But Nabokov was no cold-blooded empiricist and he was not blind to the indeterminacy of writing. For him, too, there existed a blissful, unfettered, nonhierarchical experience of meaning-but it came earlier in the process. Not while the reader reads, but before the writer writes, in a moment that precedes composition: “Inspiration.” Nabokov split this old-fashioned word into two Russian parts. The first half of inspiration, for him, is vorstog (initial rapture). Vorstog describes that moment in which the book as a whole is conceived:
A combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you. It is the prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away and the non-ego rushing in from the outside to save the prisoner-who is already dancing in the open.
Here the author dies, momentarily; here meaning is indeterminate and free flowing. Vorstorg “has no conscious purpose in view”; in vorstog “the entire circle of time is conceived, which is another way of saying time ceases to exist.” But after this comes the second stage: vdokhnovenie (recapture). And it’s here that the actual writing gets done. In Nabokov’s experience, the two had quite different natures. Vorstog was “hot and brief.” Vdokhnovenie “cool and sustained.” In the first you lose yourself. In the second, you are doing the conscious work of construction. And while making the choices good writing requires, the Author exists, he circumscribes, he controls, he puts walls on either side of the playground. The reader, to read him properly, would do well to recognize the existence of these walls. The Author limits the possibility of the reader’s play.
In The Pleasure of the Text and “S/Z,” meanwhile, we find Barthes assigning this work of construction to readers themselves. Here a rather wonderful Barthesian distinction is made between the “readerly” and the “writerly” text. Readerly texts ask little or nothing of their readers; they are smooth and fixed in meaning and can be read passively (most magazine copy and bad genre writing is of this kind). By contrast, the writerly text openly displays its written-ness, demanding a great effort from its reader, a creative engagement. In a writerly text the reader, through reading, is actually reconstructing the act of writing, a thrilling idea with which Nabokov would sympathize, for that was the kind of active reader his own work required. [25] But then Barthes imagines a further step: that by reading across the various “codes” he believed were inscribed in the writerly text (the linguistic, symbolic, social, historical, et cetera), a reader, in an active sense, constructs the text entirely anew with each reading. In this way Barthes reverses the hierarchy of the writer-reader dynamic. The reader becomes “no longer the consumer but the producer of text.”
Hard to know for sure what Nabokov would have made of that. My guess is he would have found it unhinged. He disliked literary theory in general. (“Every good reader has enjoyed a few good books in his life so why analyse the pleasures that both sides know?”) It’s probably for the best that he didn’t live to see the kind of post-Barthes (and post-Foucault) campus criticism that flowered on both sides of the pond during the eighties and nineties. Wild analogy; aggressive reading against the grain and across codes and discourses; a fondness for cultural codes over textual particulars. You remember the sort of thing:
The Trans-gendered Suitor: Refractions of Darcy as Elizabeth’s True Sister in Pride and Prejudice:
Daisy, the Dollar, and Foucault’s Repressive Hypothesis: Portraits of Sexualised Capital in The Great Gatsby.
Please Sir Can I Have Some More: Bulimic Rejections of Self in Oliver Twist.
I’ve written a lot of essays like this. And found it a wonderful thing, to feel so free. The novel was mine to do with as I wished with, to read upside down, back to front or in entirely anachronistic terms. That kind of freedom makes writers of readers, liberating us from the passive and authoritarian reading styles we are taught in school (Hard Times = British education system in Victorian England). When we read instead in an active way we get to reinscribe dusty old novels into our own interests and concerns. There is a joy in getting someone to hand us their butterfly so we can spend twenty pages making the case for its being our giraffe.
