Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces [1 ed.] 9781443873024, 9781443866828

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Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces

Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces

By

Jacqueline Hamrit

Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces, by Jacqueline Hamrit This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2014 by Jacqueline Hamrit All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6682-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6682-8

To Marine

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................. 5 On a Book Entitled Lolita 1) Publishers and first readers - Desire to publish - Resistance to publish and censorship - Incorrect interpretations - Misunderstandings 2) Good readers and good interpretations - Lolita as a love affair - Good readers - Nabokov’s interpretation 3) The author as a Janus-like persona - The author as a constraining figure - The author and the reader facing each other - The author as a ghostly figure Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 30 Introduction to Bend Sinister 1) The author confronting reality - A sinistral world - A sinister world - A monstrous world 2) The author facing his characters - Krug, the protagonist - The other characters 3) The author and his text - The author as a deity - The author confronting his text - An authorless and readerless text

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Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 64 Foreword to Speak, Memory 1) The author building his work - A bibliographic obsession - The splendor of the origin: “Mademoiselle O” - The author’s process of composition 2) The author writing thanks to remembering - A fanciful memory - Remembering by overcoming obstacles - A happy memory 3) The author facing himself when writing an autobiography - What is at stake in an autobiography - What does the autobiography contain? - The autobiography as an impossible genre - The author as a subject Conclusion ................................................................................................. 99 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 108 Index rerum ............................................................................................. 134 Index nominum ........................................................................................ 140

INTRODUCTION

In the following study, I wish to explore the problematic aspects of Nabokov’s prefaces as regards the issue of the author, authorship and authority. My choice to focus on liminary texts such as prefaces, postfaces, forewords or introductions written by Nabokov on his own fiction, is for methodological and strategic reasons. As they are all short, non-fictional, seemingly secondary texts, situated at the threshold of the main fictional text, they question the fictional text and textuality in general and so allow for an oblique and original analysis of Nabokov’s works. There have been two main theoretical studies of prefaces, one written by Gérard Genette in 1987 entitled in French Seuils1 and Thresholds in English, and the essay situated at the beginning of Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination entitled ‘Hors Livre’2 in French and ‘Outwork’3 in English. Genette offers a typology of prefaces and wonders about their function, and defines the preface as any liminary text (be it preliminary or postliminary), written by an author or by somebody else, and consisting of a discourse produced about a subsequent or a preceding text.4 Prefaces may be fictional (such as John Ray’s foreword in Lolita) or authentic. I will consider the authentic ones. As for Derrida, he states that “Il n’y a que du texte, il n’y a que du hors-texte, au total 'une préface incessante’’’5 [“There is nothing but text, there is nothing but extratext, in sum an ‘unceasing preface’”].6 According to him, the preface raises issues of genre, history, text, meaning and ultimately the very question of the author. More recently Maurice Couturier has extensively studied the figure of the author in Nabokov’s works, in Nabokov ou La Tyrannie de l’auteur7 published in 1993 and in La Figure de l’auteur8 (1995). In these works Couturier considers that the problematic of the author raises the issue of the relationship between the author and the reader and that, whereas the reader of Nabokov’s texts has the illusion that he masters the game of deciphering and interpreting, he is merely subjected to the law of the author who is the real master of the game. For Couturier, Nabokov is an authoritarian, even tyrannical author, a self-sufficient one whose figure invalidates the theory of the death of the author. We may have the impression that Couturier is right when we remember what Nabokov wrote in the foreword of his screenplay. Here are his words:

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Introduction By nature I am no dramatist; I am not even a hack scenarist; but if I had given as much of myself to the stage or the screen as I have to the kind of writing which serves a triumphant life sentence between the covers of a book, I would have advocated and applied a system of total tyranny, directing the play or the picture myself, choosing settings and costumes, terrorizing the actors, mingling with them in the big part of guest, or ghost, prompting them, and, in a word, pervading the entire show with the will and art of one individual.9

Yet whereas Couturier has based his approach mainly on Barthes’s analysis of the author in “La Mort de l’auteur”10 [The Death of the author] and the ultimate rehabilitation of authorship in Le Plaisir du texte11 [The Pleasure of the Text], I wish for my part to develop another perspective by returning to Maurice Blanchot’s and Jacques Derrida’s studies of authorship. Indeed, I intend to show that Nabokov as an author plays intermittently on apparitions and disappearances, that he not only tries to reinstate the status of the author, but ultimately disappears in a gesture combining mastery and loss of mastery, which for Derrida is named ‘exappropriation’—that is both appropriation and expropriation. I would therefore like to insist, in opposition to Couturier’s perspective, on the ultimate self-effacement (and therefore no longer the tyranny) of Nabokov as an author, a critic and a subject. To provide evidence of this theory, I will mainly analyse three liminary texts, Lolita’s postface, that is ‘On a Book entitled Lolita,’ written in 1956, then the introduction to Bend Sinister written in 1963 and the foreword of the revised autobiography written in 1966. To date, there have been three studies on Nabokovian prefaces that I know of—the articles published first by Charles Nicol, in 1994,12 and secondly by Corinne Scheiner, in 2003,13 as well as an essay written by Marilyn Edelstein in 2008.14 Nicol offers a paradigm of Nabokov’s introductions which appears as follows: I. Personal and bibliographic (two-three paragraphs): A. Personal situation during the novel’s composition B. Bibliographic information on its initial and subsequent publication C. Explanation of the title D. Statement concerning the translation, if applicable II. Miscellaneous comments prompted by this particular novel (one paragraph) III. Polemic statements (one paragraph): A. Rejection of comparisons and influences B. Denial of moral purpose and social commentary

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C. Rejection of “general ideas” and trashy authors D. One-sentence rejection of Freudian content IV. Elliptical commentary on the plot (one paragraph)15

Thus Nicol considers that the prefaces are generally composed of personal and bibliographic items such as the personal situation during the novel’s composition, some bibliographic information on its publication, an explanation of the title, a statement concerning the translation, if applicable, then some polemical statements about the rejection of comparisons and influences, of general ideas and eventually of Freudian content. This useful description gives a good account, not only of the recurrent items of the contents, but mainly of the tone of the discourse (polemical and constantly denying previous comments on his work). As for Corinne Scheiner, she is mainly interested in the act of, and commentary on, self-translation by Nabokov, whereas Marilyn Edelstein focuses on Lolita’s paratexts. As far as I am concerned, I wish to study the three prefaces I mentioned from the perspective of, first, the relationship between the author and the reader, then, the relationship between the author and his text, and finally the relationship between the author and himself, as a subject.

Notes 1 Gérard Genette. Seuils ( Paris: Seuil, 1987). 2 Jacques Derrida, “Hors livre, préfaces,” La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972) 967. 3 Jacques Derrida, “Outwork, prefacing,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: The Athlone Press, 1981) 3-59. 4 Genette, Seuils 150. 5 Derrida, La Dissémination 50. 6 Derrida, Dissemination 43. 7 Maurice Couturier. Nabokov ou La tyrannie de l’auteur. (Paris: Seuil 1993). 8 Maurice Couturier. La Figure de l’auteur. (Paris: Seuil, 1995). 9 Vladimir Nabokov, “Foreword,” Lolita: A Screenplay (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974) ix-x. 10 Roland Barthes, “La Mort de l’auteur,” Essais critiques IV. Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984) 61-67. 11 Roland Barthes. Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973). 12 Charles Nicol, “Necessary Instruction or Fatal Fatuity: Nabokov’s Introductions and Bend Sinister,” Nabokov Studies Volume 1 (1994): 115-29.

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Introduction

13 Corinne Scheiner, “In Place of a Preface: Reading Chapter one of Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark as a Foreword to the English translation,” Proceedings of the International Nabokov Symposium 2002. 26 June 2003. (http://www.nabokovmuseum.org/PDF/Scheiner.pdf) It seems difficult to access the article online as it is mentioned in Corinne Scheiner’s CV but I heard her presentation and she kindly sent me a copy in July 2003. So, it may be advised to ask her for one at [email protected]. She also gave a presentation in April 2003 at the Annual Meeting of the ACLA, in San Diego, California, which was entitled “Nabokov’s use of Paratext: Instructions on how to read Properly (That is, with the Spine).” 14 Marilyn Edelstein, “Before the Beginning: Nabokov and the Rhetoric of the Preface,” Narrative Beginnings. Theories and Practices, ed. Brian Richardson (Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2008) 29-43. In her bibliography, she mentions her 1984 Dissertation (SUNY at Buffalo) entitled “At the Threshold of the Text: The Rhetoric of Prefaces to Novels.” 15 Nicol, “Necessary Instruction or Fatal Fatuity: Nabokov’s Introductions and Bend Sinister,” 115.

CHAPTER ONE ON A BOOK ENTITLED LOLITA

My intention is to begin with Lolita’s postscript, called “On a Book Entitled Lolita” (subsequently referred to as OBEL), in order, first, to recall the circumstances of its genesis, before presenting examples of the scholarly analyses it has prompted and finally proposing a brief summary prior to exploring the problematics the text raises. It was on November 12, 1956 that Nabokov put his signature to OBEL.1 It was a particular time indeed as his novel had been rejected by all the American publishers and had only been published in Paris by Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press on September 15, 1955. According to Brian Boyd, the American publisher Jason Epstein from Doubleday had proposed to Nabokov that extracts from Lolita should appear in a number of the literary review issued by Doubleday and entitled Anchor Review. Nabokov was delighted to agree and met Melvin Lasky, the editor of Anchor Review as well as Fred Dupee of Columbia who wished to write a long introductory essay.2 The issue of Anchor Review appeared in June 1957 and contained excerpts from Lolita as well as articles about the novel by Nabokov and Dupee. Nabokov’s essay was to be inserted in all the ensuing editions of Lolita, from the first American edition in July 1958 at G.P. Putman’s Sons in New York, to the first British edition in November 1959 at Weidenfeld and Nicolson in London and the corrected American edition by Alfred Appel, Jr. in 1970 in New York.3 It is now impossible to read the novel without its afterword which produced reactions I now intend to sum up. In the 1990s, that is in the heyday of Nabokov scholarship, both Brian Boyd and Maurice Couturier commented on OBEL. Boyd considers that this “elegant” afterword is “witty and profound, […] nimble, elusive, deceptive” and that Nabokov “defends the novel from any charge of pornography by its sheer certainty that a novel on this artistic level need not descend to self-defense.”4 As for Couturier, in 1995 in La Figure de l’auteur he considers that Nabokov, as an American citizen, wanted to offer a token of his morality to the country he had adopted, uselessly

