If Naiman had started his book with the contents
of Chapter 8 ("The Allegorial Poetics of The Defense") I might not have
been as distraught as I was with his preceding exercises in paronomasia and
general drift. His examination of Luzhin's intratextual author-character
toils and altered dimensions (from flat into three-dimensional) is convincingly
presented, to the point of inviting me into a backlook into its initial
unchaste chapters.
Naiman holds that the "metafictive interpretive
game" has not been exhausted (a caveat for those who thrive to see Nabokov as a
philsopher of subjectivity, as an occult, a religious thinker, a moral prophet
aso): "This is the first novel...where Nabokov begins to insist on the
method of reading that will blatter be so closely tied to thematic issues of
sexual perversity...its connotative tricks and literary allusions ...as a
training ground for the perverse reader and as an arena where he can pursue
authorized deconstructive readings without the attendant sexual anxieties that
shadow and shape the interpretation of Nabokov's later work [...]My argument
will be that the work is intended as an allegory about the relationship
prevailing between author and character in all fiction." (181-2) For him,
this novel's "central structural opposition" lies in "the conflict
prevailing between registers of two and three dimensions." For him,
"Luzhin suffers from the ultimate, allegorical character fault - the fault
of being a character."(195) "Allegory is both the subject and the
device of The Defense."(212).
Naiman describes various images that indicate
autrhorial presence (in this novel and elsewhere): "depth, wind, shadow, the
attribution of sensory stimuli to unseen source, and the sudden illumination or
extinction of lightning on the book's 'set'."(199) Luzhin, as a
two-dimensional being, may be "experiencing the third dimension - that of
authorship - from the perspetive of the second and cand see only spectral
shadows cast on his plane from above." (207).Later, we read that "the
author and reader exist in a fourth dimension, the inhabitants of which
enjoy a transtemporal position in relation to the events described in the text.
In effect, the experience of reading outside a text is akin to having a divine
rapport to time in which all events are contemporaneous"
(215).
He quotes Bakthin (Art and
Answerability) and I extract a set of lines from his quote about the hero
who: "in respect to meaning, he must be dead for us, formally dead. In this
sense we could say that death is the form of aesthetic consummation of an
individual.", and Naiman adds: "A hero, Bakthin empashizes, is someone whose
life has been put into a rythm."(209)
Saussurean signifiers (there are no fixed
meanings to a word, for example) and the Freudian "unconscious", of course,
interfere with a character's "meaning", closure, or "consummation" but
Nabokov didn't take them into account when he fashioned, say "Pale Fire", its
shadows, winds and Kinbote. And I couldn't help wondering, and
sharing my initial conjectures with the List, if the entire issue of
intra-extratextuality could not be profitably imported onto Kinbote and Shade's
poem (I would be very interested in a special bibliography about that, if anyone
could help give me access to it). Nabokov
often referred to his poem, "Pale Fire", during interviews [in SO, I believe, he
even informs us that he started to work on his poem in Montreux
and to fashion Zembla in Nice (or the other way around)].
If we value Nabokov's/Shade poem as being
"extra-textual" in relation to the novel that carries a
similar title, then we could consider Kinbote as a character doing the
opposite motion as the one Naiman has described for Luzhin. The latter
wanted "out" - whereas we'd find that Kinbote mainly attempts to
drag John Shade, and his production, "into a work of fiction," using
Gradus (and his "rythmic advance") as his
favorite instrument. This is why
Shade must be succesfully "killed by Gradus" ( if we agree with Bakthin's theory
that a hero, "in respect to meaning...must be dead for us, formally dead").
It is also interesting that we only learn about Kinbote's suicide
extyra-textuality (also from Nabokov interviews). Anyway, that's as far as I can
go with my rather dim reader's lights...