1 – Open and Shut: The Comedies

Nabokov, of course, is no real match for Shakespeare. Who is? Still, he provides a useful contrast to Shakespeare’s achievement. Nabokov’s work is concentrated. It’s fortified by the narrowness of his passions. Shakespeare’s work is intimate yet epic. The plays carry a charge of life that energizes a great breadth and depth of characters and events. Nabokov is closed, meticulous, ardently set in his ways. Shakespeare is open. He’s improvisational, ready to try whatever might engage or enlarge his many interests.

Nowhere is the difference between Nabokov’s fixations and Shakespeare’s receptivity more apparent than in their depictions of sex and eroticism. In Lolita, Humbert says “sex is but the ancilla of art.” Ancilla means maid, accessory. Sex is art’s servant. Desire breaks from the waterfall of our private imagination, pours from the art each of us puts into experiencing our lives. The dominant sexual streak in Nabokov’s novels, the ancilla found in his published work, is as detailed and repetitive as his descriptions of glass and mirrors, his interest in tricks of reflection and perspective. It remains much the same throughout his career. Many of his male characters are drawn to a series of variations on the gamine woman. Within this series, each woman is highly specific. One of his themes is the friction between the men’s obsessions and the independent personalities of the women they desire. Margot from Laughter in the Dark could never be confused with Sonia from Glory. Armande from Transparent Things is very different from Ada. Ada in turn is very different from her sister, Lucette. Yet if they differ from each other in many ways, all of them are eroticized in startlingly similar terms. The gamine tradition figures in the books as a ravishing fixation, hypnotic in its specificity, like those chapters in Moby-Dick dissecting the nature of the whale. Sexual fixations are usually dull or embarrassing in literature because the writer lacks perspective on them. Nabokov, however, is interested in precisely this imperceptiveness, our entrapment in what Chaucer calls the “cell fantastic” of our compulsions. At his best Nabokov recreates both the heat of overflowing ardor and the coolness of detached observation. It’s part of his daring as an artist that he isolates the creepiest element of the gamine tradition, the potentially pedophilic ingredient in it, and uses it to make Lolita one of literature’s great examinations of self-deception. Lolita has a lot going on in it. One facet of what’s going on, though, is a powerful yet delicate vision of the dangers of projecting our fantasies and cravings onto others.

Artistically Shakespeare is as responsive to different possibilities of sexuality and desire as Nabokov is restricted. Whenever Kinbote’s homosexuality comes up in Pale Fire, you can feel Nabokov’s distaste for it. He can’t see Kinbote’s predilections as anything but a cheap running joke. A certain refined groove of heterosexual passion is sublime for Nabokov. Everything outside that groove is absurd. With Shakespeare, on the other hand, you have the sense he can be turned on by almost anything. He’s capable of finding nearly anyone desirable if he simply concentrates on the person long enough and applies the force of his art to imagining that person erotically. The comedies are full of characters whose appeal is layered, set up to evoke multiple levels of fascination, a lighthearted omnisexuality that delights in the Elizabethan gag of gender confusion. A boy actor plays a woman who plays a man who falls in love with another man who falls in love with the woman. Julia disguises herself as a page-boy in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Caius and Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor are deceived by boys dressed as girls, and Caius ends up marrying his boy by mistake. Twelfth Night finds Viola feigning the role of Cesario and winning the love of Olivia. As You Like It, the most elaborate handling of the theme, has Rosalind taking on the identity of the young man Ganymede so she can approach her true love, Orlando. In her Ganymede disguise, Rosalind convinces Orlando to woo Ganymede. Orlando, not too convincingly, claims he hopes to cure his love for Rosalind by acting as if Ganymede is Rosalind. This is supposed to give Ganymede the chance to turn Orlando against the memory of Rosalind’s appeal. The Elizabethan audience would have seen, all at the same moment on the stage, a boy actor pretending to be Rosalind, Rosalind pretending to be Ganymede, Ganymede pretending to be Rosalind, and Orlando courting Ganymede by pretending Ganymede is Rosalind. For good measure, much as Olivia falls in love with Viola, the shepherdess Phebe falls in love with Rosalind-as-Ganymede.