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apologizing in fact for shocking it.5 In the 2000s, two articles on OBEL appeared, one by Jennifer Ingleheart entitled “Burning Manuscripts: The Literary Apologia in Ovid’s Tristria 2 and Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘On a Book Entitled Lolita’” in 2006 and another one by Jacques Sohier entitled “Féerie pour un scandale: l’art et la morale dans Lolita (1958) de Vladimir Nabokov” in 2010. Comparing Ovid’s and Nabokov’s strategies, Ingleheart asserts that not only do both defend their work but they play on the genre of the literary apologia, through irony and ambiguity, and assert the power and autonomy of the artist.6 As for Sohier, he also considers that Nabokov claims artistic independence but Sohier wonders mainly about the problematic of art in its relationship with morals,7 a problematic which is at the core of OBEL and which will be developed further after the brief summary I now wish to present. In OBEL, Nabokov presents the circumstances and steps of the composition and genesis of Lolita, the obstacles and conditions of its publication and his reaction to the reception of his novel, ending with what he considers to be true literature and literary criticism. Nabokov therefore begins by narrating how “the first little throb of Lolita” (311) came in late 1939 or early 1940 in Paris and was prompted by his reading of a newspaper article about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who thanks to the coaxing of a scientist had managed to produce a drawing representing the bars of his cage.8 The impulse resulted in a short story of about thirty pages which he wrote in Russian9 and which told the story of a man from Central Europe who married the sick mother of a nymphet in order to approach the nymphet. Nabokov says he was not satisfied with the novella and thinks that he destroyed it—but he did not—when he arrived in America in 1940. He goes on to specify how inspiration seized him again in 1949 in Ithaca and how he began writing, this time in English, what was to become a fully-fledged novel in which he kept the marrying-the-mother idea. The book, he says, “developed slowly, with many interruptions and asides” (312) because he was faced with the task of “inventing” America at the age of fifty and he even thought once or twice of burning the work but finally refrained his impulse for fear that he might regret it. The book was finished in the spring of 1954 and Nabokov immediately set about finding a publisher. Although he was advised by a friend to publish it anonymously, he decided to put his signature to Lolita. The book was turned down by four American publishers who were shocked by it. Nabokov considers that the difficulties he met gaining publication were due to the fact that it had been read as a pornographic book whereas, for him, it was first and foremost an artistic one. He was, he says, surprised by some reactions of readers who recommended extravagant modifications,

On a Book Entitled Lolita

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but he appreciated the elegance and soundness of the interpretation by an American critic who wrote that Lolita was the record of his love affair with the romantic novel, though here Nabokov suggested substituting “English language” for “romantic novel”. So OBEL appears indeed not only as a defense of the novel but goes beyond that as it stages the relationship Nabokov as an author here engages with his readers. I therefore now propose to study this relationship with, primo, his first readers, among whom are the publishers, then his “good” and/or “bad” readers before ending with the hypothesis of Nabokov—the author—as a Janus-like persona.

Publishers and First Readers Desire to Publish Nabokov writes in OBEL that as soon as he “finished copying the thing [Lolita] out in longhand in the spring of 1954, [he] at once began casting around for a publisher” (312). This desire to publish and to be published is well analyzed by Maurice Blanchot who wrote in the chapter entitled “La puissance et la gloire” [ Power and glory] in Le Livre à venir [The Book to come]10 that a writer seeks not only to let some of his/her private life (the inner self) pass into the public sphere (the outside), to address his book to friends, family or social classes, but he/she addresses everybody and nobody: the others. According to Blanchot, the need to be published has its origin in the work itself as a memory of the movement it comes from and this explains why there is a wish to remain anonymous to give account of the impersonality of a literary work but, at the same time, a need to communicate in society and henceforth be recognized, have a reputation, and thus have one’s name known. This analysis is not at variance with what Nabokov asserts in OBEL: At first, on the advice of a wary old friend, I was meek enough to stipulate that the book be brought out anonymously. I doubt that I shall ever regret that soon afterwards, realizing how likely a mask was to betray my own cause, I decided to sign Lolita. (313)

It is almost for political reasons or even militancy (Nabokov mentions his “cause”) that he accepts the assumption of juridical responsibility. This juridical responsibility is, according to Gérard Genette, the main effect of signing a book, of exposing one’s name to society.11 If Nabokov’s friend had advised him to publish the book anonymously, it was, of course, because of the theme of the book - pedophilia. Yet Nabokov refused to

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Chapter One

hide behind a mask, which is surprising or at least significant as he does not usually refrain from dissimulating his name behind the pseudonym Sirin or anagrams (the most famous one being Vivian Darkbloom). This play with anagrams shows the author’s propensity to appear and disappear intermittently, as an anagram both hides and reveals the name more than a pseudonym which only hides the name. So Nabokov considered that Lolita deserved the promise of a faithful commitment as regards the law, society and censorship as his desire to publish faced resistance since “the four American publishers W, X, Y, Z, who in turn were offered the typescript and had their readers glance at it, were shocked by Lolita to a degree that even [his] wary old F.P. had not expected.” (313)

Resistance to Publish and Censorship According to Brian Boyd, the publishers were Pascal Covici of Viking Press, editors of Simon and Schuster, James Laughlin of New Directions and Roger Strauss from Farrar, Strauss. They all refused to publish the book for fear of being prosecuted and in order to protect the author’s reputation. So did Doubleday who had published Pnin and A Hero of our Time. This explains why Nabokov turned to Europe and had Lolita published by the French Maurice Girodias.12 According to Maurice Couturier, who devoted a chapter on the history of the censorship of Lolita in his book entitled Roman et censure ou la mauvaise foi d’Eros [The Novel and censorship or Eros’s bad faith], censorship is not only linked with prohibition but it in fact intends to silence a text, to impose one’s law on the text and one’s authority over it.13 Couturier’s statement is both akin to Michel Foucault’s position and at variance with it, as Foucault explained in La Volonté de savoir [The Will to Know] in 1976 that censorship of sexual matters did not mean repressing sexuality as is often pretended but was the mark of the mechanisms of power. Censorship has social and political dimensions. To understand the portent of this notion, one might turn to Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida. Bataille explains in L’Érotisme [Erotism] that censorship is an attempt to kill new speech and corresponds to a social and juridical response to the inner transgression of a written text.14 This would explain why Tristram Shandy, Madame Bovary, Ulysses were attacked. It was not because of their contents but because they were subversive and revolutionary. As for Derrida, he takes the more recent example of Salman Rushdie in the interview he granted Derek Attridge in April 1989 entitled “Cette étrange institution qu’on appelle la littérature” [This Strange Institution called Literature]. In this interview, Derrida explains that, for him, literature is a

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rather recent institution, with conventions and rules, but also an institution which gives fiction in principle the power to say everything, to break free of the rules, to displace them. Literature is thereby related to democracy, even if it is a democracy to come. He writes: Ce que nous appelons littérature suppose que licence est donnée à l’écrivain de dire tout ce qu’il veut ou tout ce qu’il peut dire en restant à l’abri de toutes les censures, qu’elles soient religieuses ou politiques.15 What we call literature (not belles-lettres or poetry) implies that license is given to the writer to say everything he wants or everything he can, while remaining shielded, safe from all censorship, be it religious or political.16

It seems strange or even paradoxical to pretend that one is entitled to say everything in fiction regarding self-censorship or legal proceedings but this position is rather invigorating as it associates literature and writing to an experience of freedom, to the approach and transgression of limits, the questioning of taboos. Nabokov’s position on censorship focuses on taboos, as he writes in OBEL: Not all the four firms read the typescript to the end. Whether they found it pornographic or not did not interest me. Their refusal to buy the book was based not on my treatment of the theme but on the theme itself, for there are at least three themes which are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned. The two others are: a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106. (313-314)

In spite of the apparent lightness of the ironical overtones, it seems that Nabokov really meant what he was saying, as he reiterated these examples in the lecture he gave on April 10, 1958 entitled “Russian Writers, Censors, and Readers,” where he said: If I, an American writer, decide to write an unconventional novel about, say, a happy atheist, an independent Bostonian, who marries a beautiful Negro girl, also an atheist, has lots of children, cute little agnostics, and lives a happy, good, and gentle life to the age of 106, when he blissfully dies in his sleep – it is quite possible that despite your brilliant talent, Mr. Nabokov, we feel [in such cases we don’t think, we feel] that no American publisher could risk bringing out such a book simply because no bookseller would want to handle it.17

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Chapter One

According to the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, what is taboo is what is “set apart as venerable”, what is therefore sacred, inviolable, what is “outlawed by common consent.” A taboo is “a prohibition instituted for the protection of a cultural group”, “a prohibition imposed by social usage or as a protective measure.” Nabokov therefore considers that, with Lolita, he has gone to the limit of what is lived as acceptable by American society, he has transgressed the prohibitions of human and natural law, he has faced the unthinkable and therefore shaken the foundations of this society and its coherence based, he alludes, on religion (God as opposed to atheism), Puritanism (with sexual issues) and racism (with the ingrained tensions between blacks and whites). Censorship was consequently the reaction of this society trying to protect itself from a dangerous intrusion, to protect its territory by silencing a speech characterized by its freedom of thought regarding the dark side of evil, human enslavement. Far from advocating pedophilia and incest, Lolita deals with the emancipation from the constraints of an oppressive doxa, the taboo being the inner limit of a power which reduces freedom. So it seems that the reason why, according to Nabokov, the first readers were so taken aback by the novel is because they form “an interpretive community”, to use Stanley Fish’s expression, a community “made up of those who share interpretive strategies,”18 with its rules and conventions because literature is, as we have seen, an institution which becomes a control mechanism.

Incorrect Interpretations In OBEL, Nabokov tries to defend his novel by counteracting some of the first misreadings. Nabokov adamantly asserts that Lolita is, first, not pornographic, then, not moral and finally, not anti-American. He thus raises the issues of the genre of the novel, the problematic of ethics as opposed to aesthetics and finally its political dimension. The issue of pornography as opposed to eroticism is not a new one. Nabokov devotes a whole paragraph to the criticism of pornography as he wishes to distinguish Lolita which is not pornographic, according to him, but artistic. Although he concedes that there do exist lewd successful comic or satiric works as in the eighteenth century,19 he attacks the modern use of pornography because it “connotes mediocrity, commercialism, and certain strict rules of narration.” (313) Nabokov here condemns the commercial use of writing and the reduction of the activity of reading to mere consumption. He also establishes a hierarchy between good literature and what he calls “topical trash” (315) and we think of the

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Nabokovian cannon with his famous, sometimes controversial, likes and dislikes. He alludes to the rules of narration and values the conventions of a genre. There has been a lot of critical literature on the issue of genre (from Aristotle to Genette to Derrida)20 but it seems that there is a consensus on the presence of literary prescriptive, normative conventions which Derrida calls “the law of the genre”21 creating an expectation which, when it is frustrated, induces, as in the case of Lolita, according to Nabokov, misunderstanding and misreading. Yet here Nabokov plays a kind of double game as he resorts to sexual terminology when he alludes to the characteristics of pornographic writing, that is its clichés and its banality. He mentions “the copulation of clichés” (313) and says that “obscenity must be mated with banality because every kind of aesthetic enjoyment has to be entirely replaced by simple sexual stimulation” (313) [my emphasis]. For Couturier, this would be a perfect example of what he calls the bad faith of Eros, but I think that it corresponds to Nabokov’s ambivalence as he denounces sexual matters while at the same time taking them for granted. Nabokov does use sexuality in his novels, notably Lolita and Ada, but he refuses to be reduced, as in pornographic novels, to this issue and claims the recognition of artistry, which may explain why in an interview, he declared, “Let us skip sex.”22 Yet, it seems as if he appreciates lingering on the blurred boundary between pornography and eroticism, or, to use Couturier’s neologism, poeroticism, that is, a mingling of poetry and eroticism. It is undeniable that there is a literature which induces a “security of satisfaction” (313)—and this literature can be pleasant for some. But it is certain that it does not correspond to Nabokov’s work, as his texts demand a high and intense intellectual participation. Besides, what Nabokov is saying about pornography is not only meant to distinguish his novel but also to prevent future interpretations which would be limited to this question, foreseeing the commercial drifts of the novel and the persona of Lolita. Having asserted that Lolita is not a pornographic novel, Nabokov also declares in the afterword that it is not moral, playing once more a double game in the opposition between ethics and aesthetics, just as he oscillated between sexuality and art. It seems, at first sight, that Nabokov considers that Lolita does not teach anything and should be appreciated only for its artistry when he writes: There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me, a work of fiction exists only in so far it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss [. . .]. (314)

