its generalizing tendencies and failure to account for the pluralizing effect of subjective perception. Chernyshevski, in Fyodor's biography is presented as someone who is cognitively and congenitally incapable of differentiating or accurately describing physical objects and phenomena in an utopian quest for 'coherency,'. The consequent reduction of diversity to uniformity results from Chernyshevski's effort to achieve harmony, in both the social and epistemological fields (the reverse of "specialization").
The metaphysical fantasy in "Invitation to a Beheading" serves as an example of the "outside of History." It antecedes Bend Sinister's recontextualization within a concrete political apparatus. Bonney quotes Brian Boyd, for whom Invitation to a Beheading, was partially developed out of the disgust. Nabokov experienced by the cruelties to which Chernyshevski had been subjected and they trace a parallel between the imprisonment and impending execution of Cincinnatus C. and Chernyshevski's ordeals.
Bonney will not only rely on the metaphysics of power, but also examine the congeries of works in which Nabokov dramatizes and explores the suppression of the private self, by a totalizing and overtly tyrannical public institution. For him "although Amis is correct in characterizing Lolita as a 'study in tyranny,' a careful distinction must be maintained between representations of politically determined tyranny, as it occurs within the public sphere, and asymmetrical and solipsistic power relations at the level of the private exchanges." Bonney describes how Nabokov will remove the constraints of history from his novels, to make way for a wider range of significations and possible resolutions, by articulating conflicts and practices emplying metaphysical fantasies .
Cincinnatus C. had been convicted of "the most terrible of crimes, gnostical turpitude," because he kept an individuated, private self despite the uniformity and metaphysical transparency decreed by the state as a condition of existence. Cincinnatus represents a principle of difference and he must be either be mastered or suppressed.. For Alexandrov, Invitation to a Beheading is an account of "the individual's relation to a metaphysical reality" while his subjection to the carceral regime represents "a politically defined institution of juridical power." Cincinnatus's belief in a reality beyond that to which he is condemned generates a binarial tension between "here" and "there" since, within the metaphysical schema of the narrative, history has an outside, and this makes it possible for Cincinnatus to transition from the "horrible here" to a transcendent "there." "Imagination (a fundamentally Romantic epistemological model) will save Cincinnatus, at the moment of his execution, because he is able to assert the comparative strength and reality of his consciousness, over the haphazardly constructed, pasteboard abstraction that surrounds him.
For Bonney, although Cincinnatus had, in effect, been solipsized by the institutional arrangements of the state-insofar as his reality was canceled and his self suppressed-he is successful in reversing this tyrannical structure of existence through a final act of consciousness and imagination (his or the author's?).
James Bonney believes that the problematic of representation found in the structures of tyranny becomes more complex when "Invitation to a Beheading" is considered alongside "The Leonardo"-a short story written less than a year before it. One of the most salient differences between the two texts is that the first one is situated within a historically determined time and place: Germany in the early 1930s (it should also be noted that Nabokov lived in Berlin at the time of his writing). Romantovski's so-called eccentricities and unsociable habits lead two of his neighbors to monitor his habits and to force their company on him, in a gradually escalating harassment. because "he moves and breathes differently from other people; the trouble is that we just cannot put our finger upon the difference, cannot catch the tip of the ear by which to pull out the rabbit. Hateful is everything that cannot be palpated, measured, counted." Like Cincinnatus, Romantovski is regarded as a figure of inscrutability whose mysteriousness is perceived as an existential threat to the "coherency" of a particular order of existence. The persecutional harassment that the two bullies unrelentingly inflict upon Romantovski eventually turns to violence, and Romantovski is beaten to death. As noted above, Nabokov's reference to the rising power of the Nazi regime makes it clear that this narrative, unlike "Invitation to a Beheading," is situated within a particularized historical order. Therefore it lacks "a metaphysical order that allows history to have an outside." Priscilla Meyer reads the violent persecution of Romantovski as occurring specifically within the context of the regime, of which the brothers are essentially proxies to develop the "theme of the artistic personality hounded by thugs" also found in Nabokov's "Cloud, Castle, Lake."
Nabokov's unease with the indeterminate position of art in relation to history and historical processes is signaled, however, by the narrator's efforts, in his subsequent novel,to displace and diminish the reality of the story. He will strive after a historical transcendence, such as what constitues the resolution of "Invitation to a Beheading," which begins with the narrative agent self-consciously setting the stage for the events that'll follow, and the manner in which the narrative space is dissolved once the story is concluded: "the world again irks me with its variegated void." As noted by Pifer, the artist may have little or no power within the field of history, but "his or her power within the circumscribed space of art is total, evidenced by the narrator's ability to assemble and destroy a world." Pifer reads this differential as itself constituting "an ethics of art, meant to demonstrate that the power inevitably held by the artist over his or her fictional constructs does not translate into power over people outside the narrative space... however, this raises some supplemental questions concerning the relationship between art and reality."
Totalitarianism, as it manifests itself in Nabokov's work, is a problematic of representation itself, stimulating Nabokov to experiment with a range of possible resolutions. In "Cloud, Castle, Lake" the conflict is strikingly similar to that of "The Leonardo"; and an analogous narrative strategy is employed. As Maxim D. Shrayer notes 'Cloud, Castle, Lake,' ..makes explicit the most noteworthy feature of a narrative strategy, the one Nabokov refers to as "an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by [the author]." For Bonney, although all narratives require impersonations, the prominence given to an expressly deific narrative agent as a plot device has the effect of placing him in a position of extreme liminality-simultaneously inside and outside the narrative space-while at the same time granting him the ordinarily withheld ability to stage direct and determinative interventions within the world of the narrative for the purpose of overtly arbitrating, or simply dissolving, its structures and systems of relations. "Cloud, Castle, Lake" features an extradiagetic narrator who inserts himself into the texture of the narrative.
