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EDITOR'S NOTE. NABOKV-L THANKS LAURA DE RISI <LAURA.DERISI@FLASHNET.IT> FOR PERMISSION TO RUN THIS ITEM. Included are the thesis Table of Contents and its "Introduction"
LIKE A CANDLE BETWEEN MIRRORS
Nabokov and His Reflected Languages
Laura Corvino De Risi
John Cabot University - EN 480
Prof. Allan C. Christensen
June 1998
.. I kept changing countries like counterfeit money,
hurrying on and afraid to look back,
like a phantom dividing in two, like a candle
between mirrors sailing into the low sun...
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: From the Mirage of One Language to the Oasis of Another
1. "A Russian Something That I Could Inhale": Mary, The Eye
1.1. Exile: "The voice of words that was my sole joy"
1.2. Nostalgia: The Mirrored Roots of Language
1.3. Detachment: Language as a Sham
2. Reflected Words in a Black Mirror: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pnin
2.1. Failure: "Writing Broken English"
2.2. Disintegration: "A Broken Man Writing"
2.3. Self-Satisfaction: "Efficient, alabastrine, humane America"
3. A Mimetic Pattern of Perfect Sense: Speak Memory, Look at the Harlequins!
3.1. Mastery: The Invented Grand-Aunt
3.2. Memory: "Finding Congruences with the Remote"
3.3. Mirror: The Reader Who Catches On at Once
Conclusion: "Something Else"
Notes
Works Cited
Appendix 1: Five novels, a revised autobiography, and a book of poems
Appendix 2: The Artist's Studio through the Mirror
"
...And furthermore, not without brio,
you happened to write in some quite foreign tongue.
You recall the particular anise-oil flavor
of those strainings, those flingings in verbal distress?
Introduction:
From the Mirage of One Language to the Oasis of Another
"My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern," Nabokov writes (Afterword "On a Book Entitled Lolita"), "is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses—the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions—which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." And yet, this apparent self-disclosure may prove one more trick of the same illusionist—the "baffling mirror", at least, has not been abandoned.
The amazing interest Nabokov shows in the mechanisms of language from his very first to his very last novel allows us to think that "the shift from the mirage of one language to the oasis of another" (as he terms it in the Foreword to The Eye) must have been for him an endless source of discovery and gratification. His bilingual experience is reflected in his novels through many characters who face the same challenge and predicament—though not the same achievement. In Nabokov’s novels, however, we can also find evidence of how the effort to translate oneself into another language can lead to the disintegration of both literature and one’s own self.
The themes of exile, nostalgia, indifference, failure, divided identity, ambiguity and irony, mastery and pattern-making, memory, and finally mirroring, all are related to the writer’s major concern for language. From his very first novel, Mashenka—written in exile in Berlin (1925-26) and translated from Russian into English (Mary) forty-five years later—, to his last, Look at the Harlequins!—published in 1974 when the writer was at the height of his American success—, Nabokov has constantly explored, questioned and "deconstructed" the mechanisms through which one language mirrors another.
In Nabokov’s novels, both Russian and English seem to mirror people’s hopelessness at expressing themselves—even when these happen to be poets, writers, critics, university professors or in any other way "masters of the word" and privileged repositories of imagination. Most of Nabokov’s characters experience a painful self-division or even vanish at a certain point or turn out to be someone else altogether or prove themselves puppets at their author’s mercy in the always deceptive end of the novel. In order to survive, they need to translate themselves.
In fact, not only did Nabokov translate or help translate his own Russian novels into English (and talk at length about it in his Forewords and Afterwords), not only did he translate a few of his works back into Russian with astonishing results, but his main characters are also busy all the time translating themselves to a crowd of apparently dull aliens. However, in much the same way in which Nabokov seems to regard Russian as fundamentally untranslatable and never to be content with his way of rendering the simplest Russian words—a very strange disavowal of one’s own gift—, his characters never fully succeed in getting through to other people.
Whether or not Nabokov’s reflected languages succeed in "getting through to the reader" is finally the crucial question with which most criticism is presently confronted. As has been remarked, "in almost every case the revised English versions of earlier Russian works incorporate more elaborate patterns of artifice, creating a greater awareness of the author manipulation of the fiction" (Ellen Pifer, Preface). Nabokov’s well known pleasure in allusions, puns, word-play, and false etymologies becomes delight when he can compare and contrast the Russian and English versions of one and the same expression. His obsession with chess-like patterns is also enhanced by the chance to deal with the fine intricacies of two languages instead of one. And Nabokov is confident that the reader will share the same pleasure both in reflected languages and in patterns. His authorial intrusions are sometimes similar to Kinbote’s crazy way of addressing the reader in Pale Fire. As though the readers were the writer’s distortive mirrors, however, each of them presumably sends back a different image of those same languages. Not only writing, but also reading in a second language becomes enjoyable sport.
As it would be impossible to take into consideration all Nabokov’s major writing in and on reflected languages, five novels have been chosen more as a tentative sampling than as an attempt to exhaustive analysis. Two of them are earlier Russian works in their Englished versions (Mary and The Eye); one is Nabokov’s first novel in English (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight), written when he was still in Europe; the last two (Pnin and Look at the Harlequins!) fully belong to Nabokov’s "American years". The writer’s "revisited autobiography", Speak, Memory, along with a few of his Russian and English poems, have been employed here and there to compose a sort of intertext with the five novels.