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Chapter One

He is therefore apparently contradicting the fictive editor John Ray, Jr. who, in the foreword, had affirmed: As a work of art, it [Lolita] transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, it is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study, there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egoistic mother, the panting maniac–these are not only vivid characters in a unique story; they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils.23

By juxtaposing the two contradictory assertions about the morality of the novel, in the foreword and the postscript, that is in the beginning and at the end, Nabokov places them in the way Derrida was to spatially juxtapose two columns dealing respectively with Hegel and Genet in Glas, again performing the issue which is at the core of the novel, namely the undecidability of interpretation.24 Derrida defined this key-notion of his in La Dissémination [Dissemination]. (1972) He wrote: Une proposition indécidable, Gödel en a démontré la possibilité en 1931, est une proposition qui, étant donné un système d’axiomes qui domine une multiplicité, n’est ni une conséquence analytique ou déductive des axiomes, ni en contradiction avec eux, ni vraie ni fausse au regard de ces axiomes. Tertium datur, sans synthèse.25 An undecidable proposition, as Gödel demonstrated in 1931, is a proposition which, given a system of axioms governing a multiplicity, is neither an analytical nor deductive consequence of those axioms, nor in contradiction with them, neither true nor false with respect to those axioms. Tertium datur, without synthesis.26

Derrida clearly specified that he was calling the operation “undecidable” only by analogy, as the definition applies mainly to the science of logic. What interested him in the concept was the fact that there is no synthesis, no dialectical reconciliation of two opposites. As for the relevance of this concept as regards Lolita, it seems in keeping with some of the previous criticism which mentioned the ambiguity and the tensions present in the novel, the oscillation between the insistence on the aesthetic dimension of the novel or the ethical one. One cannot choose between the two contradictory meanings of the novel without reducing its strength. If one focuses on aesthetic pleasure, one disregards the moral outrage, and vice versa. It is not only a question of hesitation, as the impossibility of choosing ends in fact in a real choice and decision. Undecidability is

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indeed, for Derrida, an ordeal one has to go through in order to be free, just, and responsible, as justice is beyond mere law. Derrida wrote: Le droit n’est pas la justice. Le droit est l’élément du calcul, et il est juste qu’il y ait du droit mais la justice est incalculable, elle exige qu’on calcule avec de l’incalculable ; et les expériences aporétiques sont des expériences aussi improbables que nécessaires de la justice, c’est-à-dire de moments où la décision entre le juste et l’injuste n’est jamais assurée par une règle.27 Law is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it is just there be law, but justice is incalculable, it demands that one calculate with the incalculable ; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule.28

To denounce pedophilia, Nabokov did not resort to mere doxa and common sense, but forced the reader, the student or the critic to first experience undecidability and go beyond this oscillation, beyond Puritanism and monstrosity, to really take his or her position and endorse responsibility. It was the only way to convincingly treat the theme, as there is no doubt that Nabokov precluded easy tolerance and advocated vigilance, as he was to declare: “In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.”29 This may be the reason why Lolita had been at first misread, read superficially, and not recognized as the masterpiece it actually was, an American masterpiece, according to Nabokov. Nabokov indeed contends in OBEL that Lolita is considered neither as purely pornographic nor moral, nor eventually anti-American. The charge of anti-Americanism was, Nabokov says, what pained him even more than “the idiotic accusation of immorality.” (315) He used in Lolita the frame of American landscapes and mores but it was not a mere sociological documentary. It is true that, when we think of certain characters in the novel such as Charlotte Haze, Miss Pratt, Valeria or even sometimes Lolita, it seems obvious that they are the targets of Nabokov’s criticism but the satiric devices do not mean the rejection of a society. On the contrary, satire is meant to correct or improve certain of its aspects. What Nabokov wanted to denounce through satire and comedy is, he says, the philistine vulgarity that is present in “any proletarian from Chicago [who] can be as bourgeois (in the Flaubertian sense) as a duke.” (315) In an article entitled “Philistines and Philistinism,” Nabokov strongly condemns philistinism which, he says, corresponds to what is called poshlust in

14

Chapter One

Russian and is mainly characterized by vulgarity, mediocrity and banalities. The philistine is a fraud and a conformist, at the extreme opposite of “the genuine, the guileless, the good.”30 So for him this state of mind is represented in Lolita but is not specific to America. Nabokov affirms, on the contrary, that he always wished to be recognized as an American writer. In an interview he gave in 1962, he declared: “In America I’m happier than in any other country. It is in America that I found my best readers, minds that are closest to mine. I feel intellectually at home in America. It is a second home in the true sense of the word.”31 In another interview he gave in 1964, he reiterated his love for his adopted country by saying: I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England where I studied French literature, before spending fifteen years in Germany. I came to America in 1940 and decided to become an American citizen, and make America my home. It so happened that I was immediately exposed to the very best in America, to its rich intellectual life and to its easygoing, good atmosphere. I immersed myself in its great libraries and its great Canyon. I worked in the laboratories of its zoological museums. I acquired more friends than I ever had in Europe. My books–old books and new ones– found some admirable readers. [...] In consequence, I am one-third American–good American flesh keeping me warm and safe.32

This is undoubtedly an affirmative declaration of love for America which takes into account the different facets of his identity and history: the USA, Russia, Europe. But to what extent can he really be considered as an “American writer”? Not in terms of his nationality but in terms of his belonging to American literary tradition? What about his link with Russian literary history? This issue has often been raised in Nabokovian scholarship33 and most critics consider it difficult or even impossible to place him in a rigid classification or category. In his book on the modern American novel, Malcom Bradbury compares him to Beckett and Borges, “two other non American authors who were to have a massive influence on American fiction in the 1960’s” and adds that “Nabokov represents a major link between the earlier European stages of the modern movement and the development of that kind of writing in the United States that came to be called ‘postmodern.’”34 It is true that Nabokov links an American literature with a European one but except for some American writers such as Poe or James, Nabokov does not take his inspiration from American literature and is, on the contrary, very far from Whitman or Emerson, for example. Besides, no American book was selected by him in the list of his great masterpieces of twentieth-century prose, which were Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s Transformation, Biely’s Petersburg and Proust’s In

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Search of Lost Time. Yet even though he was not strictly influenced by American writers, he did influence younger American writers such as John Barth or Thomas Pynchon. In fact, he is a citizen of the world, an immigrant who writes a literature of exile and who provides evidence of what Derrida refers to as a “trouble in identity”35 when he mentions his own double origin (from France and North Africa). We should not understand “trouble” only as a form of psychological disorder or flaw but more as an absence of essence and purity, a hybrid crossing of identities just as Judith Butler talks of trouble in gender. This trouble also concerns citizenship as Nabokov was to become an American citizen but with the memory of his Russian birth. His identity may therefore be another undecidable issue as he was neither “completely” Russian nor “completely” American but Russian and American at the same time or, to put it in other terms, neither and both at the same time.36

Misunderstandings So Nabokov disagrees in OBEL with those first readers or critics who considered Lolita to be a pornographic novel, a moral/immoral one, and an anti-American one. These are therefore misreadings and misinterpretations. This issue is at the core of the activity of reading and/or literary criticism. To what extent is an interpretation right or wrong? What is the role of the author in the evaluation of good or bad readings, of misunderstandings? What is at the origin of misinterpretation? The answer is, of course, inexhaustible and has been the concern of numerous literary theories.37 According to the Yale critics, and notably J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man, the multiplicity of possible readings is due to the very nature of language. Paul de Man has even developed a whole terminology regarding misinterpretation which he calls “aberrant reading” characterized by blindness as opposed to insight, and such aberrant reading gives evidence of the impossibility of reading (“unreadibility”), as he reproached Heidegger for having misread Hölderlin and Derrida for having misread Rousseau.38 The reader may see in the text something which is not said or not present. The reader, in that case, fits his reading into his system and imposes his own subjective projections. This is maybe what Nabokov implies when he ironically mentions the case of a reader who wanted, for example, to turn Lolita “into a twelve-year-old lad and [have] him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings” (314) or another one who wanted to reduce the second part. We sense Nabokov’s irritation and, how, according to him, these are bad, unreliable and unfaithful readers.

16

Chapter One

So if the reader is not the one who holds the right meaning of a literary text, is the author at the origin of sound interpretation and should we find the solution in the author’s intention? Nabokov, well aware of this problematic, offers the following: Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as “What is the author’s purpose?” or still worse “What is the guy trying to say?” Now I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book and who, when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such ancient terms as Interreaction of Inspiration and Combination–which, I admit, sounds like a conjurer explaining one trick by performing another. (311)

Nabokov is here giving his position on the debate opposing the intentionalists and the anti-intentionalists as regards meaning, a debate whose issue is made clear by the title of W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley’s 1946 essay “The Intentional Fallacy.”39 The idea behind this title seems to be that we should not trust what the author says he meant to say, what he had the intention of saying, acknowledging thereby D. H. Lawrence’s aphorism “Never trust the artist, trust the tale”. Meaning indeed overflows authorial intention. Nabokov seems therefore to claim here that knowing his intention is neither available nor desirable because he had no clear and definite intention when he began writing and that writing is therefore not a question of transmitting a message, but a strange aporetic experience, both pleasant and painful, or at least disturbing—he wants to get rid of the book he is writing. Writing is consequently a question of desire carried away by inspiration, something that remains an inexplicable secret. If I say that meaning overflows authorial intention, it does not mean that authorial intention is not relevant (neither Wimsatt and Beardsley, or even Derrida, pretended that, Andrew Bennett claims in his book The Author) but that there is a gap, an opening (in French, we say “béance”) between saying and meaning, because, according to Derrida, the writer “might say more, less, or something other than he would mean.”40 Reading begins for him, Bennett adds, in that authorial ignorance of what is being said and the uncertainty of authorial intention is what distinguishes literature from other discourses such as philosophy for example. Therefore in the text there may be elements that are unperceived by the writer and that the reader reveals. Nabokov seems to acknowledge this idea when he writes: “there have been a number of wise, sensitive, and staunch people who understood my

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book much better than I can explain its mechanism here.” (315) Opposed to misinterpretations and bad readers, there are consequently good readers.

Good Readers and Good Interpretations Lolita as a love affair Reading is not for Nabokov a mere question of sense-making. It also concerns the affective side of the reader. Nabokov indeed asserts that he appreciated the “elegant formula” of an American critic who suggested that “Lolita was the record of [his] love affair with the romantic novel.” (316) What is significant in this phrase is not only the fact that the critic ignores the so-called love story of the characters of the novel by emphasizing, on the contrary, the relation it has with a genre, but mainly the fact that he uses a very weighty word: love. Love is not merely a concept but an affect. It deals with emotion, the senses rather than the sense, passion rather than reason. In her book on theories of reading, Karin Littau emphasizes the role of the body during the activity of reading, and its physiological reactions such as tears or prickles.41 She dates the opposition between pathos and reason back to Nietzsche and Kant. But when she mentions the presence of “spine tingling”42 in the activity of reading, this reminds us of Nabokov’s own description of the pleasures of literature.