Throughout the comedies, romantic desire involves characters changing from one form to another, containing and revealing more than one identity at a time. The men from Love’s Labour’s Lost pose as Russians while the women wear masks and confuse the men as to which woman is which. The two pairs of twin brothers from The Comedy of Errors enter into a rapid succession of slapstick identity confusions, and the Olivia-Viola story in Twelfth Night is only one of the play’s many identity shifts and misunderstandings. Everyone in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is in a constant state of change. Oberon puts Puck in motion and sets off a domino fall of accidental transitions. Lysander and Demetrius transfer their interest from Hermia to Helena, and Bottom becomes first an ass and then the love object for Titania. As a writer at least, Shakespeare finds metamorphosis beguiling.

Less flashily but even more persistently, you feel that Shakespeare’s sensual and romantic empathy is distributed with remarkable consistency among his comic heroines and his comic heroes. Much Ado About Nothing shows us what’s sexy about Beatrice at the same time as it shows us what’s sexy about Benedick. Shakespeare immerses us in their screwball-comedy dialogues without taking sides or limiting us to Beatrice’s view of Benedick or Benedick's view of her. It’s their combination, the music they make together, that excites Shakespeare. He adores them both, with a fond smile for their follies, and he makes us adore them as well

27 – Tesla in Ada and Pale Fire

Nikola Tesla invented the alternating current electrical system, the system that has made it possible for ordinary people to use electricity for their everyday activities. Born to a Serbian family and raised in what is now Croatia, Tesla was famous as both a genius and an eccentric. His life has a number of things in common with Nabokov's, and a number of things in common with John Shade's. It also casts an interesting light -- an electric light -- on the whole of Ada, in which the absence of electricity is an important topic.

Nabokov definitely knew Tesla's work. It would've been unusual if he hadn't. From the time Tesla created the first major hydroelectric power station at Niagara Falls in 1896 until his death in 1943, he was one of the most famous inventors in the world. A reckless self-promoter, he loved to tease the press with outlandish statements about how he was going to revolutionize society with limitless energy taken from the electromagnetic currents of the earth and sky. His brilliance shaded into craziness, his craziness into nonsense. He talked about plans to create electric devices that could eliminate any target anywhere, and he claimed he could, if he chose, destroy the world through the misapplication of electricity. The Waltz Invention, one of Nabokov's Russian plays, is plainly based on Tesla's military boasts. Waltz offers a totalitarian government a device that, like Tesla's death-ray, can effortlessly wipe out an entire mountaintop at a single stroke.

But the more interesting Tesla connections start with Pale Fire. Tesla published his autobiography in 1919. It's a short book, and covers many subjects that come up in John Shade's poem. Shade suffers from childhood visions, moments when he seems to fall out of ordinary reality and into a state where he feels connected to the universe. Tesla also had mystical childhood visions, attacks that would come over him the whole time he was growing up. Gifted with synaesthesia (as Nabokov was), Tesla could imagine objects in three dimensions, could see his mind's projections as if they were physically present. The ability was helpful for his engineering work but also sometimes made it hard for him to tell whether he was encountering reality or an especially vivid spasm of his imagination. Moreover, Shade's skeptical but obsessive interest in spiritualism after the death of his daughter is very much like Tesla's skeptical but obsessive interest in spiritualism after the death of his mother. On the night his mother died, Tesla had a vision of her coming toward him. At first he believed it was a genuine encounter with her ghost. By the time of his autobiography, however, he wrote that he had developed a simple physical explanation for the encounter: he had seen a painting that put the idea of her ghost in his head, and his hyper-vivid imagination and a high fever had done the rest. In trying to find a way to reach his dead daughter, Shade conducts his own investigation into spiritualism and ghosts. He has what seems to him a vision of the afterlife, and thinks the vision is confirmed by a newspaper account of another woman's vision. Later, he finds that the key point of resemblance between her vision and his was a mistake, a misprint in the article. Yet the move from belief to skepticism isn't the end of the process, either for Shade or for Tesla.Pale Fire is haunted by ghosts, real or imaginary, long after Shade rejects most mysticism as a fraud. By the time of Tesla's death, it was well-known that he had never given up his interest in séances and his attempts to communicate with the dead. His skepticism, like Shade's could never quite stop him from going back to spiritual interests that he worried were a form of self-delusion. Pale Fireseems to make use of the extreme combination of brilliance and crankery in Tesla, his fusion of a Shade-like creator and a Kinbote-like madman in a single person. And just as it's never clear what the relationship is between the genius and the lunatic with Shade and Kinbote, it's never been clear what the relationship is between the genius and the lunatic in Tesla.

