Transparent Things, written between 1969 and 1972, was the sixteenth of Nabokov's seventeen novels. immediate predecessor, Ada, had been a long, luxuriant fantasy with an extravagantly gifted heroine and hero. Trans-parent Things offers a sharp contrast: a short, austere tale with a bumbling, inept, slightly absurd protagonist. Critics did not know what to make of the novella; nor did it catch the fancy of many readers. Updike, one of Nabokov's best readers, frankly stated his admiring incomprehension. reaction was widely shared, and Nabokov undertook the (for him) unprec-edented step of offering his readers some guidance in a 1972 interview where he blandly described the theme of Transparent Things as "merely a beyond-the-cypress inquiry into a tangle of random destinies" (SO 194-96). In the years since, the attention devoted to Transparent Things has come to exceed the length of the book itself as critics realized it contains the most nearly explicit formulation of several of Nabokov's fundamental themes. Nabokovbiographer and critic, Brian Boyd, who provides the best general introduction to the mysteries of Transparent Things, asserts that the novella explores: "the nature of time; the mystery and privacy of the human soul, and its simultaneous need to breach its solitude; the scope of consciousness beyond death; [and] the possibility of design in the universe." Boyd is good on Nabokov's themes, the reader may well have trouble in perceiving how these themes are embedded within the novella's involute patterns. Michael Rosenblum examines Transparent Things as a case study in how to read Nabokov, while Alex dejonge also offers some pertinent thoughts on pattern-making in the novel. Karlinsky explores the novel's Russian literary echoes and particularly its thematic relationship to the early Nabokov tale "The Return of Chorb." Alter sees the novel's theme as the conflict between death and art (or opacity and transparency) and proposes various intriguing subtexts. Rampton also finds the theme of art versus death as central, but senses that the aging author has perhaps come to question his own long-held affirmation of art as sufficient solaceAArt and death also stand at the center of Garret Stewart's interpretation: "Existential death seems at times in Nabokov not only a dead but a decomposed metaphor in the stylistics of closure." In a fruitfhl comparison with Samuel Beckett, for whom death is viciously intimidating, Stewart notes that for Nabokov "style tends to elide death into mere figure, all terminus merely a transposition of terms." Bruss argues that Transparent Things focuses on the tenuous and ultimately unknowable nature of reality. Those (like Hugh Person) who believe that there is an unambiguous, recoverable past (a single reality) inevitably fall victim to its fluid, unfixable nature. True artists (like Mr. R.) recognize "the essential arbitrariness of human experience"-both past and present.' worth-while general surveys of Transparent Things have been made by Herbert Grabes, G.M. Hyde, Richard Patteson, and Lucy Maddox." Two more
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specialized readings are also of interest. W.'VV. Rowe has used Transparent Things as a primary text in his argument, derived from Boyd, that Nabokov's novels are populated by ghosts who watch over the affairs of their survivors. The much-discussed question of the novel's narratorial voice has been exam-ined by the Finnish scholar Pekka Tammi, British scholars Michael Long and Bob Grossmith have looked at specific literary allusions in Trans-parent Things. survey of reviews may be found in Page. The major events of Transparent Things take place, with growing inten-sity, from the 1950s through the late 1960s and center around four trips to Switzerland made by Hugh Person. On the first, Hugh, a college student, accompanies his newly widowed father who dies while trying on a pair of trousers in a shop. Hugh marks the occasion by losing his virginity to an Italian prostitute in a shabby rooming house. After some years, Hugh, a young man of some gifts but little artistic talent, becomes an editor for a New York publisher who assigns him to work with Mr. R., a brilliant, ifperverse, novelist who lives in Switzerland. By chance, Hugh has had a one-night liaison with Mr. R's former stepdaughter, Julia Moore. Hugh's second Swiss trip is to meet with the much-married Mr. R. who is completing the first volume of a projected trilogy called Tralatitions. The novel apparently fictionalizes parts of the author's complex love life-in particular, his passion for his stepdaughter Julia. On Hugh's train journey to meet Mr. R. he falls into conversation with a young woman named Armande Chamar as she reads one of Mr. R.'s earlier novels which she has received from her friend Julia Moore. Hugh is so taken with Armande that his interview with the famous Mr. R. passes in a daze. Unathletic Hugh launches his tormented, awkward courtship of the coldly promiscuous Armande on the ski slopes of her native town. In spite of his own Ineptness and her shallow character, the couple marry. Their Italian honey-moon is marred by Armande's insistence on a mock fire drill in which they must escape their room by climbing down the outside of their hotel. Back in New York, Hugh's blind adoration protects him from Armande's behavior during the brief months of their life together. Soon after a third trip to Switzerland, Hugh, who has been prone to nightmares and sleepwalking from childhood, strangles Armande during a dream in which he saves her from leaping from the window of a burning building. He is tried and sentenced for murder and spends several years being shuffled between prison and asylum. Released, Hugh, age forty, makes his last journey to Switzerland in a pilgrimage to recover the happiest moments of his life when he first knew Armande. He returns to the very hotel room where she first visited him before their marriage. As he dreams of her impending visit, the hotel is set afire by a disgruntled former employee, and Hugh, mistaking the door for the window, dies of smoke asphyxiation. The plot of Transparent Things, as opposed to its simple story line, resembles a set of those nesting Russian dolls, while the identity and status of the narrator remain obscure. It is by means of this artful structural complexity