Good Readers Nabokov indeed wrote at the end of the lectures he gave on literature in American universities: In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanisms of those wonderful toys–literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. […] I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction. […]The main thing is to experience that tingle in any department of thought or emotion. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.43 [my emphasis]

18

Chapter One

Nabokov devoted a whole lecture, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” on what he considered a good reader was. He indeed begins the lecture with a question “How to be a Good Reader?” and answers it by saying “the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense.”44 Even if he mentions imagination, he insists here on the cognitive dimension of the activity of reading requiring memory and semantic research. Yet the artistic sense is related to the other sensuous dimension which is alluded to in the previous quotation with its tingling and is developed at the end of the lecture as follows: “a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle [...]. Then, with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.”45 Nabokov mentions here an experience which is not only “sensual and intellectual” but actually physiological—a tingle seeming to advocate a suspension of the mind but actually supporting a complex state of being that Nabokov describes at length in OBEL with his definition of artistic delight. He indeed writes: For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. (314-15)

A key-term here is “bliss”. Nabokov expresses the delight he experiences when he reads a good work of fiction and defines what, according to him, is good literature by the effect it produces and not by its form or its meaning. Moreover, this term—like “wonder”—belongs to Nabokov’s favorite and idiosyncratic terminology and has led to numerous different translations into French. For example, the first translator of Lolita in France, Éric Kahane, used the word “volupté” [voluptuous delight]. A French critic—Danièle Roth-Souton—talks of “félicité”. Whereas Maurice Couturier rightly reproaches Kahane for having ignored the two aspects of bliss, the profane and the secular, he proposes in his 2001 translation of Lolita the word “jubilation” [exultation] while the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines “bliss” as “complete or ecstatic happiness,” “perfect and exalted joy of saved souls: beatitude.” It seems therefore that aesthetic pleasure is a welcoming of the gift of art which induces in the receiver a complete happiness, an intense joy approaching an epiphany. Wishing to clarify this aesthetic emotion Nabokov describes it with highly indeterminate and enigmatic words. By saying that this delight is “a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected to other

On a Book Entitled Lolita

19

states of being”, he sees it as a phenomenological, almost existential experience pregnant with a “je ne sais quoi” expressed by phrases such as “a sense of” or “somehow, somewhere”. The interesting word “somewhere” initiates the drift towards a space, a place, an elsewhere— what Maurice Blanchot would call “a literary space” and Gilles Deleuze “a territory.” This space is not so much a world as a country where “art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” The use of the parentheses is noteworthy here and recalls the famous parentheses Nabokov uses in the second chapter of the first part of Lolita when he alludes to Humbert’s mother’s death.46 The lightness of the device paradoxically stresses the importance Nabokov gives to his definition of art as an experience which is not only epistemological and/or heuristic— due to the curiosity it requires and induces—but ethical as it is related to tenderness and kindness. These are two notions which may be surprising when we remember the cruelty characterizing some characters of Nabokovian fiction, such as Humbert for example. Yet Nabokov continuously proclaimed in his interviews that he abhorred cruelty and advocated kindness. In a 1969 interview, he considered that the worst thing men do was “To stink, to cheat, to torture.” Whereas the best was “To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.”47 This insistence on tenderness and kindness not only expresses Nabokov’s propensity for generosity and altruism but affords an almost “feminine” dimension to his ethics, in the sense which Emmanuel Lévinas uses when he refers to woman.48 So reading is, for Nabokov, an almost transcendent experience, or at least an ecstatic one which should generate “elegant” interpretations. Nabokov indeed considers that it was elegant on the part of the American critic to estimate that Lolita was “the record of [his] love affair with the romantic novel.” He was to use the same adjective—“elegant”—in a 1962 interview when he said: “Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.”49 So is a good interpretation, for Nabokov, more a question of convincing aesthetics than a mere issue of correct and sound meaning, of truth? It seems indeed as if Nabokov advocated, and had the intuition of, a kind of literary criticism that was to be creative writing. This may explain why, when he exposes his own interpretation of Lolita in OBEL, he does not refrain from expressing himself poetically.

Nabokov’s Interpretation He concludes OBEL by writing:

20

Chapter One After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution “English language” for “romantic novel” would make the elegant formula more correct. But here I feel my voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way. (316-17)

So Lolita is indeed, for Nabokov, a love affair, a love story, the love story of a writer for the English language. Nabokov’s bilingualism is a wellknown fact to which Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour devoted a whole article in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. She recalls how Nabokov knew how to read, speak and write English when he was a child. As for George Steiner, he insists on Nabokov’s multilingualism in his article entitled “Extraterritorial,”50 as Nabokov was to write not only in Russian and English but also in French. Both critics emphasize Nabokov’s experience of strangeness coming from this multilingualism and his feeling of uprootedness. Beaujour writes: “Nabokov was both a native speaker of English and a foreigner at the same time. The real point is that he was not a monolingual native speaker of either English or Russian.”51 Here she interestingly and paradoxically refers to the term “monolingual” just as in 1996 Derrida was to write a book on the issue of language and identity entitled Le Monolinguisme de l’autre [Monolingualism of the Other]. Derrida asserts: 1. On ne parle jamais qu’une seule langue–ou plutôt un seul idiome 2. On ne parle jamais une seule langue–ou plutôt il n’y a pas d’idiome pur.52 1. One only and ever speaks just one language—or rather just one idiom. 2. One never speaks just one language—or rather there is no pure idiom.53

This experience of being at the same time not merely a native speaker of different languages but a native speaker and a foreigner to one’s mother language displays an inner crack or flaw generating suffering and a feeling of exile within oneself. For Nabokov, it was the process of the loss of a language, the fact that he had to abandon his natural idiom that was his personal tragedy. He moreover expresses a different love for the different

On a Book Entitled Lolita

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languages he used. He preferred Russian for the mastery he had of it and deprecated his English for its artificiality. It seems strange to read such a statement when we know of Nabokov’s virtuosity in English. We may yet understand him when he mentions the magical tricks he resorts to when he uses his Russian idiom. Writing is indeed for him a scene, a scene of magic. He had already compared himself beforehand, we may recall, to “a conjurer explaining one trick by performing another.” (311) What characterizes a conjurer is that he hides what happens in the background and the figure Nabokov offers us is thus one of a magician who clings to what he calls “the secret points” (316) corresponding to “the nerves of the novel” (316). Secrecy, therefore, typifies literature for him and is different from and beyond mere meaning. Secrecy, too, is what is at the origin of the passion Derrida feels for literature. He writes in Passions: Si, sans aimer la littérature en général et pour elle-même, j’aime quelque chose en elle qui ne se réduise à quelque qualité esthétique, à quelque source de jouissance formelle, ce serait au lieu du secret. Au lieu d’un secret absolu. Là serait la passion. Il n’y a pas de passion sans secret, ce secret-ci, mais pas de secret sans cette passion. Au lieu du secret : là où pourtant tout est dit et où le reste n’est rien–que le reste, pas même de la littérature.54 If, without loving literature in general and for itself, I love something within itself which would not be reduced to some aesthetic quality, to some formal pleasure, it would be at the locus of the secret. At the locus of the absolute secret. Passion would be there. There is no passion without the secret, this secret, but there is no secret without this passion. At the locus of the secret: where however everything is said and where the remainder is nothing—but the remainder, not even literature.55

I quote Derrida at length because he may help us grasp more subtly this notion of secrecy in Nabokov’s magical fiction. The origin of a book, Nabokov says, cannot be explained, deciphered, revealed, reached. The “secret points” of the novel, Derrida helps us to understand in his various commentaries on the secret in literature,56 are situated at the limit of the unsaid, the half-said and the to-be-said. They are blindingly visible and readable but at the same time at the threshold of the invisible and the unreadable, at the limit of the conscious and the unconscious, like “the subliminal coordinates by means of which the book is plotted” (316). Their silence generates in the reader the desire to keep on exploring riddles and a passion for discovery as he knows that he is facing a strange and elusive persona, that of a manipulating author/conjurer.

22

Chapter One

The Author as a Janus-like Persona The Author as a Constraining Figure Most Nabokov scholars have agreed with the fact that OBEL is mainly a defense of the novel. Nabokov has indeed criticized what he considers to be incorrect interpretations and has, on the contrary, praised good ones. He therefore acts as a professor who grants good or bad grades, corrects, guides, judges, validates or invalidates, authorizes or forbids readings and interpretations. But beyond acting as a professor, what is his role as an author reading and judging his own text, an author reading and judging his readers’ interpretations? To what extent is his own interpretation valid and does it have priority? These questions are, of course, again enormous and raise issues in literary theory of meaning, the nature of the text and the role not only of the author but also of the reader. For Michel Foucault, the author is the one who limits the excessive proliferation of meaning. He writes: “The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world. [...] The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.”57 The author is then literally a safeguard against delirious interpretations, as Nabokov would agree with the statement that one cannot say anything about a text. The freedom of interpretation that he acknowledged when he mentions those “wise, sensitive, and staunch people who understood [his] book much better than [he] can explain its mechanism” (315) should be limited. But does the author have “the last word,” to use Kinbote’s phrase in Pale Fire? By being the reader of his own text, he is facing a paradoxical situation as he is not only the author of the text—so not a reader like any other one— and thereby entitled (“authorized”) to give his own particular opinion by virtue of coherence, but also a reader like any other reader and thereby allowed to express a new discourse that can be deconstructed just like the previous one since an author cannot exhaust the secret of his own unreadable text.

The Author and the Reader Facing Each Other According to Nabokov himself and later Maurice Couturier, an encounter occurs between author and reader. Nabokov writes in “Good Readers and Good Writers”: The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction. [...]