Ellen Pifer writes that, in "Invitation to a Beheading," Cincinnatus's consciousness is "the locus of reality in an otherwise false world"; and, although that might offer a practicable resolution in the context of a narrative, situated within a fantastic metaphysical order, it offers no such solution to the other stories, discussed above, located as they are within a narrative approximation of history. These stories instead must rely upon an uncharacteristically heavy-handed use of deus ex machina devices, which locate transcendence outside the space of the narrative, in the hands of an extradiegetic narrator, vested with godlike powers of creation and destruction: the narrator - without any adequate means of redressing the politically-inflected cruelties suffered by Vasiliy, nor having access to the same kind of metaphysical transcendence available to Cincinnatus - because he is situated within a historically determined order of existence, has to operate from the outside and simply dissolves his character.
The same theme and problematic will be rehearsed again one year later, in 1938's "Tyrants Destroyed," in which Nabokov temporarily abandons the extreme narrative interventions, already discussed opting, instead, for a more modest but equally uncertain resolution. For Bonney, " 'Tyrants Destroyed' represents a temporary departure from the strategies and claims of the earlier texts, in that it features a first-person narrator who is situated directly and unambiguously within the world of the narrative. By suppressing the presence of an omnipotent narrative agent operating above the diagetic plane, the perspective is shifted in such a way that the possibility of metaphysical transcendence implicit in the earlier narratives is denied. The story instead seeks to resolve the representational problematic of totalitarian power structures by making an almost equally strong claim for the transcendent qualities of art, particularly its capacity to turn victim into victor." The novel is composed by an unnamed narrator who describes life in a totalitarian state. The tyrant is a mediocrity whose rise to power is attributed to "the kind of somber, concentrated will deeply conscious of its sullen self, which in the end transforms a giftless person into a triumphant monster." For Elen Pifer, apud Bonner, the narrator characterizes the source of this monstrosity as the "profound and fatal" disjuncture "between dreaming of a reordered world and dreaming of reordering it oneself as one sees fit." This reordering is achieved by an inherently solipsistic move (according to Nabokov's use of the term), causing the impoverishment of "average reality" through the violent infliction of ideological and epistemological abstractions. The most substantial portion of the story is devoted to chronicling the narrator's evolving obsession with the tyrant, which initially leads him to compulsively fantasize about assassinating him. Quickly concluding that murder is "insufferably trite," the narrator instead settles on suicide as a solution, rationalizing his decision as follows: "By killing myself I would kill him, as he was totally inside me, fattened on the intensity of my hatred." Suicide is abandoned as a potential resolution to both the speaker's predicament within the space of the narrative, and the narrative itself when, having re-read what he has written, the narrator concludes that his account has captured the truth with "artistry and inventiveness" and made the tyrant seem absurd-an object of ridicule rather than terror-which prompts him to describe his text as "an incantation, an exorcism, so that henceforth any man can exorcise bondage." This resolution, while eschewing the more extreme narratological and metaphysical interventions of the earlier texts, stakes a problematically strong claim for art. Can a tyrant be said to have been destroyed simply because a narrative construction semantically reduces his cruelties to the level of "annoyances"-particularly when the structures through which he exercises his power remain intact? This question is perhaps best answered by Lucy Maddox's comment on Bend Sinister's "inability, as a work of art, to come to terms with the irrefutable reality of the least aesthetically pleasing of all things-willful human cruelty." In terms equally applicable to "Tyrants Destroyed," Maddox writes the following: "The difficulty, of course, is that real dictatorships are not plays on words or absurd mirages that will go away when we stop thinking about them."