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that Nabokov simultaneously conceals and reveals the metaphysical meaning of Transparent Things. The tale's mysterious narrator proves to be Mr. R., the German-born novelist who writes in a baroquely brilliant English, but whose spoken English is strewn with Germanisms and mangled English idioms. Mr.R.,who dies in the course of the events narrated in Transparent Things, is, in fact, already dead at the beginning of his story (SO 195). The otherworldly status ofMr. R. (and several other characters) lends the semi-omniscient ghost narrator certain advantages not available to ordinary, living eyewitnesses. Among other things, he can sink into the past of any person or object in order to seek out the patterns that underlie the present. The most obvious example is Mr. R's inset tale of the pencil in chapter 3 which Nabokov described as "the clue to the whole story" (SL 506). Death is at the center of Transparent Things. There are no fewer than sixteen deaths in the short book, although only three (Hugh's father's, Armande's, and Hugh's) occur "on stage." Mr. R., as narrator and ghost, uses his special powers to pinpoint those parts of the past that seem to preordain Hugh's fate. There are three linked complexes of lethal motifs that sketch Hugh's life and death: fire, falling, and asphyxiation. Fire pervades the short novel. The first faint flicker comes when the Trux clothing store where Hugh's father shops is shorthanded because ofa fire. The fire motif continues when Hugh takes Julia Moore to an avant-garde theater presentation, Cunning Stunts, which is disrupted by flaming streamers that threaten to set the place afire. Fire is also prominent in Mr. R.'s best novel, Figures in a Golden Window, which Armande is reading when Hugh first meets her. Its title perhaps reflects an incident in which the narrator's daughter,June, sets fire to her doll house and burns down the entire villa. This fictional conflagration is featured on the book cover done by the artist Paul Plain (cf. the Russian plamia "flame"). Recounting his meeting with Armande in his diary, Hugh tacitly alludes to Alfred de Musset's poem "A Julie" in which the impassioned poet decries his squandered life and proclaims that he will end in ashes like Hercules on his rock: "'tis by thee that I expire, / Open thy robe, D~janire, /that I mount my funeral pyre" (28). The fire motif intensifies when the honeymooning Armande, having seen a TV newcast of a hotel fire, insists that acrophobic Hugh help her in her hazardous impromptu fire drill. These strands of the motif all come together in Hugh's nightmare in which he fatally "saves" Armande during a dreamed fire. Even Hugh's death in a hotel fire is foreshadowed when he is unable to reserve a room in another hotel because it is under repair following a fire. Images of falling and burial beneath avalanches are scarcely less important than fire in making up Transparent Things' death theme. As a boy, acrophobic Hugh walks the roof of his residential school during his somnambulistic trances. His father's death is prefaced by a window blind which crashes down in a rattling avalanche" (10). After the fatal heart attack, his body seems to have fallen from some great height. That night Hugh resists the pull of gravity

that attracts him to his hotel window. After nightmare-ridden Hugh strangles Armande, he is awakened by their fall, not from the flaming window of his dream, but from their bed. As Hugh himself dies, he is attempting to leap from his hotel window. Sinister avalanches, both real and metaphoric, are a part of the "falling" motif. Many are connected with athletic Armande's love for skiing. One of her numerous lovers before and after her marriage lies under six feet of snow in Chute (French for "fall"), Colorado; she skis at Aval, Quebec and Cavahere, California. Hugh suffers from "avalanche" nightmares in which "he would find himself trying to stop. . . a trickle of grain or fine gravel from a rift in the texture of space and being hampered.., by collapsing colossuses. He was finally blocked by masses of rubbish, and that was death" (60). At the rush of awakening, these "avalanches" turn into verbal torrents that imperil sanity. Mr. R., dying of his rotted liver, speaks of the pain barely held at bay "behind the wall of my flesh like the muffled thunder of a permanent avalanche which obliterates there, beyond me, all the structures of my imagination, all the landmarks of my conscious self' (83-84). The "asphyxiation" complex which points towards Hugh's strangulation of Armande has three components: strangulation, hands, and necks. The earliest hint is the episode in which the dreaming Hugh bare-handed crushes the three-legged stool that serves as a night table in his college dorm (21). Much more explicit is the green statuette of a woman skier that Hugh admires in a souvenir shop window while his father is