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The writer is the first man to map it and to name the natural objects it contains. Those berries there are edible. That speckled creature that bolted across my path might be tamed. That lake between those trees will be called Lake Opal or, more artistically, Dishwater Lake. That mist is a mountain–and that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.58 Nabokov describes here—thanks to the metaphor—a very poetic vision of the meeting which occurs as a surprise but is also passionate and positive: the reader is happy; author and reader embrace. As for Couturier, he could not be accused of unfaithfulness59 as regards his reading of Nabokov since he also describes the encounter of the reader and the author as “an intimate and passionate exchange” (“un échange intime et passionné à la fois”60) which is at the heart of the author’s desire to write and the reader’s desire to read as each of them needs the other to pursue their activity. For Couturier, there is an interaction between author and reader because of the existence of a mutual textual communication. Even though it seems obvious that Couturier is conscious of the fact that, in the case of literature, a particular communication exists, different from mere oral communication as is obvious in the title of one of his books named Textual Communication: A Print-Based Theory of the Novel,61 he is considering communication in a way which would be questioned by deconstructionists. He is thus more indebted to Lacan’s notion of intersubjectivity than Derrida’s notion of destination as expressed in the concept of “destinerrance,” which Simon Morgan Wortham defines as “a neologism of Derrida’s which implies erring or wandering as always possible in embarking upon a certain destination.”62 This may explain why Derrida, following Blanchot’s vision of a combat or struggle between author and reader,63 considers that the relationship between author and reader is not a mere encounter but a duel, “a duel of singularities” as he declared: “There is as it were a duel of singularities, a duel of writing and reading. [...] In reality, I don’t even think it is a matter of a duel here, in the way I just said a bit hastily: this experience always implies more than two signatures. No reading [...] would be, how can I put it, ‘new,’ ‘inaugural,’ ‘performative,’ without this multiplicity or proliferation of countersignatures.”64 This description of a struggle, a combat or a duel is undoubtedly at variance with the embrace Nabokov sees during the meeting between reader and author. Yet when we

24

Chapter One

remember all the misunderstandings Nabokov alludes to in OBEL when he mentions some of the aberrant readings by some of his readers, they seem to provide evidence of a not so angelic relationship as the embrace would imply. It is indeed a much more complex relationship and is best described by Blanchot who refers to a singular reciprocity whereby author and reader generate each other. The reader is then eventually the one who writes. Blanchot asserts: The writer, inasmuch as he remains a real person and believes himself to be this real person who is writing, also believes that he willingly shelters in himself the reader of what he writes. He feels within himself, vital and demanding, the role of the reader still to be born. And very often, through a usurpation which he barely escapes, it is the reader, prematurely and falsely engendered, who begins to write in him.65

French critic Georges Poulet was to prolong this reflexion in an article published in 1969 on the phenomenology of reading. According to him, “when I read, my thoughts are the thoughts of another but still mine. I think the thoughts of another as my own, which implies that ideas belong to no one.” Poulet goes on by saying that, “whenever I read, I mentally pronounce an I, and yet the I which I pronounce is not myself.” He eventually asks himself: “Who is the usurper who occupies the forefront? What is this mind who all alone by himself fills my consciousness and who, when I say I, is indeed that I?”66 So there seems to exist a very singular blurring of identities which is compared by both Blanchot and Poulet to a usurpation. This term is highly significant as it echoes the one Nabokov uses in OBEL when he tries to describe the feeling he experiences when he writes on his own novel, Lolita, and this term is “impersonation.”

The Author as a Ghostly Figure Nabokov begins OBEL with these sentences: After doing my impersonation of suave John Ray, the character in Lolita who pens the Foreword, any comments coming straight from me may strike one–may strike me in fact–as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book. A few points, however, have to be discussed; and the autobiographic device may induce mimic and model to blend. (311)

In a very wily and tricky way, Nabokov plays here on the different senses of the word “impersonation” which include the fact of pretending to be

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somebody (personating) and the idea of playing a role. Nabokov thus questions the issue of the identity of an author as he compares himself to the fictive editor of Lolita, John Ray, who is the author of the fictive foreword and thereby a mere character in the novel, whereas, he, Nabokov, is the author of the “real” postscript and has therefore the impression of copying a character, thus inverting the hierarchy between model—the “real” author—and mimic—the fictive editor—and blending them. So authorship is split, it is composed of a series of real and fictive selves: the “real” person—the one at the origin of an autobiography, that is, as he calls him, Vladimir Nabokov—the fictive one—the character of John Ray, Jr.—and another spectral one—the one that plays the role of an author while writing the postscript and which echoes the real one as well as the implied one present in the novel. The author becomes a very elusive persona characterized by these blurred and numerous identities. The effect of this mise-en-abyme structure is that fiction and reality are no longer strictly distinct and the author becomes fictionalized as he plays the role of a character. Elusive and spectral, he resembles a ghost characterized, according to Derrida, by its double nature juxtaposing his real and unreal dimensions. This intuitive feeling of authorship that the reader experiences questions the nature of the “I” of the author all the more as the word “I” is not mentioned by Nabokov here but merely alluded to by its complementary form “me”. Who and what is this “I” at the horizon of the activity of reading, this “I” which accumulates the selves of the writer and the author which correspond, according to Erwing Goffman, to what is known by literary gossip (the writer) as opposed to what is known by his/her books (the author)?67 This question, which we all ask ourselves when we read, is even more conspicuous at the locus of a paratext – prefaces, postcripts, introductions, etc. It seems obvious that Nabokov is well aware of the idiosyncrasy of such a discourse as he composed John Ray’s fictive foreword and his own supposed real postscript. Through this mirror structure, he gives evidence of his interest in the experience of an author when he/she reads his/her texts—an issue to be studied in the analysis of the introduction he wrote to Bend Sinister, while his interest in the subjectivity of an author will be highlighted by studying his introduction to Speak Memory.

26

Chapter One

Notes 1 Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. 1970 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) 311-317. 2 Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991) 299-300. 3 This information is given in Michael Juliar’s bibliography: Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography. (New York: Garland, 1986) 217-19. 4 Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 300. 5 Maurice Couturier, La Figure de l’auteur (Paris: Seuil, 1995) 68. 6 Jennifer Ingleheart, “Burning Manuscripts: The Literary Apologia in Ovid’s Tristia 2 and Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘On a Book Entitled Lolita’,” Classical and Modern Literature, 26/2 (2006): 79-109. 7 Jacques Sohier, “Féerie pour un scandale: l’art et la morale dans Lolita (1958) de Vladimir Nabokov,” Revue LISA/LISA e-journal (Online), Writers, writings, Literay studies, Online since 02 February 2010, connection on 14 July 2013. URL: http://lisa.revues.org/3249; DOI: 10.40000/lisa.3249 8 No Nabokovian scholar has ever found a trace of this article which may therefore have been invented by Nabokov. 9 For a study of the passage from the novella to the novel and then to the screenplay, see my article entitled “Generic Glidings and Endless Writing from The Enchanter to Lolita: A Screenplay through Lolita” in the Proceedings of the International Nabokov Conference Revising Nabokov Revising March 24-27, 2010, ed. Mitsuyoshi Numano and Tadashi Wakashima (Kyoto: The Nabokov Society of Japan, 2010) 27-32. 10 Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959) 333-40. 11 See the chapter dedicated to the author’s name in Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris, Seuil, 1987) 38-53. 12 See Boyd, The American Years 255-70. 13 Maurice Couturier, Roman et censure ou la mauvaise foi d’Eros (Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 1996) 224. 14 Georges Bataille, L’Érotisme (Paris: Minuit, 1957) 46-47. 15 Jacques Derrida et Derek Attridge, «Cette étrange institution qu’on appelle littérature», Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, dir. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski (Paris: Galilée) 257. Derrida repeats this notion in Donner la mort [The Gift of Death] (Paris, Galilée, 1999) 208. 16 Jacques Derrida, «This Strange Institution Called Literature»: An interview with Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge) 17. 17 Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (1982; London: Picador Pan Books, 1983) 3. 18 Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1980) 14. 19 In his book on the novel and censorship, Maurice Couturier mentions Tristram Shandy, and later Madame Bovary and Ulysses as well as Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

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20 For a survey of the theories of literary genres, see my article written in French entitled “ Lolita à l’epreuve de la théorie des genres littéraires” in Lolita. Roman de Vladimir Nabokov (1955) et film de Stanley Kubrick (1962)”, dir. Didier Machu and Taïna Tukhunen (Paris: Ellipses, 2009) 43-54. 21 Jacques Derrida, “ La loi du genre,” Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986) 249-87. 22 Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions 1973 (New York: Vintage International, 1990) 23. 23 Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita 5-6. 24 I developed the argumentation about undecidability in Lolita in a paper read at the symposium on Nabokov at the University of Strasbourg in October 2008. It was published under the title of “The ordeal of undecidability in Lolita” in Kaleidoscopic Nabokov. Perspectives françaises, dir. Lara Delage-Toriel and Monica Manolescu (Paris: Michel Oudiart Éditeur, 2009) 85-92. 25 Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972) 148-49.Derrida is alluding here to the famous Austrian-American mathematician Kurt Gödel who proved in 1931 that there exist in mathematics propositions which are neither true nor false, neither demonstrable nor refutable, and without a third possibility. 26 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson (London: The Athlone Press, 1981) 219. 27 Jacques Derrida, Force de loi (Paris: Galilée, 1994) 38. 28 Jacques Derrida, Force of Law. Trans. Mary Quaintance in Gil Anidgar, ed. Acts of Religion (New York: Routlege, 2002) 244. 29 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 193. 30 Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature 313. 31 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 10. 32 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 26-27. 33 See Alekseï Zverev, “Nabokov, Updike, and American Literature”, The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov (New York: Garland, 1995) 536-48. 34 Malcom Bradbury, The Modern American Novel, 1983 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994) 193-94. For the question of modernism and postmodernism, see the issue of the French journal Cycnos dedicated to this problematic (Volume 12/2, 1995). 35 Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre [Monolingualism of the other] (Paris: Galilée, 1996). 36 This paradoxical expression was used by Wordsworth in The Prelude (Book 5; 121-25) when he wrote: Upon a dromedary, lance in rest, He rode, I keeping pace with him, and now I fancied that he was the very knight Whose tale Cervantes tells, yet not the knight, But was an Arab of the desert too; Of these was neither, and was both at once. [my emphasis] (The Prelude 1850 [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971] 174). 37 For a survey of the literary theories of reading, see Karin Littau’s Theories of Reading. Books, Bodies and Bibliomania. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.

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38 See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 1971 (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 39 For an analysis of the intentional fallacy as developed by Wimsatt and Beardsley, see Andrew Bennett’s The Author (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2005) 75-80. 40 The quotation is asked by Andrew Bennett in The Author 82. 41 See Maya Medlock’s article entitled “La Figlia che Piange – Tears in Lolita” published in the proceedings of the international Nabokov Conference which was held in Tokyo in March 2010 (Revising Nabokov Revising). 42 Littau, Theories of Reading 10. 43 Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (San Diego, New York, London: A Harvest Book, Bruccoli Clark, Harcourst Brace & Company, 1982) 381-82. 44 Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers”, Lectures on Literature 3. 45 Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers”, Lectures on Literature 6. 46 “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.” (Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, p. 10) 47 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 152. 48 See Emmanuel Lévinas, Difficile liberté (Paris: Albin Michel, 1963): «La femme, la fiancée, n’est pas la réunion dans un être humain de toutes les perfections de la tendresse et de la bonté qui subsisteraient en soi. Tout se passe comme si le féminin en était la manifestation originelle, le doux en soi, l’origine de toute la douceur de la terre.» 54. [Woman, the fiancée, is not the reunion in a human being of all the perfections of tenderness and kindness remaining in oneself. It is as if the feminine was at the origin, was what is soft in oneself, the origin of all the softness of the world.] (my translation) 49 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 16. 50 George Steiner, “Extraterritorial,” Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations and Tributes, ed. Alfred Appel , Jr. and Charles Newman (Evanston: Nothwestern UP, 1970) 119-27. 51 Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, “Bilingualism,” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov 42. 52 Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre 24. 53 My translation 54 Jacques Derrida, Passions (Paris: Galilée, 1993) 64. 55 My translation. 56 See mainly Passions or Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret. Trans. from the French and Italian, Giacomo Donis. Ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb 1997 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001) 57 Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, Textual Strategies. Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari, 1979 (London: Methuen & Co, Ltd, 1980) 158-59. 58 Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” Lectures on Literature 2. 59 The boundary between faithfulness and submission was lightly crossed by Brian McHale in his review of Couturier’s Nabokov ou la tyrannie de l’auteur in Nabokov Studies 2 (1995). McHale talks of “Couturier’s willing submission to the tyranny of his author” (285). In a personal email Couturier sent me on June 16,

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2013, he specified that he had never had the impression of a submission to Nabokov. 60 Couturier, La Figure de l’auteur 21. 61 Maurice Couturier, Textual Communication: A Print-Based Theory of the Novel (London : Routledge, 1991). 62 Simon Morgan Wortham, The Derrida Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2010) 36. 63 In The Space of Literature trans. Ann Smok (Lincoln, London: U of Nebraska P, 1982), Blanchot writes: “The reader, without knowing it, is engaged in a profound struggle with the author.” (193), adding later: “Although, in the end, the work seems to have become a dialogue between two persons in whom two stabilized demands have been incarnated, this ‘dialogue’ is primarily the more original combat of more indistinct demands, the torn intimacy of irreconcilable and inseparable moments…” (199) 64 Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature 69. 65 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 200. 66 Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History (Vol. 1, No. 1, New and Old History, Oct., 1969) 57. http:/www.jstor.org/stable/468372 67 I owe this distinction to French critic Matthieu Vernet and his article “L’auteur en soupçon: déjouer la fiction d’autorité.” In Lire contre l’auteur, ed. Sophie Rabou (St-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2012 ) 99-115. He cites Erwing Goffman, Frame Analysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974) 298.