The thematic concerns and narrative impasses that begin to manifest themselves with "The Leonardo"-at least insofar as they are represented in overtly political contexts-culminate in "Bend Sinister," a novel which amplifies both the structural and thematic tendencies of the earlier works and establishes a more explicit link between solipsistic habits of thought. The course traced by the series of narratives that begins with "The Leonardo" suggests a trend towards increased specificity, from the wholly fantastic "Invitation to a Beheading" to the historically concretized "Bend Sinister." While the earlier fictions dramatize the effects of repressive political ideologies as they are translated into practices of power, "Bend Sinister"'s Ekwilism presents a fully elaborated example of such an ideology, which allows for a more precise understanding of what Nabokov saw as the specifically epistemological failings of totalitarian political philosophies.In narrating Krug's youthful association with Paduk, the latter's commitment to precisely this mode of solipsistic thought is made apparent. Consistent with this ideal of total uniformity, Paduk, like Chernyshevski, claims that "two pairs of eyes looking at a boot see the same boot since it is identically reflected in both," with no place for the subjective perception that Nabokov regarded as essential to the animation of "given reality." The novel's narrator posits that the "padograph" was "a proof that a mechanical device can reproduce personality, and that Quality is merely the distributional aspect of Quantity." Tellingly, adds Bonney, the device lacks a question mark, due to an engineering oversight, which seems to allude to the incuriosity and aversion to ambiguity that Nabokov includes as a characteristic feature of solipsistic thought. For him, the political implications of such a difference-eliding epistemological disposition are clearer when read in conjunction with passages from an earlier novel, "Despair," This novel features a mentally ill narrator, Hermann, who believes that he has found a perfectly identical double, named Felix. Soviet-style Communism being a frequent target of Nabokov's, his political leanings are made to reflect this. Hermann has a "faith in the impending sameness of us all," and he believes that "Communism shall indeed create a beautifully square world of identical brawny fellows." This is similar to Paduk's anagrammatic notion of individual selfhood, and the association between solipsism and substitutability is made even more obvious in Hermann's utopian reverie. Although Hermann's pronouncements are a symptom of his distinctly solipsistic insanity, his sentiments are echoed in Paduk's speeches and writings, particularly in the following distillation of his political philosophy: The sexualized rhetoric of Paduk's speech evokes a sense of violation, while the language of transparency recalls the metaphysical arrangement of Invitation to a Beheading. Paduk's belief in the interchangeability of selves obliterates the integrity of the private self, reducing the individual to a means by which the power of the state-which is, in essence, an abstract aggregate of "average" selves-can augment itself. The citizen is now recast as a mere appendage of the totalizing will of the state. Krug's resistance to Paduk's attempted subornation is a refusal to permit his self to be abstracted, or solipsized, by the ideological apparatus of the state. Krug's general epistemological disposition is also situated at the higher end of the scale by which Nabokov evaluates his characters' ethics of perception. Despite this, Krug's "conception of practical politics is romantic and childish,"as his friend Maximov informs him. When the narrator intervenes and dissolves the world of the narrative, he explains his intervention by saying that he "felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid towards him on an inclined beam of pale light-causing instantaneous madness, but at least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical fate." Prior to this, the "anthropomorphic deity" who narrates "Bend Sinister" signals his presence in the world of the narrative through an oblique system of signs, while Krug is dimly aware of this otherworldly presence from the start. This device enables Nabokov to suggest Krug's transcendence, constructing the narrative space in such a way that it has an outside-the reality of the narrator-which constitutes an order of existence wholly independent of the world of the novel. Whereas the outside of history present within the narrative space of "Invitation to a Beheading" had been essentially comprised by the world of the novel-as a result of its uniquely metaphysical arrangement, the "here" and "there" to which Cincinnatus refers coexist within the same space-the world of the narrator of "Bend Sinister," roughly corresponding to the reality of the reader, constitutes an order of metaphysical transcendence, relative to the action of the novel. And yet, the narrator ultimately acknowledges that Krug's transcendence is a dead end, characterizing it as "a slippery sophism, a play upon words."
While some critics, such as Morton, characterize Nabokov's extreme narrative incursions as an assertion "triumph of the powers of consciousness," others read them as despairing admissions of the inadequacy of art, in the face of brutal historical processes. For Moynahan, these interventions "reflect a bottomless pessimism about politics and the social process in our time," and that the "absolute individualism of Nabokov's world view tends to deny him the consolation of belief that any agency, operating in or beyond history, will eventually redeem the sufferings inflicted on innocent and decent people by savage and incompetent ideologues and power brokers in this century." For Moynahan,Nabokov's continued reliance on a "slippery sophism" suggests that the problematic of representation generated by tyrannical power structures has not yet been resolved.
For Bonney "the problematic of representation and narratological resolution that distinguishes Nabokov's former works can be understood, at least in part, as resulting from attempts to elude the comprehensive grasp of history, so it is significant that Nabokov seeks to rhetorically establish historical processes that comprise totalitarian power structures as something other than history." And yet "the historically determined space of the narrative generates the same narratological blockages and forces the same extreme interventions that we find in the earlier texts." Lolita, which also explores the solipsistic exercise of tyrannical power, resituates it in the sphere of private relations. "While this transposition from public to private does not obviate history as a contextual consideration, it has the effect of displacing it from the foreground of the narrative.
One of the most salient structural differences between the earlier fictions and Lolita is that the latter is marked by a narratological inversion: while the preceding works are focalized through the experiences of the victims, Lolita is narrated from the perspective of the 'tyrant'."
Although Nabokov's representations of solipsism are largely uniform, the shift towards the private that occurs in Lolita allows solipsism to be constituted as an epistemological and ethical mechanism that ultimately makes possible a successful narrative resolution, while the continuum of narratives with more overtly political subjects are distinguished by their failure to resolve similar conflicts..."In essence, Lolita offers a dramatized redemption rather than an artificial transcendence based on narratological design; it also forces the reader to directly confront a form of the solipsistic epistemology upon which Nabokov's tyrannies are invariably based and develop his or her own strategy of resistance... For the duration of the novel, the reader is presented with Humbert's "schematic" Lolita: a "solipsized" eidolon drained of all but those generalized nymphetic qualities that Humbert falsely imputes to her." It is only as Humbert relates his gradual and implicit emergence from his solipsistic condition that those qualities of "curiosity" and "tenderness" concretely manifest and fully reveal themselves as antithetical and antidotal to the state of tyrannical cruelty that he otherwise shares with Nabokov's other "torturers." Humbert's awakening to the "given world," and his realization that he has stolen Lolita's childhood by estranging her from this reality serves as the measure of his redemption by the "the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art."
