Dear SES and List,
I do my best to keep to your suggestion of proceeding from § to §, but it is difficult to do so without making inroads into other parts of the text! Her are a few remarks about elements in §1 and 3.
Relying
on what J Aisenberg says about Maxim Shrayer's The World of Nabokov's
stories (that I have not read yet but will), the story 's protagonist
comes from the Otherworld. That's how I see it too, the character
is some kind of otherwordly ghost - a lesser being certainly, since
he is the "employee" of one of those beings, "aloof
and mute", who are "Playing a game of worlds " "from
their involute /Abode ".
What
Vasiliy Ivanovitch has experienced and wants to resign is mortality.
The short story could be seen as the dramatization of what VN wrote
(in Lectures on Literature, if I'm not mistaken):
"I
remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of
a tall
building
and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong,
and
wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting
it. In a
sense,
we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to
the flat
stones
of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland
at
the
patterns on the passing wall."
The
"headlong flight" is replaced by a succession of train
journeys and hikes from which it is impossible to desist (= life).
Like Alice in Wonderland and like the chimney sweep, although Vasiliy
"dimly" realises "the absurdity and horror of the
situation", he nevertheless enjoys "the fleeting gifts of
the road" and notices "the configuration of some entirely
insignificant objects".
"the
absurdity and horror of the situation" is the "reality"
of Time and therefore, Death of course: in §3, we are told that
Vasiliy slept badly because "he took along into his dreams the
delicate face of the watch ticking on his night table". The
bland incrustable disturbing face of the watch has something
arresting and ominous (like the anthropomorphic clock in the hotel
room where Sebastian Knight as a child waits for his mother who will
never come back = the end of Time-free childhood).
As
for the wonderful landscape (with me it works entirely!), its first
characteristic, in stark contrast to the inescapable forward movement
in the rest of the story is its immobility (= timelessness). Vassili
has already glimpsed at such islands of immobility on the first day
of the trip: §8 "... there would appear and, as it were,
stop for an instant, like air retained in the lung, a spot
so enchanting - a lawn, a terrace - such perfect expression of tender
well-meaning beauty - that it seemed that if one could stop the
train ..."
Laurence
Hochard
PS:
I wrote in my preceding post that the first § was remindful of
Kafka, but less successful because I thought the reader should be
made to feel the trip as absolutely unavoidable but after some
thought, I realised that maybe Nabokov intended it. Perhaps there was
a way out (Vasiliy could forego the trip altogether, even if he
couldn't sell the ticket), but, however reluctantly, Vasiliy chose
to go. Like Cincinnatus, he chose to cooperate with "reality".
Why? Maybe because, as Gavriel Shapiro has it about Cincinnatus, in Delicate Markers, Vasiliy "is a prisoner of something other than [...]the surrounding demonic world".
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2014 13:04:27 -0700
From: vanveen13@SBCGLOBAL.NET
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] RES: [NABOKV-L] RES: [NABOKV-L] CCL: Title, Kafkaian undertones and efficiency
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
I specifically did not look at the story in its Nazi historical context since, as Jansy noted, Nabokov would have said that his story wasn't about that. What I meant about N.'s high horse concerning his manner of turning individualism to a conceit is that in so many stories he often never quite gives us the why of his positive characters; won't put anything basic behind they decisions they make: either he only hints around at it (as with the lost love element, done in stories like The Return of Chorb or Torpid Smoke too) or he deliberately makes things abstractly unmotivated, like the main character of Glory deciding to go back to Russia/Zoorlandia and disappearing (with a bit of the pining lost love theme as well), not for any specific reason but just to do it, which is supposed to
be dizzyingly romantic and uncanny and to prove that people aren't driven by Darwinian determinism--the problem, in CCL, to my mind is that these tendencies rob the otherworliness that the reader is supposed to feel in the presence of the landscape, making feel like an arbitrarily willed awe and by means of a rather tired tired imagery at that. What would happen to the story's rhetoric if it was called: Shack, Road, Dump?
By the way, Maxim Shrayer noted he'd written about this story in his book The World of Nabokov's stories. I went and read
it and would recommend it. He discusses the context of the story's composition, has a fun digression about trying to find the real life inspiration of the landscape in the story and even provides a close metrical analysis of the prose in order to show the subtlest ways in which N. tries to signal the presence of the otherworld in the story. He's also good on the self-reflexive nature of the story's structure. We're pretty close in our readings except to me the story is rather hollow and for him it works entirely.
I'd like to point out I think
that the last line of the story doesn't merely suggest the character has quit his job or has been dismissed as a character but suggests suicide, reminiscent of the way in which a character's self-destruction was conflated with his very fictionality in a story like "That in Aleppo Once" where the narrator, who's story is in the form of a confessional letter to Nabokov or a fictional author, hints that should the word Aleppo be placed by the author in the title of the story he's telling he'll probably do himself in--but it's only hinted at, as it is here (it has a lost love/wife aspect very similar to the earlier Return of Chorb). Shrayer says many read CCL happily, thinking Vasiliy would just go back to the landscape now that he's free, but that Nabokov thought differently, saying in an interview, quoted by Shrayer, that Vasiliy will never get back there, ever. Meaning my interpretation is as wispy as any other, like so much in the
story.
On Tuesday, July 1, 2014 7:19 AM, Jansy Mello <jansy.mello@OUTLOOK.COM> wrote:
RES: [NABOKV-L] RES: [NABOKV-L] CCL: Title, Kafkaian undertones and efficiency
Joseph Aisenberg: “… despite its brevity and language [CCL] doesn't come off [ ] Nabokov tries to use his meta tick to divert from the obviousness of the story's rhetoric, the deliberate mystification of the tale's eponymous imagery [ ] Nabokov started with an amusing premise here, a nightmare version of those little groups of tourists but he piles it on so thick, makes Vasiliy so passive a receptacle of group violence that one may start to question it or turn against it [ ] Nabokov doesn't give us any space here so that when he finally brings on the cloud, castle and lake of the title
one may be struck by the lameness of this paradise.[ ] Vasiliy barely fights back once the group has him on the train at the end where they descend on him in a savage horde that seems entirely unmotivated, unless Nabokov's just trying to suggest that these philistines are releasing a kind a jealous rage on him, because he's got depths and sensitivity they don't have, setting him apart from the group. The pointless, in context, reference to Invitation to a Beheading seems to suggest as much, that Vasiliy is a poor sweet holder of secret density, gnostical turpitude. There's something always thin and unconvincing when N. gets on a romantic high horse about individuality and turns it to a spiritual conceit--as if tying it to anything real and pragmatic would cheapen it [ ]
Jansy Mello: CCL is one of VN’s short-stories that I enjoy most, particularly its “afterglow” and the delirious smiling landscape with its (vain) promise. However, when it is analyzed bit after bit, its ghostly pattern is undone and “it doesn’t come off,” as in J.A’s comment. I suppose that its clumsy mixture of concrete (pragmatic) physical reality and flesh, as embodied by the narrator’s representative, and the metaphoric vertex ( an artist’s individuality, mind or soul) may be responsible for the story’s lack of proportion. After all the caricature of the philistine tourists and their governmental instigators may also be read as part of an all-embracing abstract scenery about the hostility of the masses towards those that don’t fit into the group and involuntarily denounce its basic “herd-behavior” premises. Perhaps this is what J.A means when he writes about “when N. gets on a romantic high horse about individuality and turns it to a spiritual conceit--as if tying it to anything real and pragmatic would cheapen it.” (I underlined the point in question here).
As in the recently quoted lines from VN’s preface to Bend Sinister, the author indicates that: “…the influence of my epoch on my present book is as negligible as the influence of my books, or at least of this book, on my epoch. There can be distinguished, no doubt, certain reflections in the glass directly caused by the
idiotic and despicable regimes that we all know and that have brushed against me.” He may be wrong in relation to what comes out in CCL for the epoch he lived in in fact pressed and distorted the minds of those who participated it, directly or indirectly. As it happens with the waxwings, something is shattered against the reflected sky in a glass.
Here, as I discern it now, V.Nabokov’s uncanny ability to travel in and out of madness and, like Dante, describe what he saw, was shattered. Therefore, the entire setting of CCL becomes, actually, as paranoid as the epoch he wrote it was – and, surprisingly, this time he could not adequately reset this perspective, its inconsistencies, anguish, idealizations, persecutions, delirious stances and “inhumanity,” as he usually did on his way out of a nightmare. Berlin, in the thirties, is an example of an epoch that is hostile to metaphors, while metaphors themselves are insufficient tools for thinking and acting through the horror.
All private editorial
communications are read by both co-editors.
All private editorial
communications are read by both co-editors.