I don't think the character is a ghost. I think we're meant to understand the character two ways simultaneously: to become involved with him much as one would any character in a story, but also Nabokov wants to tweak the reader now and then with the understanding that Vassilliy is simply a made up person refracted through the narrator, who is also a character, appointed to go through the motions of his tale. Alfred Appel Jr. in his intro the Vintage International Annotated Lolita (pp. xxxi-xxxii gives a personal
anecdote about having built one summer a puppet theater for his children. They had "immediately become engrossed in the show, and then virtually mesmerized by my improvised little story that ended with a patient father spanking an impossible child. But the puppeteer, carried away by his story's violent climax, knocked over the entire theater, which clattered onto the floor, collapsing into a heap of cardboard, wood, and cloth--leaving me crouched, peeking out at the room, my head now visible over the couch's rim, my puppeted hands, with their naked wrists, poised in mid-air. For several moments my children remained in their open-mouthed trance, still in the story, staring at the space where the theater had been, not seeing me at all. Then they did the kind of double take...and began to laugh uncontrollably, in a way I had never seen before...at those moments of total involvement in a nonexistent world, and at what its collapse implied to them about the
authenticity of the larger world, and about their daily efforts to order it and their own fabricated illusions." He told N. about the incident and how it defined literary "involution" and the response he though N. was trying to get from his readers. "Exactly, exactly," he quotes N. as saying to this.
I'd also like to say to Hochard that I may have been to hasty to dismiss a connection between the story and Kafka. I recalled the introductory pages to Nabokov's lecture on The Metamorphosis as it's published in the Fredson Bowers Harcourt Brace and Company paperback (pp. 253-255) Nabokov deals with the notion of realism as applied to The Metamorphosis, The Overcoat and Dr. Jeckyll and Mr Hyde but winds up talking about the unity of style, structure and character in Kafka's work. "...in 'The Metamorphosis' there is a central figure endowed with a certain amount of human pathos among grotesque, heartless characters, figures of fun or figures of
horror, asses parading as zebras, or hybrids between rabbits and rats." And at the bottom of the page: "In Gogol and Kafka the absurd central character belongs to the absurd world around him but, pathetically and tragically, attempts to struggle out of it into the world of humans--and dies in despair." I think I would argue a bit with this understanding of Gregor's plight, but I think it clearly applies to many of the characters in Nabokov's work, especially Cinncinatus C.'s in Invitation to a Beheading where he is surrounded by fakes and parodies and at the end, when his theatrical world falls apart, moves as some kind of abstract spirit towards beings more akin to himself--human beings? Also goes with Bend Sinister where Krug is made aware of the fact his torture is a fictional exercise and goes insane before his death. He did die before Nabokov puts himself into the novel finishing it up? And this is Vassilliy's struggle. These
characters' pathos is in their understanding at some level that they are mere figments and their doomed attempts to try to become "real" or find transcendence or something more. I think the problem in CCL is that the something more like something less than more.
By the way, I think the descriptions of the landscape throughout the train trip are marvelous. N's train trips are unforgettable. I just don't care for the imager of the title.
Another thing I noticed was that at the beginning of his Kafka lecture Nabokov makes this startling announcement: "We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss." Nabokov, who so often dismisses material determinism here suggests that aesthetic
appreciation, spiritual depth?, is genetic, hence pre-determined and I think this view is partly what's responsible for a certain caricatured flatness when he tries to give us good or moral characters too directly; why he does so much better with his nastier narrators.
On Wednesday, July 2, 2014 7:27 PM, Jansy Mello <jansy.mello@OUTLOOK.COM> wrote: