"Something nagged at me when I first saw Eve Sussman's 89 Seconds at Alcázar at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, her exquisite high definition video in which Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas comes to life ...a revival of the age-old tableau vivant, in which actors come to assume the poses of a famous work of art, reminded me that I'd dropped a thread some years before when reading Vladimir Nabokov's novel Laughter in the Dark. There, a character daydreams about animating an old master painting, "movement and gesture graphically developed in complete harmony with their static state in the picture." The imagined film would bring to life, by means of perhaps thousands of handpainted interpolations...the final interpolation of the long sequence of painted frames culminating in the original painting itself (or rather, in a photographic image of it). We can say, then, that Laughter postulates a limit-case tableau vivant, akin to that of 89 Seconds when the costumed actors arrive at their fateful, familiar pose...

Although Nabokov spends much of a concise novel's first chapter in fleshing out the idea, the animated painting proposal gives the impression of being a stray tangent and is mentioned again but once, briefly. The novel leaves off, however, with a precise description of a murder scene; and the final disposition of the body and of each object in the room is so forensically depicted that it had struck me that here, surely, was a blatant tableau--the novel constructed as an enactment, as had been hinted at in the beginning by the animation idea, of an old master painting, all the narrative vectors designed to come to rest just so.

...I consulted Nabokov scholarship to see which painting had been intended but found to my astonishment no real recognition of the puzzle at all. Thinking that I might have stumbled onto something noteworthy, a hidden door in a celebrated mansion, I began to look as well for the key. I paged through catalogues raisonnés of all the obvious culprits--Breughel the Elder (as we shall see, he is particularly implicated), J-L David,Daumier, Manet, Titian, Picasso, Bouguereau.,anyone...who depicted murder or death scenes ...up to the time of Laughter's publication in 1938...But now a few years on as I watched the Spanish court in 89 Seconds assembling slowly, inevitably into its eternal position, I remembered that Nabokov, if in a characteristically devious way, had been up to something similar (damn it!) and I resolved to get to the bottom of it.

Nabokov...his synesthete's gift for sensory transmutation, and ...his chess expert's...gambits has always ...seemed to stand somewhat beside the historic tide of Joyce's or Gertrude Stein's brand of Modernism. The waters have long since receded and Nabokov's metatextual mirror games now appear prophetic. However that may be, the endless internal refractions of his oeuvre have spawned a fun house shooting gallery of partisan commentary, into which none should dare venture without bullet-proof credentials. I did have some proprietary expertise as a painter and animator that might be brought to bear on Laughter's neglected mapping of text onto canvas onto film, and perhaps better yet, a naïve, literal-minded obsession to decrypt its trail of clues. My amateur method succeeded: I did in the end find a solution to the template puzzle, though it wasn't what I'd anticipated.

...Perhaps it makes sense that the tale's most interested readers be visual artists, for Laughter doesn't simply refer to paintings and films, it transmutes their formal properties into text. (Its narrative is shaped like a Möebius strip, a loop of film spliced to itself with a twist.) What's more, Nabokov's fascination with moving around inside the stage machinery of an old master painting, an idea which may have seemed stodgy once...turns out... to have been simply ahead of its time...In Nabokov's other novels frequent references to painting and film function as metaphysical invocation; Laughter in the Dark's proposal to turn an old master painting into a cinematic entertainment, a cartoon, threatens to drag high art into low places, and this seems to call forth, even more, a sort of ontological retribution. With comic precision, and without the character's knowledge, reality, image and shadow will exchange places like plaits of braiding. ...The story properly begins when [...] the blind assassin is himself fatally shot in a struggle for the gun. Here the book ends with the pathetic tableau in question, the precisely arranged death scene which struck me as being compelled by the idea of an animated painting introduced at the book's very beginning.

We will sift the evidence of his death scene presently for clues to exactly which painting lies behind the arrangement, but let's first scrutinize the daydream by which the template idea is planted in the attentive reader's mind. Albinus is contemplating what he calls his "beautiful idea"--even if it isn't quite his, but no matter for now--as we first meet him. "It had do with colored animated drawings--which had just begun to appear at the time. How fascinating it would be, he thought, if one could use this method for having some well-known picture, preferably of the Dutch School, perfectly reproduced on the screen in vivid colors and then brought to life." Albinus toys with producing this film and seeks to engage as animator the artist and caricaturist...Rex...but counterproposes Pieter Breughel the Elder's "Proverbs" as the source/target painting--a Boschian grotesque of human nature and a pitiless take on Netherlandish genre...But what if the Dutch School painting, pastoral or otherwise, were coded into details of the novel's 1930's Berlin landscape? Consider that Albinus's daydream about the animation had conjured "people on the quaint skates they used then, sliding about in the old fashioned curves suggested by the picture," whereas later Albinus brings his brazen young mistress to a hockey match along with his new cartoonist friend... Down on the ice, the curves of the quaint skaters from the canal are incised in the present "with an excruciating impact." If that seems like a casual echo of the Dutch painting, a later incident corresponds isometrically.... Nabokov pulls back into a dazzling panorama: "A sharp bend was approaching and Albinus proposed to take it with special dexterity. High above the road an old woman who was gathering herbs saw to the right of the cliff this little blue car speed toward the bend, behind the corner of which, dashing from the opposite side, toward an unknown meeting, two cyclists crouched over their handlebars. Two cyclists? There is something familiar about this set-up. If we return to the skaters in Albinus's Dutch School reverie at the novel's beginning we find:... the old fashioned curves suggested by the picture; or a wet road in the mist and a couple of riders-finally, returning to the same tavern, little by little bringing the figures and light into the self-same order, settling them down, so to speak, and ending it all with the first picture. Though the road from Rouginard is not wet, and the view is ironically crystal clear rather than misty, Albinus is surely about to encounter, by way of the two bicyclists, the "couple of riders" from his bucolic Dutch landscape as they return to the tavern--or come home to roost. He swerves to avoid them, and it is in the resulting crash that Albinus loses his vision, leading to the onvalescence at the villa and the final karmic calamity. One could go on in this manner, but the couple of cyclist-riders clinches the argument for me.