Citing Rorty, who distinguishes between novels with clearly defined social intentions, such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, that endeavor to dramatize the cruelty of certain social and institutional practices and arrangements, and novels that attempt to demonstrate the cruelties that can arise from our personal idiosyncrasies and obsessions, Bonney believes that Rorty offers a deeply ethical reading of Lolita, applicable as much to Humbert as it does to the reader, upon whom Nabokov places the implicit obligation to penetrate the narrator's obfuscatory rhetoric and "distribution of emphasis" and truly become aware of the suffering of the novel's "poor little girl."
Although Nabokov may not believe that the suffering of innocents can be redeemed, as Moynahan maintains, by displacing tyranny from the overtly political context of the public and inscribing it, within the context of a closed narrative circuit, in the space of the private, he finds an ethically determined resolution that makes a more modest claim for art and proposes a pragmatic solution to the problem of solipsism that does not depend on a formally constructed transcendence. Lolita is not saved by the intervention of an extradiagetic narrative agent; nor is art presented as powerful enough to destroy tyrants and reduce regimes of cruelty to the level of "annoyances." It can instead serve as a "very local palliative," as Humbert comes to realize, and a means by which readers might be taught to recognize cruelty in its virtually endless manifestations, as Rorty argues. The narrative structure of Lolita forces the reader to read over the tyrant's shoulder, in a manner of speaking, and the and the ethical work that this requires the reader to do assumes the place of the quasi-metaphysical work performed by the "anthropomorphic deity" who narrates the earlier texts.
For Bonney, Nabokov explores the epistemological dimensions of tyrannical power structures as they manifest themselves within various orders of magnitude-ranging from the casual, politically-inflected brutality of "The Leonardo" to the ideologically and historically determined repressive state apparatus of Bend Sinister, and finally the private realm of personal obsession in Lolita-revealing solipsistic engagements with reality as the foundation common to each. By representing the ethical redemption of a tyrant, however, rather than the transcendence of a victim that amounts to a "despairing trick of fiction," Nabokov suggests a way beyond such practices of power. The desired escape from history that manifests itself in the earlier fictions derives from a sense of art's ultimate ineffectuality when confronted by brutal historical processes, as Maddox and Moynahan suggest; that desire-and the narrative distortions that go along with it-is largely absent from Lolita, in large part due to its position within a postwar private sphere.
More important, however, is the fact that Lolita is given an ethical function that attempts to obviate the ineffectual despair that determines the narratological forms of the earlier texts: by forcing the reader to read through and around Humbert's generalizing, solipsistic discourse in order to know Lolita as a uniquely individuated subjectivity rather than an abstraction, the novel seeks to effect an epistemological reorientation towards specificity and the type of ethical cognition described by Rorty. In Nabokov's formulation, cruelty on any scale inevitably has a solipsistic epistemology as its foundation; and by replacing the merely formal reassurances offered by the metaphysical interventions of the earlier texts and instead addressing the sources of solipsism as they are manifested in private relations, this newly centralized ethical function puts art into a more modest yet less ambiguous position with respect to history.
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To pursue the issue, related to Wilson's criticism of "Bend Sinister," when he exaggerates Nabokov's lack of information and knowledge about political issues, I tried to read other works which dealt with the meanders in the relationship between art, metaphysics and politics.
Off-list I was offered the opportunity to read James Bonney's M.A. Thesis (December 2008) about "Solipsism and the Poetics of Power: Tyranny and Narratological Impasse in Some Fictions of Vladimir Nabokov," which offers an ellucidative perspective on solipsism, its link with tyranny and its impasses.
In his article James Bonney analyses various novels -written by Nabokov while he lived in Germany at the time of Mussolini's, Stalin's and, particularly, Hitler's, ascendancy to power - in order to trace narratological shifts, from the "deus ex machina" stance adopted by Nabokov, to the solution of narratological dead-ends. Bonney demonstrates how the latter is achieved by a move from the representation of "external" tyrannies, towards the "private" tyranny practiced by some of his characters, like Humbert Humbert in "Lolita." In "Lolita" it is no longer the victim, but the torturer who is allowed to narrate his experience.
Bonney also indicates how the individual reader is entrapped by solipsism, blinded by a social discourse or by a character's self-absorbed reductive perception (of the world, of people and of himself). He then indicates how Nabokov manoeuvers the reader into breaking away from his spell, to broaden his perspective following the aesthetic values he professes (curiosity, kindness...),.often only discovered in opposition to and "outside" a literal rendering of the novel's ideology and plot.*.
How a victim "may become a victor," another issue which has been raised in the List, connected to VN's assertions in Pale Fire, is here explained from the literary standpoint and not recurring to ethical systems or metaphysical ellaborations.
........................................................................................................................................
* Excerpts from James Bonney's thesis:
According to Bonney, Nabokov's control over the terms by which his work should be read, and his statements about his rejection of political, moralistic and didactic intentions (although true in a limited technical sense), have created a critical bias towards his aesthetic and moral positioning. Bonney believes that Nabokov's works reveal particular ethical and political concerns in connection with philosophical preoccupations related to them. For him, Nabokov's idea of solipsism became "something of a canon-defining topos" and his "ethics of perception," directed the readers to an "epistemological scale" which helped them to evaluate how his fictional characters recreated "reality" and their positivie or negative states (such as curiosity/incuriosity, tolerance/intolerance, kindness/cruelty ). For Bonney, the lower end of the scale entails perceptual or metaphysical blindness to reality ( solipsism). This overall destructive state is represented both by individual criminal characters and by totalitarian political structures. For Bonney "Nabokov situates solipsism at one end of an epistemological scale, and his representation of criminals like Lolita's Humbert Humbert's obsession, is closely related to his representation of totalitarian regimes, the actions of which are rooted in an almost identically degraded and constricted engagements with reality." In opposition to "solipsism," we find that imagination and criativity are fundamental qualities in Nabokov's epistemological schema.
