Former posting:  http://david-brody.com/writings/Nabokov.pdf  [  ] In an interview published in 1973, Nabokov was asked how a reader should experience the end of one of his novels. His answer shows that the tableau-vivant idea from thirty-five years before had, at the very least, tapped a deep root in Nabokov's conception of novelistic structure.  [  ] And it is the off-kilter reflexivity of Velasquez's masterpiece even more than Van Eyck's seminal antecedent that Nabokov's "a picture in a picture" particularly describes: "Velázquez," his paint brush poised, sizes us up as if we were the royal couple reflected dimly in the mirror behind him which he is in the process of painting onto the very canvas we are looking at. To wonder at this topology is indeed to become "suspended." [  ] Could Nabokov in 1973 have been pointing to the overlooked final pose of Laughter in the Dark?––revisiting, as it were, the scene of the crime? Might he have been confessing, as with the Steinberg and Soglow cartoons, something crucial about the painter of Albinus's vengeful Dutch Landscape?  [ JM ] a finished book is, for him, like a finished painting: distant, visually complete, glowing, atemporal and “redemptive”(endorsing Sebald’s words).The 1966 Van Bock quote, though, adds another element. The finished book is “distant” for its author but his “studio and style” of composing it are as much a part of the image than the content of the picture inside the picture.

Present posting:  David Brodie’s intent is related to what did VN have to say about how a reader could experience the end of his novels, to show that in Laughter in the Dark they’d find a “final pose” resulting from a “tableau vivant”. In that case, V.Nabokov’s novel would be finished, closed within the covers of the published book, but as complete and timeless as a painting [this is how I read D.Brodie].*

However, somewhere, V.N stated that his novels are not about how the characters interact, but how author and reader engage themselves in the process (and embrace on top of a mountain etc etc ).  This leads me also to Ada’s lines on the infinite moves possible when there are two chessboards and two minds playing the infinite variations obtainable in games with identical openings and ends, when I consider that, for me, VN’s novels are not closed but permanently open to interpretations by its various readers at various times.  For Nabokov every novel might be both closed like a completed painting and, also, open because readers exist that give life to the painting they wander in and over it, as in a story that culminates in a “tableau vivant”.

Besides, there’s the “metafictional” level to consider:  how the reader’s minds interact with VN’s purposes and fantasies in response to his style (the style is the man?) and authorial interventions. In this case, the painting by Velazquez is an apt figuration for the “artist’s studio by Van Bock” because the plot is a painting inside the painting confronting the viewer, who must then interact with the complete scene, inside and out.  

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* - Btw: I hope Nablers have seen S. Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. (George Seurat’s painting).