CHAPTER TWO INTRODUCTION TO BEND SINISTER

The issue of an author reading his/her own text also appears in the introduction Nabokov appended to the first novel he wrote in America: Bend Sinister. It was in 1963, that is sixteen years after the novel was published, that in Montreux (Switzerland) Nabokov added his signature to the introduction.1As in the case of OBEL, I wish to propose a brief summary of it, then present scholars’ analyses of it before exploring the problematic issues it raises. In the introduction, Nabokov first recalls the factual conditions of the composition of the novel. It was composed, he says, in the winter and spring of 1945-1946 at a time when he was in excellent health, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studying butterflies in the laboratories of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and teaching grammar and literature three times a week at Wellesley College. The typescript was read by his friend Edmund Wilson who recommended it to Allen Tate, who published it in 1947. It went unnoticed and only received praise in two weeklies—Time and The New Yorker. Nabokov then turns to the signification of the title, ‘bend sinister’, which means, he says, “a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy).” (5) He then adds that he chose this title in order to suggest “an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world.” (5) He nevertheless regrets that such a title might induce readers to seek “general ideas” or “human interest”, the discussion of which for him is highly tedious. He goes on to say that the purpose of the introduction is not to show that Bend Sinister belongs or does not belong to “serious literature” as he has never been interested in what is called “the literature of social comment.” (6) He is not, he says, “sincere”, “provocative”, “satirical”; he is, he adds, neither didactic nor allegorical. He is indifferent to politics and economics and refuses that his novel—just as his Invitation to a Beheading—might be compared to Kafka’s or Orwell’s works, as he considers the influence of the epoch to be, he says, as negligible as the

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influence of his books on his epoch, although he admits that there are some reflections on Fascist or Bolshevist regimes in his book. Broaching the issues of themes, he underlines the fact that “the lever of love” has not been sufficiently exploited by the police state in the novel who realized only too late that it was sufficient to kidnap his son to have Krug submit. Nabokov declares that he refuses to see his characters as ‘types’ or carriers of ‘ideas’ as they are only illusions and mirages that he dismisses whenever he wishes. The other themes are brutality, torture and “Krug’s blessed madness when he suddenly perceives the simple reality of things” (7) and realizes that the characters are merely the author’s whims. Nabokov then wonders about the moral dimension of the novel and concludes that crime is punished at the end. As for the plot, he asserts that it is built on two images, that of the puddle Krug observes out of the window of the hospital where his wife is dying at the beginning of the novel (this image reappears several times in other forms) and that of his wife Olga undressing herself in front of a mirror (this image crops up during one of Krug’s dreams). Nabokov adds that the “book teems with stylistic distortions” (8) such as puns, neologisms, spoonerisms or a hybridization of tongues and that the language spoken in the country is a blend of various ones, such as German, Russian, Slavic or Germanic. Moreover, citations and references are often deformed and a passage from Mallarmé constantly resonates in the book. Nabokov then wonders if it is worthwhile for an author to explain hidden references but concludes by affirming the personal pleasure of the author when rereading his text and by comparing the author to “an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by [himself].” (11) To summarize this introduction in a more concise way, it is possible to highlight Nabokov’s reference to the title—concerning its origin and signification—; the genre—it is indeed a novel which reflects the universes of torture and tyranny of fascist and bolshevist regimes—; the themes—such as love, cruelty and madness—; the plot—based on the recurrence of certain images—; verbal games—puns, spoonerisms, hybridization of languages—and finally the author—an anthropomorphic deity who dismisses or saves his characters whenever he wishes. Before proposing my own analysis of this text and the problematic issues it raises, I wish to present the commentaries it provoked among Nabokovian scholars. Both David Rampton in 1993 and John Burt Foster, Jr. in 1995 realized the importance of the introduction, which Rampton considers “the most helpful commentary he wrote on any of his novels,”2 whereas Foster declares that “the novel’s most influential critic has been Nabokov himself in his exceptionally detailed introduction.”3 Both are

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mainly concerned with the issue of art and politics. As for Marilyn Edelstein, she emphasizes the contradiction that exists within Nabokov’s discourse when he refers to art and politics, pretending at the same time that politics is irrelevant to his fiction but referring to Soviet propaganda and Lenin’s tyranny.4 Charles Nicol was the first to publish an extensive study of Nabokov’s prefaces in 1994, and in his article he wonders why Nabokov chose to write such a long introduction to Bend Sinister since there may have been numerous legitimate reasons to do so in Lolita but few in the case of Bend Sinister. Nicol’s first explanation is that it was perhaps simply requested by the editors of Time Reading Editions who wanted to reprint the novel. Another explanation Nicol advances is that it was a message to his friend Edmund Wilson with whom he was parrying.5 But both Edelstein and Nicol conclude by saying that the last word is left to the reader. Even if Foster considered that the two-world theme is classical in Nabokov’s work,6 it was indeed D. Barton Johnson in his 1983 article on Bend Sinister who highlighted the presence of two worlds in the novel and wrote: The work is conceptually organized in terms of two worlds: the fictive world of Krug and Paduk on the one side, and on the other, that of the omnipresent author-persona to whom Nabokov refers in his “Introduction” as “an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me” (xviii). Krug is consciously aware only of his own (and Paduk’s) world. The plot of Bend Sinister is the account of his gradual groping toward the realization that his, Krug’s world, is but a creation in the consciousness of the anthropomorphic deity who lives in a “real” world.7

I shall develop this remark later, but what strikes me first here is the insistence not only on the presence and creation of worlds which several scholars were to draw attention to in the titles of their works on Nabokov,8 but also on the opposition between the ‘fictive’ world and the ‘real’ one as, even if it seems at first sight hackneyed, it pinpoints one of the main issues Nabokov emphasizes in the introduction to Bend Sinister since he specifies not only the presence of “a sinistral and sinister world” (5) but of “worlds of tyranny and torture” (6). This is why I intend to focus in the first part on how Nabokov as an author confronts reality in the novel, before pursuing in the second part how he faces his characters, and ending in the third part with the relationship he entertains with his own text.

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The Author Confronting Reality To develop this issue, I wish to resort to Nabokov’s own words from the introduction in which he states that “The choice of title was an attempt to suggest […] a sinistral and sinister world.” (5)

A Sinistral World It is a sinistral world, because the novel depicts totalitarianism, highlighting the relationship between politics and art, and therefore problematizing the topic of the representation of reality as well as the genre chosen to give an account of such a reality. Nabokov did have the intention, even though he denies it in the introduction, of denouncing certain political regimes as evidenced in the letter written by his wife on January 14, 1948: At this point my husband thinks it essential to submit to you the following considerations: One of the main subjects of Bend Sinister is a rather vehement incrimination of a dictatorship – any dictatorship, and though the dictatorship actually represented in the book is imaginary, it deliberately displays features peculiar a) to Nazism, b) to communism, c) to any dictatorial trends in an otherwise non-dictatorial order.9

Yet Nabokov contradicts himself in the introduction to Bend Sinister, as in OBEL, saying one thing and doing another at the same time, giving evidence of a kind of flaw in his discourse, as he initially declares: “Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of ‘thaw’ in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent,” (6) before later adding: “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” (6). This is then later nuanced with the following: 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 in the course of my life: worlds of tyranny and torture, of Fascists and Bolshevists, of Philistine thinkers and jackbooted baboons. No doubt, too, without those infamous models before me I could not have interlarded this fantasy with bits of Lenin’s speeches, and a chunk of the Soviet constitution, and gobs of Nazist pseudo-efficiency. (6)

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Although Nabokov claims an indifference to politics and economics, it is, it seems, more a reluctance to have his novel considered to be political, because, again, as with Lolita, which he refused to consider as a mere ethical work, his novel is for him more an artistic performance than a political one. Yet later he twice adds nuances to his categorical assertions by resorting to the modalising expression “no doubt”, implying in other words that the political and historical reality is actually present in his novel. He therefore addresses the controversial issue of the relationship between politics and art, just as he raised the issue of ethics and aesthetics in OBEL. What kind of influence is there between an epoch and a book? Can a policy, a regime, be the origin of a certain literature? What kind of causality might there be? Nabokov resorts to the term “reflections” to give account of the relationship between the communist and Nazi regimes and his “fantasy” and although it seems highly unlikely that Nabokov would have approved of a Marxist-oriented explanation, it might be useful to refer to some French theorists such as Lucien Goldmann (1913-1970) and Jean-Joseph Goux to ponder on this relationship. First, for Goldmann, the real subjects of a cultural creation are social groups and not isolated individuals and he considers that a literary work is not the mere reflection of a collective consciousness but the much elaborated and coherent result of the tendencies of the consciousness of such a group.10 He also asserts that there is a “rigorous homology” [“ homologie rigoureuse”] between the literary form of a novel and the everyday relationship of men with goods in general.11As for Jean-Joseph Goux, he develops this idea of a correspondence between economic reality and spiritual achievements and claims that there is not only a correspondence between them but also autonomy, as ideas and institutions not only influence the economicopolitical reality but emerge and develop by themselves.12 Although Nabokov qualifies the influence of his epoch on the book, or of his book on his epoch, as merely “negligible” (6) he does indeed acknowledge it and would not, I think, disagree with the idea of autonomy of literary creation as, indeed, the political models he used in his novel are not in a dominant or authoritative relation. He recreated, reworded, and rebuilt an imaginary world. There is not a pure cause-effect between the model and the “copy”, there is no one-to-one relationship between them but a symbolic one made of multiple correspondences. Through these remarks, Nabokov raises the dizzying issue of mimesis or the literary representation of reality and as such we have to go back to Plato and Aristotle to approach the problem. Whereas Plato affirms in Book X of The Republic that artistic representation is away from nature and truth by two degrees, rejecting consequently what he considers the

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degraded characteristics of representation, Aristotle restores imitation in Poetics by acknowledging the pleasure one gains in imitations thanks to the recognition of well-known objects and therefore to verisimilitude. Nabokov expressed himself on this issue on two main occasions, first in the 1937 article he wrote in French in La Nouvelle Revue Française entitled “Pouchkine, ou le Vrai et le Vraisemblable ” [Pushkin, or the True and the Verisimilar] and secondly, during the 1962 BBC television interview conducted by Peter Duval-Smith and Christopher Burstall where he gave his definition of reality. In the Pushkin article Nabokov ponders on the process of biographical novels and considers that these inevitably deform the “real” story of a man and therefore only generate verisimilitude rather than truth, even though they might however contribute to the revelation of a certain truth, “the truth of art” (“la vérité de l’art”).13 As for the definition he gave of reality, he formulated it as follows: Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects – that machine, there, for instance. It’s a complete ghost to me.14