Martin Amis's description of Lolita as "a study in tyranny." helps Bonney to conclude that "Humbert's solipsization of Lolita is the mechanism by which the asymmetrical and oppressive power relations that define their interactions are ultimately effected." Humbert's kind of solipsism, for Bonney, is also present in the corpus of narratives that have actual tyrannies (in the form of repressive state or social apparatuses) as their subjects: "The Leonardo,"; Invitation to a Beheading; "Cloud, Castle, Lake"; "Tyrants Destroyed"; and "Bend Sinister." He finds in the temporal concentration of texts about tyranny within the period of Nazism's ascendancy, an indication of Nabokov's particular engagement with the historical processes around him.
To be able to determine art's position relative to history, through plots that describe tyrannical powers entrapped Nabokov in a problematic of representation, which he was unable to resolve when he departed from a perspective related to the public dimension of "tyranny." For Bonney, it's Lolita who will mark a narrative inversion that will enable Nabokov "to abstract and resolve those same conflicts on the more manageable level of private relations." A useful model stems from Isaiah Berlin's abstract account of the mode of power relations in public and private spheres which will exemplify the direct assaults on human agency and the autonomy of the self.Bonner connects Berlin's analysis to the representations of tyrannical power to Nabokov's work and to his idiosyncratic conception of solipsism.
In Humbert's narrative, by solipsizing Lolita, Humbert degrades and destroys external reality while, at the same time, he turns Lolita's subjectivity and behavior into an epistemic nullity, an unreadable referent, to narrator and reader alike. Lolita is "encased" by Humbert's solipsizing discourse, which serves "the double purpose of imprisoning the actual person in an artificial, constructed non-self, and establishing something of a lacuna in his narrative," which will eventually entrap the reader. Following Leona Toker's exposition about "distribution of emphasis," he sees in Humbert's verbal (in a grammatical sense) coinage of solipsism a transplantation of this resource from the abstract realm of epistemological theory, to that of praxis. Apart from canceling Lolita's reality within the space of the narrative, his hegemonic discursive strategy is defined by an effort to cancel her reality within the mind of the reader.
In Nabokov's early novels, solipsism is characterized by violations of individual autonomy and violent suppressions of difference, with a degraded and constricted construction of reality as their precondition:
In "The Gift," Nabokov's final Russian novel, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the novel's narrator and protagonist, writes a biographical monograph on Nikolay Chernyshevski, who expresses what had been Nabokov's primary objections to materialism, with its generalizing tendencies and failure to account for the pluralizing effect of subjective perception. Chernyshevski, in Fyodor's biography is presented as someone who is cognitively and congenitally incapable of differentiating or accurately describing physical objects and phenomena in an utopian quest for 'coherency,'. The consequent reduction of diversity to uniformity results from Chernyshevski's effort to achieve harmony, in both the social and epistemological fields (the reverse of "specialization").
The metaphysical fantasy in "Invitation to a Beheading" serves as an example of the "outside of History." It antecedes Bend Sinister's recontextualization within a concrete political apparatus. Bonney quotes Brian Boyd, for whom Invitation to a Beheading, was partially developed out of the disgust. Nabokov experienced by the cruelties to which Chernyshevski had been subjected and they trace a parallel between the imprisonment and impending execution of Cincinnatus C. and Chernyshevski's ordeals.
Bonney will not only rely on the metaphysics of power, but also examine the congeries of works in which Nabokov dramatizes and explores the suppression of the private self, by a totalizing and overtly tyrannical public institution. For him "although Amis is correct in characterizing Lolita as a 'study in tyranny,' a careful distinction must be maintained between representations of politically determined tyranny, as it occurs within the public sphere, and asymmetrical and solipsistic power relations at the level of the private exchanges." Bonney describes how Nabokov will remove the constraints of history from his novels, to make way for a wider range of significations and possible resolutions, by articulating conflicts and practices emplying metaphysical fantasies .
Cincinnatus C. had been convicted of "the most terrible of crimes, gnostical turpitude," because he kept an individuated, private self despite the uniformity and metaphysical transparency decreed by the state as a condition of existence. Cincinnatus represents a principle of difference and he must be either be mastered or suppressed.. For Alexandrov, Invitation to a Beheading is an account of "the individual's relation to a metaphysical reality" while his subjection to the carceral regime represents "a politically defined institution of juridical power." Cincinnatus's belief in a reality beyond that to which he is condemned generates a binarial tension between "here" and "there" since, within the metaphysical schema of the narrative, history has an outside, and this makes it possible for Cincinnatus to transition from the "horrible here" to a transcendent "there." "Imagination (a fundamentally Romantic epistemological model) will save Cincinnatus, at the moment of his execution, because he is able to assert the comparative strength and reality of his consciousness, over the haphazardly constructed, pasteboard abstraction that surrounds him.
For Bonney, although Cincinnatus had, in effect, been solipsized by the institutional arrangements of the state-insofar as his reality was canceled and his self suppressed-he is successful in reversing this tyrannical structure of existence through a final act of consciousness and imagination (his or the author's?).