Albinus's beautiful idea appears to be unspooling in his life. It was no mere introduction to the fickle inconsequence of his character; no curious, long-winded aside. It was a portent. And if we accept Nabokov's gambitted pawn and entertain that the narrative is linked to the beautiful idea,shouldn't we accordingly anticipate that, like the animating Dutch landscape, Laughter will be "ending it all with the first picture?" At the very least,we ought to regard Laughter's ending scene, a vividly precise picture indeed, with raised eyebrows.Read the final paragraphs below as if they fulfilled Albinus's daydream and you can easily imagine Nabokov fastening his long narrative interpolations exquisitely to a painting that he has had in mind from the beginning of the novel.[...]

We do have ample reason, however, to move on to the somewhat less bucolic landscape substituted by Rex, Breughel's Proverbs. The surprisingly few scholarly texts that give much thought to the beautiful idea tend to point outthat the Breughel painting, comprising a hundred or so literalized depictions of proverbial wisdom laid out encyclopaedically in a receding landscape of hellish fascination, is also known as The Blue Cloak. In its central incident, a buxom young beauty in a red dress hangs a hooded blue cloak on a befuddled older man whilst casting an amorous glance at the pig driver. In the idiom of Breughel's time, to hang a blue cloak on someone was to cuckhold him.The puzzle would seem to be solved then: Albinus is hoist with his own petard by being consigned to the retributions of an art nearer to cartooning than he had imagined. Within Nabokov's color-coded syn-esthetic, it is sure to be no casual matter that the bulging "wave" of the (colorless) carpet in the final passage above succeeds in handing off, by sardonic association, to Albinus's "blue, blue wave" of revelation a few pages before, through which the blind man "sees" as he lies dying of a gunshot wound. There is little doubt that Nabokov is pointing here to a correlation between Albinus's fate and the pictorial indignity that his nemesis, Rex, as it seems, assigns to him. The blue wave is, in effect, the blurry, translucent fabric of the blue cloak which has blinded him. Nabokov criticism expresses no surprise, however, that nothing else in the final tableau corresponds to the Breughel painting, the original of which is in Berlin where the author, on the first long stop of his exile's journey, presumably inspected it while writing. Wouldn't the joke be crispier if Albinus's precisely disposed corpse micked, say, a tiny, unnoticed incident among the painting's teeming pools and pockets? Breughel's densely inhabited painting harbors,however, no prone man close by a chair, no striped sofa, no glove, no trunk. The blue-cloaked man himself? He is obstinately standing.Perhaps the reader is satisfied with this loose association.... I began to wonder if a painting template might be a red herring--too obvious for the "maze maker" of Ada and Invitation to a Beheading.What if our story indeed splices seamlessly to its beginning, but only after a Möebius half-twist, with Laughter's final tableau originating not in any painting,but in a comic strip, say, or a work of popular cinema? Such a nightmarish piggy-backing of vulgar fare onto the museum pastoral of Albinus's daydream would teach him (and us) a cruel satirist's lesson, very much in Breughel's tradition, about the impolite motives of true art, its bile, its pandemoniactransmogrifications. It turns out there are good reasons to consider the comic strip. Rex, we recall, is a noted caricaturist.

And there are two well-known instances in which Nabokov felt compelled retrospectively to admit paying tribute to the work of cartoonists in his texts--in new introductions upon reissue, since close readers hadn't noticed. Saul Steinberg's anti-Nazi cartoons inspired some caricatural depictions in Bend Sinister, and in Speak Memory Nabokov was thinking of Otto Soglow's Little King in poking fun at his own youthful poems, "so glowing, with their puffed out little chests" (and please note the translucent encryption of the cartoonist's name). No doubt other graphic tidbits found their way into his work and remain hidden.[...] A detailed comparison of Camera Obscura and Laughter in the Dark might yield a diagnostic map of Nabokov's mental preoccupations as if flipbooking between brain scans,but for our tableau-seeking purposes it is enough to point out that only the second book proposes Albinus's beautiful idea. Also, the suspicious text on the luggage label in the final death scene differs, and there willbe more to say about that. Lastly, Laughter threads a second precognitive loop,in addition to the beautiful idea, through the projector at the Argus, where Albinus first sees Margot:[...] The excellent Dabney Stuart detects that the "masked" man that Albinus sees on the screen of the Argus is the blind man that Albinus will become...Stuart calls "the motion picture that will become his life" to decipher his own noirish doom. Stuart is one of the very few scholars (one must also mention Alfred Appel, Jr. and Kevin J. Mckenna) who implies that the events foreshadowed by the film have been "set in motion"15 by the animation idea, andthe only one who makes an explicit connection between the loop engulfing Albinus and the ice-skating congruence of Dutch landscape and hockey arena.[...] We can only imagine Nabokov, the acerb critic of Dostoevsky but who worshipped Tolstoy, watching the 1935 Selznick extravaganza .

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

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