This passage is, I think, of the utmost importance as it provides evidence of Nabokov’s position on mimesis in his work, just as various writers in our literary history expounded theirs—whether it be realism, naturalism, surrealism, etc. His is a particular one as he does acknowledge reality—the reality of objects, a lily or a machine, for example—diverging thereby from a certain vision of reality as a mere simulacrum such as, for instance, the theory of virtuality advanced by Jean Baudrillard, even though Nabokov is actually well-known for his mastery in deceptive art. Deception is indeed different from virtuality and supposes the materiality of a reality. Yet this reality is, he says, “unattainable” since “you can never know everything about one thing” and since objects are “ghostly”, mere “ghosts.” To understand the particularity of this double nature of reality— there and absent at the same time—it is possible to resort to Derrida’s own philosophy of hauntology as expressed in his numerous writings on specters, such as in Spectres de Marx [Specters of Marx] (1993). Derrida

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refers to specters as Nabokov refers to ghosts to give account of the presence-absence of reality. It is indeed impossible for Derrida to preclude reality, and this contradicts those who had misunderstood his famous phrase “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (translated as “there is nothing outside the text” instead of “there is no out-text”), but this reality is “suspended.” Derrida declared indeed in the 1989 interview conducted by Derek Attridge: “There is no literature without a suspended relation to meaning and reference. Suspended means suspense, but also dependence, condition, conditionality.”15 It is in this suspension that it is therefore possible to understand the “unquenchable” nature of reality, for Nabokov. Reality is there, exists, consists, insists but is “unattainable.” This leads me back to the issue of politics and art. Even if Nabokov pretends he denies the importance of politics and economics, even if he asserts that he prefers his ivory tower, as the good literary person he was and wanted to be acknowledged as, he dealt with them twice in his work, with political problems such as totalitarianism in Bend Sinister and the death penalty in Invitation to a Beheading. He actually admits in the introduction to Bend Sinister that there are affinities between these two novels, all the more so as they are both, according to him, ‘farcical fantasies’. Why did he choose, each time, such genre? Critics had already referred to this aspect in the 1960’s when Malcom Bradbury wrote in Punch on April 20, 1960: “Bend Sinister is, in fact, a comedy about totalitarianism; hideous events are seen through the screen of farce.”16 As for Frank Kermode, he declared in Encounter in June 1960: “Nabokov’s genre is, in fact, tragic farce.”17 But it does not seem legitimate to reduce Bend Sinister to this generic characteristic since, just as Lolita can be considered as either a confession, or a memoir, or a self-defense, or a plea for a trial, or a detective story, or a travelogue, or a psychiatric case, or a fairytale or a work of art or even a love story, or all these genres, Bend Sinister is more than a mere farce. It is indeed at the same time possible, or perhaps even necessary and difficult, or perhaps even impossible, to classify genres and grant one specific genre to a work of art because, although there exists the necessity of a quest for a “pure” genre, according to Derrida, since one has to comply to “the law of a genre” (its conventions, its constraints, its rules), this purity is undermined by contamination, deformation, perversion, proliferation. This explains why, for Derrida, a text participates in a genre but does not belong to a particular genre. Any text participates in one or several genres, there is no text without a genre but the text only participates in genres.18 This is why Bend Sinister can also be seen as a dystopia (staging an imaginary totalitarian country), a political novel (raising the issue of politics versus art), a philosophical fable (narrating the thoughts of a

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philosopher), or a nightmare. Each of these genres is present and regenerated by the text but it is the farcical dimension of the text which is, I think, the most fruitful one. Nabokov is not the only one to have resorted to farce to give an account of the specificity of a totalitarian regime. Ernst Lubitsch’s film To Be or Not to Be had appeared in 1942, a couple of years before Nabokov started composing Bend Sinister. In both cases, Hamlet is at the core of the intertext and the Nazi regime is ridiculed. Later this regime was satirized in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb in 1964. Italian filmmaker Roberto Benigni staged concentration camps in La vita è bella [life is beautiful] in 1997 and also used comedy to criticize Nazism. And, of course, all those films are indebted to Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator which was made in 1940, at a time when Hitler was still alive. If all these artists used the device of farce, it may be because laughter is sometimes the only way to give an account of horror, because it would be barbaric to talk about horror if we did not keep the distance imposed by farce or if we did not express it in an allegorical manner. Using pathos would be obscene. And Nabokov chose this vein (satire and parody) to ridicule the automatons that Paduk and the soldiers were. The exaggeration characteristic of farce helps represent a certain unbearable reality by disparaging it and hence controlling it. Moreover this vein engenders a particular atmosphere in both Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, an atmosphere of nightmarish strangeness and uncanny unreality, of Unheimlichkeit mingling the intimacy of Krug’s family life and the absurdity of his final disquieting public predicament. These two novels might therefore correspond to a particular literary sensibility of Nabokov's, different from that of Lolita or Ada which would belong to what Maurice Couturier calls the poerotic mode.19 In his “political” novels, Nabokov has assumed his responsibility as regards the relationship of art towards politics. Again, as in Lolita, it is by rejecting mere social common responsibility, by refusing to submit to an ideological and instituted power, by assuming the freedom of his thought, that he provides evidence of a higher responsibility. He wished to denounce totalitarianism without being didactic, without offering mere propaganda and of course in a way completely opposed to socialist realism, where art is subservient to ideology and/or a political system. This is why he was far from the French doctrine of auteurs engagés [committed authors] such as Sartre. His political credo was simple and straightforward: freedom and democracy. During a 1963 interview conducted by Alvin Toffler for Playboy, he declared:

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Chapter Two The fact that since my youth— I was 19 when I left Russia—my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art; the social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions.20

Is he here indirectly and negatively alluding to the stone the protagonist Roquentin feels in his hand in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, which he had criticized on several occasions. Perhaps. However, he may only be insisting on the harsh permanence of the rock. He resumes his indifference here to economic and social issues but does not mention politics, perhaps recalling his debt to his father’s political commitment and paying his tribute to the political American system: democracy. Although Nabokov rarely expressed himself on his preferred political system, he did once voice it in Wellesley Magazine on April 1942, where he asserted the following: Democracy is humanity at its best, not because we happen to think that a republic is better than a king and a king is better than nothing and nothing is better than a dictator, but because it is the natural condition of every man ever since the human mind became conscious not only of the world but of itself. Morally, democracy is invincible. Physically, that side will win which has the better guns. Of faith and pride, both sides have plenty. That our faith and our pride are of a totally different order cannot concern an enemy who believes in shedding blood and is proud of its own.21

Whereas “democracy is humanity at its best” and “democracy is invincible” are two clearly forthright phrases which are not difficult to understand, the way he expresses himself in the next sentences is more nuanced and complex. It seems as though the quest for democracy was a military combat between two opposed enemies. Therefore, it is as if democracy was, for Nabokov, something to be pursued, to be fought for. Such a position is in a strange congruence with what Derrida was to assert years later when he mentioned the relationship between literature and democracy. During a 1989 interview with Derek Attridge, he declared: The institution of literature in the West, in its relatively modern form, is linked to an authorization to say everything, and doubtless too to the coming about of the modern idea of democracy. Not that it depends on a democracy in place, but it seems inseparable to me from what calls forth a democracy, in the most open (and doubtless itself to come) sense of democracy.22

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There is also an expression of a democracy to come, therefore to be pursued. But Derrida specifies later that it is “Not the democracy of tomorrow, not a future democracy which will be present tomorrow but one whose concept is linked to the to-come [à-venir, cf. avenir, future], to the experience of a promise engaged, that is always an endless promise.” (38) There Derrida also adds nuances between a democracy of tomorrow, that is a fixed and instituted one, and a democracy to-come, that is one which is in an endless process of becoming. The quest for democracy is consequently, of course, at variance with the establishment of a totalitarian regime and this may explain why Nabokov felt the necessity in Bend Sinister to denounce this system by staging and fashioning what he called his “sinistral” world. But Nabokov also mentioned the existence of a “sinister” world alluded to in the title of the novel through the expression “bend sinister” which is noticeable by the presence not only of the term “sinister” but also of the word “bend” which we will analyze later with the help of the author's comments. Subsequently I now intend to develop this notion of a “sinister” world.

A Sinister World In the introduction, Nabokov affirms: “The term ‘bend sinister’ means a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy).” (5) Foster reminds us that he had first called the novel “The Person from Porlock”23 then “Game to Gunm” (after Volume X of the Encyclopedia Britannica), and finally “Solux Rex” before he settled on the current title.24 Why did Nabokov choose such an enigmatic title? Why did he resort to heraldry? What is the meaning of the allusion to the left? Some theoretical background may assist us here. It is not surprising that those who wrote on the use and functions of prefaces also dealt with the purposes of paratexts such as titles and they are Gérard Genette and Jacques Derrida. According to Genette, there are two types of titles, those which focus on the contents and those which allude to the form. A title is meant to identify, designate as well as describe but its function is chiefly hermeneutic.25 This role is highly problematic in the case of “bend sinister” as the expression does not induce a clear, easy and straightforward meaning. It is, on the contrary, a disturbing title which stands in an oblique relationship to the text; it seems as if it was floating on the text, set on its side, crossing it, going through it, as if it was suspended. It is Derrida who asserts this idea of the title being always suspended as it offers meaning but at the same time keeps it in reserve.26 The reserve of meaning here is not negligible and it is

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thanks to French historian Michel Pastoureau that I learned that the expression refers to the habit in the Middle Ages to “bend” (in French “briser”, hence the French title of the novel “Brisure à Senestre”) the bar of the coat of arms for younger members of a family. Only the oldest son could wear a “full” coat of arms (not bent). This rule permitted the recognition of the situation of an individual within his family but it was often felt by those who had to comply to it as degrading.27 So Nabokov is right when he specifies that the bending of the bar is not a sign of bastardy. Yet he indirectly emphasizes the question of filiation and deviation from rule. In the novel, there are Father/Son relationships as Krug is David’s father and Paduk’s spiritual father. Krug is confronted by the ironic reversal of Abraham’s sacrifice as his son dies by accident and because of Paduk. Moreover, the father/son relationship between Krug and David recalls the relation between Hamlet and his father in the oftenquoted and analyzed Shakespeare’s play and in the novel all the more so as the allusion to the left side movement of the heraldic bar is reminiscent of Hamlet’s lines saying: “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right” (I-5-189-190) As “right” is not only opposed to “left” but also to “wrong”, this leads to the presence of ethics in the novel since the mention of a bending to the left evokes the vision of a chaotic world, of “a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world” (5) as Nabokov indeed specifies that “This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world.” (5) What characterizes this “sinister” world, is that the figure of a broken outline, the figure of a bend, and this term “bend” is associated with the curved part of a stream, a lake or a coastline. The outline is, Nabokov says, broken by refraction and “refraction” is, according to the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary: “the deflection from a straight path undergone by a light ray or wave of energy in passing obliquely from one medium (as air) into another (as water or glass).” What seemed to have appealed to Nabokov is the idea of a detour, a swerve, the oblique deviation from the straight line of action, from the norm, a deformation, a distortion, a twist. This broken line recalls concepts that have haunted the history of philosophy. “Deformation”, for example, is reminiscent of Plato’s cave where prisoners only see deformed shadows of reality. Whereas Plato considered that such shadows were far from the truth and the world of pure ideas, modern philosophers, such as Gilles Deleuze for instance, in the wake of breakthrough philosophers such as Nietzsche undermined the negative vision of Plato’s concept of the simulacrum. For