James Bonney believes that the problematic of representation found in the structures of tyranny becomes more complex when "Invitation to a Beheading" is considered alongside "The Leonardo"-a short story written less than a year before it. One of the most salient differences between the two texts is that the first one is situated within a historically determined time and place: Germany in the early 1930s (it should also be noted that Nabokov lived in Berlin at the time of his writing). Romantovski's so-called eccentricities and unsociable habits lead two of his neighbors to monitor his habits and to force their company on him, in a gradually escalating harassment. because "he moves and breathes differently from other people; the trouble is that we just cannot put our finger upon the difference, cannot catch the tip of the ear by which to pull out the rabbit. Hateful is everything that cannot be palpated, measured, counted." Like Cincinnatus, Romantovski is regarded as a figure of inscrutability whose mysteriousness is perceived as an existential threat to the "coherency" of a particular order of existence. The persecutional harassment that the two bullies unrelentingly inflict upon Romantovski eventually turns to violence, and Romantovski is beaten to death. As noted above, Nabokov's reference to the rising power of the Nazi regime makes it clear that this narrative, unlike "Invitation to a Beheading," is situated within a particularized historical order. Therefore it lacks "a metaphysical order that allows history to have an outside." Priscilla Meyer reads the violent persecution of Romantovski as occurring specifically within the context of the regime, of which the brothers are essentially proxies to develop the "theme of the artistic personality hounded by thugs" also found in Nabokov's "Cloud, Castle, Lake."
Nabokov's unease with the indeterminate position of art in relation to history and historical processes is signaled, however, by the narrator's efforts, in his subsequent novel,to displace and diminish the reality of the story. He will strive after a historical transcendence, such as what constitues the resolution of "Invitation to a Beheading," which begins with the narrative agent self-consciously setting the stage for the events that'll follow, and the manner in which the narrative space is dissolved once the story is concluded: "the world again irks me with its variegated void." As noted by Pifer, the artist may have little or no power within the field of history, but "his or her power within the circumscribed space of art is total, evidenced by the narrator's ability to assemble and destroy a world." Pifer reads this differential as itself constituting "an ethics of art, meant to demonstrate that the power inevitably held by the artist over his or her fictional constructs does not translate into power over people outside the narrative space... however, this raises some supplemental questions concerning the relationship between art and reality."
Totalitarianism, as it manifests itself in Nabokov's work, is a problematic of representation itself, stimulating Nabokov to experiment with a range of possible resolutions. In "Cloud, Castle, Lake" the conflict is strikingly similar to that of "The Leonardo"; and an analogous narrative strategy is employed. As Maxim D. Shrayer notes 'Cloud, Castle, Lake,' ..makes explicit the most noteworthy feature of a narrative strategy, the one Nabokov refers to as "an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by [the author]." For Bonney, although all narratives require impersonations, the prominence given to an expressly deific narrative agent as a plot device has the effect of placing him in a position of extreme liminality-simultaneously inside and outside the narrative space-while at the same time granting him the ordinarily withheld ability to stage direct and determinative interventions within the world of the narrative for the purpose of overtly arbitrating, or simply dissolving, its structures and systems of relations. "Cloud, Castle, Lake" features an extradiagetic narrator who inserts himself into the texture of the narrative.
Ellen Pifer writes that, in "Invitation to a Beheading," Cincinnatus's consciousness is "the locus of reality in an otherwise false world"; and, although that might offer a practicable resolution in the context of a narrative, situated within a fantastic metaphysical order, it offers no such solution to the other stories, discussed above, located as they are within a narrative approximation of history. These stories instead must rely upon an uncharacteristically heavy-handed use of deus ex machina devices, which locate transcendence outside the space of the narrative, in the hands of an extradiegetic narrator, vested with godlike powers of creation and destruction: the narrator - without any adequate means of redressing the politically-inflected cruelties suffered by Vasiliy, nor having access to the same kind of metaphysical transcendence available to Cincinnatus - because he is situated within a historically determined order of existence, has to operate from the outside and simply dissolves his character.
The same theme and problematic will be rehearsed again one year later, in 1938's "Tyrants Destroyed," in which Nabokov temporarily abandons the extreme narrative interventions, already discussed opting, instead, for a more modest but equally uncertain resolution. For Bonney, " 'Tyrants Destroyed' represents a temporary departure from the strategies and claims of the earlier texts, in that it features a first-person narrator who is situated directly and unambiguously within the world of the narrative. By suppressing the presence of an omnipotent narrative agent operating above the diagetic plane, the perspective is shifted in such a way that the possibility of metaphysical transcendence implicit in the earlier narratives is denied. The story instead seeks to resolve the representational problematic of totalitarian power structures by making an almost equally strong claim for the transcendent qualities of art, particularly its capacity to turn victim into victor." The novel is composed by an unnamed narrator who describes life in a totalitarian state. The tyrant is a mediocrity whose rise to power is attributed to "the kind of somber, concentrated will deeply conscious of its sullen self, which in the end transforms a giftless person into a triumphant monster." For Elen Pifer, apud Bonner, the narrator characterizes the source of this monstrosity as the "profound and fatal" disjuncture "between dreaming of a reordered world and dreaming of reordering it oneself as one sees fit." This reordering is achieved by an inherently solipsistic move (according to Nabokov's use of the term), causing the impoverishment of "average reality" through the violent infliction of ideological and epistemological abstractions. The most substantial portion of the story is devoted to chronicling the narrator's evolving obsession with the tyrant, which initially leads him to compulsively fantasize about assassinating him. Quickly concluding that murder is "insufferably trite," the narrator instead settles on suicide as a solution, rationalizing his decision as follows: "By killing myself I would kill him, as he was totally inside me, fattened on the intensity of my hatred." Suicide is abandoned as a potential resolution to both the speaker's predicament within the space of the narrative, and the narrative itself when, having re-read what he has written, the narrator concludes that his account has captured the truth with "artistry and inventiveness" and made the tyrant seem absurd-an object of ridicule rather than terror-which prompts him to describe his text as "an incantation, an exorcism, so that henceforth any man can exorcise bondage." This resolution, while eschewing the more extreme narratological and metaphysical interventions of the earlier texts, stakes a problematically strong claim for art. Can a tyrant be said to have been destroyed simply because a narrative construction semantically reduces his cruelties to the level of "annoyances"-particularly when the structures through which he exercises his power remain intact? This question is perhaps best answered by Lucy Maddox's comment on Bend Sinister's "inability, as a work of art, to come to terms with the irrefutable reality of the least aesthetically pleasing of all things-willful human cruelty." In terms equally applicable to "Tyrants Destroyed," Maddox writes the following: "The difficulty, of course, is that real dictatorships are not plays on words or absurd mirages that will go away when we stop thinking about them."