Tesla worshipped electricity, and made elaborate claims for it. He felt it was the secret to life, the key force in the universe. It's a notion that Shade adopts. Electricity in Pale Fire is presumed to have some special connection with the dead, to maybe even embody their spirit. Kinbote's commentary contains a poem by Shade that states: “The dead, the gentle dead—who knows?— / In tungsten filaments abide, / And on my bedside table glows / Another man's departed bride.” Shade says that Shakespeare's electrical spirit possibly “floods a whole / Town with innumerable lights, / And Shelley's incandescent soul / Lures the pale moths of starless nights.” Electric light also figures in Hazel Shade's nighttime barn investigations, which might or might not reveal something about the afterworld.

In Ada, the long novel that Nabokov published in 1969, electricity offers a clue to the hell of the story's environment. If electricity is somehow representative of or necessary for the spirit, the absence of electricity might be a spiritual catastrophe. Ada supposedly begins after something called the L disaster, which stands for “electricity disaster.” The novel never explains what the L disaster involved, but the world in which the story is set, Antiterra, was struck by some awful event in which electricity played a major part. Electricity is largely banished from Antiterra now, and either the L disaster was responsible for removing electricity from the world or for making electricity so terrible that nobody wants anything to do with it anymore. Antiterra is, as its name suggests, an Earth that has been reversed against itself, and Tesla used to talk vaguely about splitting our planet in two with his electrical knowledge. Somehow this has happened in Ada, and the characters are all banished to a world without electricity, a world without the spirit or life that electricity carries. Antiterra is a soulless place, based largely on cruelty, the absence of mercy or pity. Despite some superficial beauties, Antiterra is grotesque and monstrous, and the absence of electricity has something to do with its horrors. About midway through the novel, Van Veen speculates that “one thing is certain: the only consciousness that persists in the hereafter is the consciousness of pain.” Maybe Antiterra is the hereafter deprived of any positive electrical charge, the hereafter as the consciousness of pain and nothing else.

I've always assumed that Ada's science fiction and fantasy elements are a screen for something else. I doubt we're supposed to take Antiterra seriously as an alternate world, just as I doubt we're supposed to believe in Kinbote's Zembla, which might be his warped reconfiguration of Russia. Van Veen is in his late nineties when he's writing Ada, and maybe Antiterra and the entire story derive from his senility or his final mental breakdown, the hell of his guilty conscience. So whatever Antiterra is, and whatever the meaning of the absence of electricity, the Tesla influence is probably not literal but suggestive, not a pseudo-rational explanation but a poetic evocation clothed as science.

Van's guilt revolves largely around his mistreatment of Ada's sister, Lucette. Brian Boyd, with his usual intelligence, has written extensively on Lucette in the second volume of his Nabokov biography. One of his points is that Ada and Van are so narcissistic they don't let us see how cruel they're being to Lucette until it's too late to save her. The novel's final paragraph, Boyd notes, invokes Lucette's death and the mistreatment she endured as a girl with Van and Ada. The connection is made through the mention of “a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook.” I would only add that the sentence continues with a brief but noteworthy allusion to “The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare's early narrative poem. Nabokov adds a last example of pictorial detail: “a doe at gaze in the ancestral park.” In “The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare enters Lucrece's mind after she has been raped, and compares her to a deer at gaze. Her thoughts are suicidal, and parallel Lucette's thoughts when she kills herself on the ocean cruise with Van: “As the poor frightened deer that stands at gaze, / Wildly determining which way to fly, / Or one encompassed with a winding maze, / That cannot tread the way out readily, / So with herself is she in mutiny, / To live or die which of the twain were better / When life is shamed and death reproach's debtor.” Lucette is a doe rather than a deer because Van and Ada damaged her most deeply in her girlhood. (Nabokov did something like this in Lolita, when he changed Poe's “kingdom by the sea” to “princedom by the sea” in recognition of Humbert's youth.) The doe at gaze is Nabokov's method of directing us toward the pain of Lucette's death, as she tries to determine which way to fly, and can't find her way out of the winding maze of her emotions.