having his heart attack. The sculptor is the Jean Genet-like convict Armand Rave who has strangled his boyfriend's incestuous sister (13). As Hugh awakes from his lethal nightmare, "he stares at his bashful claws," and his prison psychiatrist later offers a disquisition on hands and strangulation (79-81).Just as hands are foregrounded throughout the narrative, necks are objects of special attention. The necks of both Armande and a blond receptionist are lovingly noted. The prison psychiatrist asks an outraged Hugh whether he ever bought excessively tight turtleneck sweaters for Armande. Hugh buys himself turtlenecks for his first date with Armande and once again dons a turtleneckwhen he tries to recreate their early days. Like all Nabokov novels, Transparent Things abounds in literary allusions. Some are incidental but most pertain to key elements of the story. One of the more obvious is Shakespeare's Othello in which the Moor strangles his beloved Desdemona. (Hugh has been thinking ofJulia Moore just prior to his lethal nightmare and blends her image with that of Armande and an Italian prostitute who acquires the Shakespearean dream-name Giulia Romeo.) In another such allusion, Monsieur Wilde, the stolid Swiss gentleman who calls Hugh's attention to a magazine article about a wife-murderer, evokes Oscar Wilde and his prison poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" with its lines "Some strangle with the hands of Lust, / Some with hands of Gold," and, especially, its refrain 'Yet each man kills the thing he loves" (96-98). Popular culture also
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provides sources for allusion. Hugh's ftiture is foreshadowed in an early reference to his strong hands, likening them to those of the Boston strangler-one Albert DeSalva who strangled thirteen women between 1962 and 1964 before being committed to Boston State Hospital (16). Baron R.'s appearance is compared to that of the nonexistent actor Reubenson "who once played old gangsters in Florida-staged films" (30). The very real Edward G. Robinson, who provides the prototype for Mr. R.'s features, played such a role in John Huston's 1948 classic Key Largo. Nabokov's next-to-last novel is uncharacteristically laconic. Its themes emerge most clearly only against the background of his oeuvre which displays a remarkable consistency over a sixty-year period. Memory is one of the great themes of twentieth-century modernism, and Nabokov has singled out Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as one of the three greatest literary works of the century (SO 57). His own autobiography, Speak, Memory, is a sensuously and minutely textured recreation of his past. Obsessive preoccupation with the past is not, however, without its dangers. Mr. R., the narrator of Transparent Things, remarks that Hugh Person is prone to pilgrimages" (86), but denies the Proustian search for lost time as Hugh's motive (94). The motive is, he says, connected with spectralvisitations (presumably dreams of Armande) that impel Hugh to return to Switzerland in an attempt to recreate the past: "The desideratum was a moment of contact with her essential image in exactly remembered surroundings," specifically that first wondrous and never-to-be-repeated kiss (95). For the most part, Hugh's attempts to recover that past are unsuccessful and, as we know, end in his death. Why is Hugh's effort a failure? Many of Nabokov's fictional heroes make pilgrimages to their past and almost all of them end badly. In the 1925 story "The Return of Chorb," the young bridegroom retraces each step of the honeymoon journey on which his wife died.' Hugh, he ends his relived journey in the same dismal hotel room where the couple spent their first night. Attempting to recreate the scene, he hires a prostitute to spend the chaste night with him only to receive an unexpected visit from his in-laws who do not yet know of their daughter's accidental death. Chorb's sacramental pilgrimage into the past ends in farcical disaster. Mary, Nabokov's first novel, also points to the hazards of reliving the past. When his hero, Ganin, a Russian exile in Berlin, learns that his first love, Mary, is coming to Berlin to join her odious husband, he loses himself in reliving their affair in memory. Ganin, however, is wiser than Chorb. Before the arrival of Mary's train, he realizes that the past cannot be regained and strikes out without seeing Mary. Hugh, a "sentimental simpleton and somehow not a very good Person ... merely a rather dear one" (48), has not learned the lesson of Chorb and Ganin. Hugh's failure to separate past and present is illustrated in a striking metaphor. Skiing, which looms large in Transparent Things, requires skim-ming along the surface. Hugh cannot learn what all novice ghosts must: if he breaks through the "thin veneer" of the now, he will "no longer be walking on