The thematic concerns and narrative impasses that begin to manifest themselves with "The Leonardo"-at least insofar as they are represented in overtly political contexts-culminate in "Bend Sinister," a novel which amplifies both the structural and thematic tendencies of the earlier works and establishes a more explicit link between solipsistic habits of thought. The course traced by the series of narratives that begins with "The Leonardo" suggests a trend towards increased specificity, from the wholly fantastic "Invitation to a Beheading" to the historically concretized "Bend Sinister." While the earlier fictions dramatize the effects of repressive political ideologies as they are translated into practices of power, "Bend Sinister"'s Ekwilism presents a fully elaborated example of such an ideology, which allows for a more precise understanding of what Nabokov saw as the specifically epistemological failings of totalitarian political philosophies.In narrating Krug's youthful association with Paduk, the latter's commitment to precisely this mode of solipsistic thought is made apparent. Consistent with this ideal of total uniformity, Paduk, like Chernyshevski, claims that "two pairs of eyes looking at a boot see the same boot since it is identically reflected in both," with no place for the subjective perception that Nabokov regarded as essential to the animation of "given reality." The novel's narrator posits that the "padograph" was "a proof that a mechanical device can reproduce personality, and that Quality is merely the distributional aspect of Quantity." Tellingly, adds Bonney, the device lacks a question mark, due to an engineering oversight, which seems to allude to the incuriosity and aversion to ambiguity that Nabokov includes as a characteristic feature of solipsistic thought. For him, the political implications of such a difference-eliding epistemological disposition are clearer when read in conjunction with passages from an earlier novel, "Despair," This novel features a mentally ill narrator, Hermann, who believes that he has found a perfectly identical double, named Felix. Soviet-style Communism being a frequent target of Nabokov's, his political leanings are made to reflect this. Hermann has a "faith in the impending sameness of us all," and he believes that "Communism shall indeed create a beautifully square world of identical brawny fellows." This is similar to Paduk's anagrammatic notion of individual selfhood, and the association between solipsism and substitutability is made even more obvious in Hermann's utopian reverie. Although Hermann's pronouncements are a symptom of his distinctly solipsistic insanity, his sentiments are echoed in Paduk's speeches and writings, particularly in the following distillation of his political philosophy: The sexualized rhetoric of Paduk's speech evokes a sense of violation, while the language of transparency recalls the metaphysical arrangement of Invitation to a Beheading. Paduk's belief in the interchangeability of selves obliterates the integrity of the private self, reducing the individual to a means by which the power of the state-which is, in essence, an abstract aggregate of "average" selves-can augment itself. The citizen is now recast as a mere appendage of the totalizing will of the state. Krug's resistance to Paduk's attempted subornation is a refusal to permit his self to be abstracted, or solipsized, by the ideological apparatus of the state. Krug's general epistemological disposition is also situated at the higher end of the scale by which Nabokov evaluates his characters' ethics of perception. Despite this, Krug's "conception of practical politics is romantic and childish,"as his friend Maximov informs him. When the narrator intervenes and dissolves the world of the narrative, he explains his intervention by saying that he "felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid towards him on an inclined beam of pale light-causing instantaneous madness, but at least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical fate." Prior to this, the "anthropomorphic deity" who narrates "Bend Sinister" signals his presence in the world of the narrative through an oblique system of signs, while Krug is dimly aware of this otherworldly presence from the start. This device enables Nabokov to suggest Krug's transcendence, constructing the narrative space in such a way that it has an outside-the reality of the narrator-which constitutes an order of existence wholly independent of the world of the novel. Whereas the outside of history present within the narrative space of "Invitation to a Beheading" had been essentially comprised by the world of the novel-as a result of its uniquely metaphysical arrangement, the "here" and "there" to which Cincinnatus refers coexist within the same space-the world of the narrator of "Bend Sinister," roughly corresponding to the reality of the reader, constitutes an order of metaphysical transcendence, relative to the action of the novel. And yet, the narrator ultimately acknowledges that Krug's transcendence is a dead end, characterizing it as "a slippery sophism, a play upon words."