But Nabokov believed in the butterfly qua butterfly. For this reason, when I first read his Lectures on Literature I was disappointed. [26] Was this really Nabokov? The apparent analytic simplicity, the lengthy quoting without commentary. The obsession with (what seemed to me) utterly banal details: the shape of Gregor Samsa’s shell, a map of Dublin, the exact geographical location of Mansfield Park. And the questions he set his students! What color are Emma Bovary’s eyes? What kind of house was Bleak House? How many rooms are in there? You have to reset your brain, away from the overheated hustle of English departments, before you can see how beautiful those lectures are. How attentive. How particular. When it comes to rereading, Nabokov felt, “one should notice and fondle details.” These lectures are a marvelous, concrete example of that principle.
For Barthes, ideologically tied to a post-Marxist analysis, a bad reader was a consumer and an ideal one, a producer. For Nabokov, the reader is neither. Nabokov’s ideal reader is something resembling a butterfly collector, with an interest both empirical and aesthetic. For his ideal reader, the text is a highly particular thing, and the job is to appreciate and note its particularities. If nothing else, in these lectures we find a mirror image of how Nabokov himself hoped to be read. For he felt his own work to be multiplex but not truly multivalent-the buck stopped at Nabokov, the man who had placed the details there in the first place. His texts had their unity (their truest reality) in him.
Consequently, seriously variant interpretations of his novels were only so much poshlust [27] to him, to be filed next to “Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, over concern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.” This makes him a hard author to write about. He seems to admit no ideal reader except himself. I think of him as one of the last, great twentieth-century believers in the autonomy of the Author, as Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the last believers in the Architect. They both specialized in theatrical interviews, struck self-regarding and self-mythologizing poses, all of which would mean nothing (the Author being dead, you don’t have to listen to his self-descriptions) if it weren’t for the fact that they wove the restrictions and privileges of authorship into the very fabric of the things they built. For it’s true that each time I enter Pnin I feel its author controlling (via an obsessive specificity) all my reactions, just as, in Wright’s Unity Temple, one enters through a small, low side door, forced to approach the magnificence of the interior by way of a series of awkward right-angled turns. There is extraordinary, almost overwhelming beauty in Nabokov-there is also an oppressive rigidity. You will live in his house his way. Nabokov’s way means giving up the reader’s traditional linear right-of-way through a novel (starting at the first page and ending at the last) and confronting instead a network of connected leitmotifs, quotations, clues, and puzzles that are not so much to be read as deciphered. Faced with a Nabokov novel it’s impossible to rid yourself of the feeling that you’ve been set a problem, as a chess master sets a problem in a newspaper. I am always tormented by the sense I have missed something-and Nabokov makes me feel my failure. The Author, he claimed, “clashes with readerdom because he is his own ideal reader and those other readers are so very often mere lip-moving ghosts and amnesiacs.” He claimed to be writing, instead, “mainly for artists, fellow-artist and follow artists,” whose job it was to “share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author-the joys and difficulties of creation.” Follow artists! In practice this means subsuming your existence in his, until you become, in effect, Nabokov’s double, knowing what he knows, loving as he loves and hating his way, too, [28] following each nuance, pursuing each reference, in what amounts to a reader’s mimeograph of the Author’s creative act. (And there exist many people who hate Nabokov for precisely this reason.) It is a reversal of the Barthes formulation: here it is the reader who must die so that the Author may live. There is a sensible school of thought that argues all writing makes us do this [29]-but few writers make you feel your subjection as Nabokov does. The only perfect tenant of the house that Nabokov built is Nabokov. [30]
[25] Another way of thinking about the distinction might be: there is a style that believes writing should mimic the quick pace, the ease, and the fluidity of reading (or even of speech). And then there is a style that believes reading should mimic the obstruction and slow struggle of writing. Raymond Carver would be on that first axis. Nabokov is
[26] These were originally conceived as lectures for Nabokov’s Cornell undergraduates on the Masters of European Fiction. They were collected and published after his death.
[27] Properly
[28] Nabokov nerds often slavishly parrot his strong opinions. I don’t think I’m the first person to have my mind poisoned, by Nabokov, against Dostoyevsky.
[29] “In many ways writing is the act of saying