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water but descending upright among staring fish" (2). A pilgrimage to the past in memory may occasion deep personal and aesthetic satisfaction; a pilgrimage as an attempt to relive the past leads only to disaster. Nabokov has underscored this point in his remark that the good novelist is "like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past" (SO 195). If Transparent Things' first theme concerns the past, the second and third involve the future. During Hugh Person's seven years behind bars, he maintains an Album of Asylums and Jails in which a dying fellow asylum inmate makes the following entry: "It is generally assumed that if man were to establish the fact of survival after death, he would also solve, or be on the way to solving, the riddle of Being. Alas, the two problems do not necessarily overlap or blend" (93). In the world of Transparent Things, the first problem 15 solved. The story is narrated by the dead Mr. R., and Nabokov has remarked that Hugh is welcomed by a ghost or ghosts on the threshold of his novel (SO 196). In fact, the novel's dead seem to constitute a kind of committee that watches over Hugh. Mr. R. discourses on the powers and the limitations of the dead in chapters 1 and 24. Most obvious among their powers is their ominiscience concerning the past which can, however, lead to difficulties. The newly dead, novices, must learn to focus their powers of omniscience to avoid slipping off into irrelevancy as they often do in the course of the narration. (Such "unscheduled" narrative diversions are often surreptitiously indicated by enclosing parentheses.) Hugh, of course, has access to his own past which he is vainly trying to understand and, in part, resurrect. The ghosts, who while alive have all had some connection with Hugh, have access to a/i of his past (as well as the present) and are trying to seek out those coincidences that have shaped the pattern of his life. Like Hugh, they are "harrowed by coincident symbols" (13). This sifting of the past for "coincident symbols" is prominent in chapter 5 where events clustered in threes herald the death of Hugh Person, Sr. generally, Mr. R. draws on the results of this ghostly pattern-seeking which he artistically weaves into his narrative through the recurrent motifs of fire, falling, and asphyxiation. The limitations of ghosts are no less important than their powers. As Mr. R. says, "Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity... ." (92). The most that ghosts can do is "to act as a breath of wind and to apply the lightest, the most indirect pressure such as trying to induce a dream that we hope our favorite will recall as prophetic if a likely event does actually happen" (92). These subtle influences are manifested in the narration by various typographic devices such as spectral use of parentheses. Slightly slanted italics may reflect the slight breath of ghostly wind inclining the character toward a given action. Qt~otation marks help Mr. R. avoid elucidat-ing the inexplicable nature of "dream" and "reality" (92). Proofreader's dele signs also have their role (102), as do transposed letters and anagrams (75). All
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VII

these devices are most apropos for the story of Hugh Person, editor and practicing proofreader. Those in the ghostly dimension suffer another important limitation. In spite of their ability to pick out portentous patterns in the past such as those making up the fire motif, they do not know the future. Note that Hugh does not die of fire but of asphyxiation. In the opening scene of Transparent Things the late Mr. R. denies the existence of any concrete and individual future. The individual's future is merely a figure of speech, for human destiny is not "a chain of predeterminate links" but "a hit-and-miss" affair (92). Some future events may have a higher probability than others but all remain "chimeric" until after their occurrence. Ghosts, like humans, cannot know the future. This limitation on ghosts is the subject of the second part of the madman's entry in Hugh's diary: the riddle of Being. riddle of Being arises in many Nabokov novels. Its nature is somewhat unclear, but it entails the idea of a creator or author figure who stands above and beyond both the human and ghostly dimensions and creates the coincidences and patterns that define the lives of lesser beings. A human character may (or may not) recognize coincidence and emergent pattern in his own present and past life. Ghosts can recognize patterns in any life or object, but have miniscule influence on the living and no future knowledge. It is the omnipotent author figure ofa yet more encompassing dimension who not only creates the patterns but shapes the future. The fictional author-creator/narrator/character relationship (Nabokov! Mr. R./Hugh Person) in which each enjoys the powers and limitations proper to his respective level of "reality" hints at the existence of a parallel series of relations in the non-fictional universe. Like many of Nabokov's works, Transparent Things provides a cryptically playful model of the author's meta-physical speculations. We now come to our final question. What is distinctive about Transparent Thingswithin the context ofNabokov's oeuvre? The title itself provides the key. Its immediate meaning is clear enough. Nabokov told Alfred Appel "Ghosts see our world as transparent, everything sinks so fast."' very act of their directing attention to an object or person may lead to sinking into its history. Both physical and temporal boundaries become transparent and dissolve. Novices delight in looking at the hollow in a pillow through a person s forehead, brain, occipital bone, etc., or at the swirl of semi-digested food in Hugh's entrails (101-102). With equal ease, they may penetrate the endlessly branching past of an object such as the pencil Hugh finds in a drawer. This power, however, brings with it a problem. If perception is not to become a matter of infinite regression in which the very identity and persistence of objects are hopelessly lost, the novice must master the art of staying on the surface. He or she must master the art of retaining things in a constant focus at least until a given physical or temporal level of perception is exhausted and the observer consciously wills another level of perception.