While some critics, such as Morton, characterize Nabokov's extreme narrative incursions as an assertion "triumph of the powers of consciousness," others read them as despairing admissions of the inadequacy of art, in the face of brutal historical processes. For Moynahan, these interventions "reflect a bottomless pessimism about politics and the social process in our time," and that the "absolute individualism of Nabokov's world view tends to deny him the consolation of belief that any agency, operating in or beyond history, will eventually redeem the sufferings inflicted on innocent and decent people by savage and incompetent ideologues and power brokers in this century." For Moynahan,Nabokov's continued reliance on a "slippery sophism" suggests that the problematic of representation generated by tyrannical power structures has not yet been resolved.
For Bonney "the problematic of representation and narratological resolution that distinguishes Nabokov's former works can be understood, at least in part, as resulting from attempts to elude the comprehensive grasp of history, so it is significant that Nabokov seeks to rhetorically establish historical processes that comprise totalitarian power structures as something other than history." And yet "the historically determined space of the narrative generates the same narratological blockages and forces the same extreme interventions that we find in the earlier texts." Lolita, which also explores the solipsistic exercise of tyrannical power, resituates it in the sphere of private relations. "While this transposition from public to private does not obviate history as a contextual consideration, it has the effect of displacing it from the foreground of the narrative.
One of the most salient structural differences between the earlier fictions and Lolita is that the latter is marked by a narratological inversion: while the preceding works are focalized through the experiences of the victims, Lolita is narrated from the perspective of the 'tyrant'."
Although Nabokov's representations of solipsism are largely uniform, the shift towards the private that occurs in Lolita allows solipsism to be constituted as an epistemological and ethical mechanism that ultimately makes possible a successful narrative resolution, while the continuum of narratives with more overtly political subjects are distinguished by their failure to resolve similar conflicts..."In essence, Lolita offers a dramatized redemption rather than an artificial transcendence based on narratological design; it also forces the reader to directly confront a form of the solipsistic epistemology upon which Nabokov's tyrannies are invariably based and develop his or her own strategy of resistance... For the duration of the novel, the reader is presented with Humbert's "schematic" Lolita: a "solipsized" eidolon drained of all but those generalized nymphetic qualities that Humbert falsely imputes to her." It is only as Humbert relates his gradual and implicit emergence from his solipsistic condition that those qualities of "curiosity" and "tenderness" concretely manifest and fully reveal themselves as antithetical and antidotal to the state of tyrannical cruelty that he otherwise shares with Nabokov's other "torturers." Humbert's awakening to the "given world," and his realization that he has stolen Lolita's childhood by estranging her from this reality serves as the measure of his redemption by the "the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art."
Citing Rorty, who distinguishes between novels with clearly defined social intentions, such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, that endeavor to dramatize the cruelty of certain social and institutional practices and arrangements, and novels that attempt to demonstrate the cruelties that can arise from our personal idiosyncrasies and obsessions, Bonney believes that Rorty offers a deeply ethical reading of Lolita, applicable as much to Humbert as it does to the reader, upon whom Nabokov places the implicit obligation to penetrate the narrator's obfuscatory rhetoric and "distribution of emphasis" and truly become aware of the suffering of the novel's "poor little girl."
Although Nabokov may not believe that the suffering of innocents can be redeemed, as Moynahan maintains, by displacing tyranny from the overtly political context of the public and inscribing it, within the context of a closed narrative circuit, in the space of the private, he finds an ethically determined resolution that makes a more modest claim for art and proposes a pragmatic solution to the problem of solipsism that does not depend on a formally constructed transcendence. Lolita is not saved by the intervention of an extradiagetic narrative agent; nor is art presented as powerful enough to destroy tyrants and reduce regimes of cruelty to the level of "annoyances." It can instead serve as a "very local palliative," as Humbert comes to realize, and a means by which readers might be taught to recognize cruelty in its virtually endless manifestations, as Rorty argues. The narrative structure of Lolita forces the reader to read over the tyrant's shoulder, in a manner of speaking, and the and the ethical work that this requires the reader to do assumes the place of the quasi-metaphysical work performed by the "anthropomorphic deity" who narrates the earlier texts.
For Bonney, Nabokov explores the epistemological dimensions of tyrannical power structures as they manifest themselves within various orders of magnitude-ranging from the casual, politically-inflected brutality of "The Leonardo" to the ideologically and historically determined repressive state apparatus of Bend Sinister, and finally the private realm of personal obsession in Lolita-revealing solipsistic engagements with reality as the foundation common to each. By representing the ethical redemption of a tyrant, however, rather than the transcendence of a victim that amounts to a "despairing trick of fiction," Nabokov suggests a way beyond such practices of power. The desired escape from history that manifests itself in the earlier fictions derives from a sense of art's ultimate ineffectuality when confronted by brutal historical processes, as Maddox and Moynahan suggest; that desire-and the narrative distortions that go along with it-is largely absent from Lolita, in large part due to its position within a postwar private sphere.
More important, however, is the fact that Lolita is given an ethical function that attempts to obviate the ineffectual despair that determines the narratological forms of the earlier texts: by forcing the reader to read through and around Humbert's generalizing, solipsistic discourse in order to know Lolita as a uniquely individuated subjectivity rather than an abstraction, the novel seeks to effect an epistemological reorientation towards specificity and the type of ethical cognition described by Rorty. In Nabokov's formulation, cruelty on any scale inevitably has a solipsistic epistemology as its foundation; and by replacing the merely formal reassurances offered by the metaphysical interventions of the earlier texts and instead addressing the sources of solipsism as they are manifested in private relations, this newly centralized ethical function puts art into a more modest yet less ambiguous position with respect to history.
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