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Deleuze, the simulacrum is to be rehabilitated because it is transformed and deformed with the observer’s point of view, because it is in keeping with modern times and a creative chaos.28 This evokes Nabokov’s deceptive art and its dazzling and virtuosic style which plays more on the brilliant surface than on an illusory depth, reaching paradoxically a more adequate truth. The line broken by refraction is also in keeping with the classical notion of clinamen which is defined by French philosopher Christian Godin, as the slight deviation from the straight line of atoms in the course of their fall in the void and as an origin of freedom.29 As for Derrida, he was to allude to the clinamen to highlight the issue of chance in nature which entails surprise, the unpredictable and the arrival of the event, as opposed to the determinism of fate and necessity.30 In Bend Sinister, the disruption appears suddenly when, as Nabokov recalls it in the introduction, the author “experiences a pang of pity for his creature and hastens to take over” (11) by granting Krug madness. But the broken line also refers to the notion of the fold, of folding and unfolding as expounded by Gilles Deleuze. For him, the fold recalls the curve and the inclination, folding and unfolding does not only mean stretching and loosening, but also implies the act of enveloping and developing, the double movement of involution and evolution and eventually the constant presence of a detour.31 The fold induces a certain vision of the world and of reality evoking a baroque one.32 Curves and what Nabokov calls the “distortion in the mirror of being” (5) are representative therefore of a sinistral and sinister world whose illusions and dreams induce metamorphoses and anamorphoses characteristic of a monstrous world.

A Monstrous World The notion of monstrosity appears in the introduction when Nabokov declares that he had to resort to a language characterized by monstrosity, deformation and hybridization. He writes: “Paronomasia is a kind of verbal plague, a contagious sickness in the world of words; no wonder they are monstrously and ineptly distorted in Padukgrad, where everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else.” (8) Nabokov had mentioned a bit earlier the “wrong turn taken by life” (5) and he had also once claimed in the letter he addressed to Doubleday’s editor, Donald B. Elder on March 22, 1944: I propose to portray in this book certain subtle achievements of the mind in modern times against a dull-red background of nightmare oppression and persecution. The scholar, the poet, the scientist and the child – these are the

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It may seem strange that Nabokov who is so well-known for his stylistic exuberance and his frequent play on words considers paronomasia as a “sickness,” “a kind of verbal plague” rather than a fruitful play. What Nabokov may be implying is that there is a sort of manipulation of language which is a failure. Playing on words should be a source of cerebral pleasure, should serve meaning and not annihilate it with a propensity to resemblance as in paronomasia, ending in mere inefficient and unsuccessful gratuitousness. Such use of language may be for the author a way to give account of the reality of “a world that goes wrong” or even the only way to testify, to be the witness to a monstrous world. We should not forget that Bend Sinister was composed in 1945-1946, just after the Second World War and the discovery of the holocaust, which, as the absolute event of History [“événement absolu de l’histoire”34], necessitates, according to Maurice Blanchot, a certain writing, “the writing of disaster,” that is a writing which may testify to the horror and the ultimate limit of what cannot be accepted. Even if art may seem at first sight, “an insult to calamity” [“une insulte au Malheur”35], it is nevertheless indispensable because testimony is necessary. Literature is paradoxically what permits testimony, according to Derrida who claims that there is no testimony without the possibility of fiction, of dissimulation, of lying and so therefore of literature, and if testimony were mere proof, information, certainty, or archive, it would lose its function.36 So Bend Sinister should be considered as a work testifying to historical times. But paronomasia is not the only device used to give an account of a world which goes wrong. Other games on language are present in the text, as Nabokov states: The book teems with stylistic distortions, such as puns crossed with anagrams (in Chapter Two, the Russian circumference, krug, turns into a Teutonic cucumber, gurk, with an additional allusion to Krug’s reversing his journey across the bridge); suggestive neologisms (the amorandola – a local guitar); parodies of narrative clichés (‘who had overheard the last words’ and ‘who seemed to be the leader of the group,’ Chapter Two); spoonerisms (‘silence’ and ‘science’ playing leapfrog in Chapter Seventeen); and of course the hybridization of tongues. (8-9)

It seems that Nabokov wants to oppose this language constituted of puns (wordplay), anagrams (words or phrases made by changing the order of the letters in another word or phrase), neologisms (newly coined words),

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parodies of clichés (ridiculing imitations of phrases) and spoonerisms (transpositions of the initial sounds of two words) to the language of propaganda used by the government of the dictator and which appears as follows: Dear Citizen, according to Article 521 of our Constitution the following four freedoms are to be enjoyed by the nation: 1. freedom of speech, 2. freedom of the press, 3. freedom of meetings, and 4. freedom of processions. These freedoms are guaranteed by placing at the disposal of the people efficient printing machines, adequate supplies of paper, wellaerated halls and broad streets. What should one understand by the first two freedoms? For a citizen of our State a newspaper is a collective organizer whose business is to prepare its reader for the accomplishment of various assignments allotted to them. Whereas in other countries newspapers are purely business ventures, firms that sell their printed wares to the public (and therefore do their best to attract the public by means of lurid headlines and naughty stories), the main object of our press is to supply such information as would give every citizen a clear perception of the knotty problems presented by civic and international affairs; consequently, they guide the activities and the emotions of their readers in the necessary direction.37 .

This long extract shows how Nabokov must have, first of all, done some specific reading or research for the novel, but it also illustrates his parody of a certain judicial, journalistic or political language which he clearly criticizes and opposes to literary discourse. Through this juxtaposition and antagonism, he manages to disparage a certain leveling collective ideology at variance with an apology for difference, singularity and individualism. It seems that, on the one hand, Nabokov praises language play as it diverges from a certain propagandist discourse but, on the other hand, criticizes it when it is destructive and useless, when it is the mark of a mere monstrous and abject world. Language play can therefore be at the same time positive thanks to its subversive powers and its demystification of reality but it can also be negative. The example Nabokov gives in the introduction of the Krug/Gurk anagram is interesting because it corresponds to a blending of two languages and is reminiscent of the blending of the two languages (English and German) present in the phrase “He War” that Derrida highlights in his study on James Joyce who is also well-known for his wordplay.38 Blending can be consequently both negative or positive, and so is the hybridization of tongues in such a Babel world where “the language of the country […] is a mongrel blend of Slavic and Germanic with a strong strain of ancient Kuranian running through it.” (9)

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When Nabokov mentions the “mongrel blend,” the “verbal plague,” the “contagious sickness in the world of words,” he paradoxically goes against the grain of a contemporary consensual politically correct doxa pleading for hybridization. Yet it seems highly unlikely that Nabokov would advocate ethnic purity in the vein of Nazi ideology. To better clarify what appears a paradox where impurity is criticized but praised at the same time, we can turn first to Jean-Luc Nancy who problematized this issue in the chapter entitled “Éloge de la mêlée”39 [praising blending] in Être singulier pluriel [singular plural being] and then to Derrida’s analysis of the Platonist concept of the pharmakon in “La pharmacie de Platon”40 [Plato’s pharmacy] in La Dissémination [Dissemination]. Nancy warns against a simplistic praise of blending as well as a simplistic praise of purity which has engendered political crimes. It is a well-known fact, he says, that blending is pursued but it should never be considered as an essence because it would lose its multifarious identities. Blending is an event rather than a fixed entity. There is no pure blending as there is no intact purity. This, according to Nancy, is in keeping with the particularities of language which is always a blending of languages, something between total Babel confusion and immediate transparency. That is why blending in the dystopian world of Bend Sinister should be at the same time, pursued and rejected. Such a contradiction can be clarified by Derrida who has detected in Plato’s Phaedrus the use of a term, pharmakon, to qualify the act of writing which is, as a drug, at the same time a remedy and a poison. So blending is a poison when it brings about a monstrous world, such as the sinistral/sinister one of Bend Sinister with its transgression of nature. Shakespeare’s work, as the main intertext of Bend Sinister, may help us to understand the presence of this monstrosity. It is indeed Shakespeare who, in The Tempest, pinpointed this issue when Trinculo says: What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of, not of the newest, Poor-John. A strange fish! Were I in England now (as once I was), and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver: there would this monster be a man: any strange beast there makes a man. (II-2-24-30) A monster, Michel Foucault was to explain in the courses he gave in 19741975, is a mixture of two categories—animal and human—or two species, two individuals, two sexes. It is what transgresses natural or social law.41 The world of Bend Sinister is a monstrous one because it transgresses the

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laws of nature represented by Krug and his son David so that its monstrosity is an insult to man. It is again Shakespeare who is alluded to in the novel with the name of the dictator “Paduk” echoing the “paddock”—that is the toad—mentioned at the beginning of Macbeth. But Paduk, the one who should have represented the monster, is too ridiculous to be taken seriously. Likewise, the phantasm of purity sought by totalitarian regimes is disparaged by the stupidity of the soldiers. So Nabokov has denounced totalitarianism by staging a monstrous world not only through the literary devices of satire, parody and farce but also thanks to linguistic deformations, such as distorted intertexts or problematic translations. Thus Nabokov mentions the following in the introduction: Ember, for instance, in Chapter Seven, gives his friend a sample of the three first lines of Hamlet’s soliloquy (Act III, Scene I) translated into the vernacular (with a pseudo-scholarly interpretation of the first phrase taken to refer to the contemplated killing of Claudius, i.e. , ‘is the murder to be or not to be?’). He follows this up with a Russian version of part of the Queen’s speech in Act IV, Scene VII (almost without a built-in scholium) and a splendid Russian rendering of the prose passage in Act III, Scene II, beginning, ‘Would not this, Sir, and a forest of feathers . . .’ (9)

Aside from his passion for Shakespeare, we can note here Nabokov’s will and the self-consciousness of his resort to deliberately inconspicuous intertextualities which have generated so many scholarly annotations. But in the example quoted by Nabokov, it is the manipulation, the transformation of the Shakespearian text that is brought into relief. For the Frenchwoman that I am, to read Hamlet’s first line of his soliloquy (“To be or not to be”) translated in French as “L’égorgerai-je ou non?” does appear as a sacrilege which must have been deliberate by Nabokov, who, in his answer to Edmund Wilson’s letter about Bend Sinister, had specified that “The point of L’égorgerai-je ou non (To be or not to be) [was], of course, the well-known hypothesis that what Hamlet meant by the first words of his soliloquy was: ‘Is my killing of the king to be or not to be?’”42 Nabokov must have been well aware that he was raising the tricky issue of translation, as he commented on the previous example he had given in the introduction: Problems of translation, fluid transitions from one tongue to another, semantic transparencies yielding layers of receding or welling sense are as characteristic of Sinisterbad as are the monetary problems of more habitual tyrannies.

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The problem of translation was not unfamiliar to Nabokov who translated numerous works and wrote extensively on it. Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour reminds us that he translated Mayne Reid’s The Headless Horseman into French alexandrines at 11, that he translated into Russian Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Rupert Brooke, Seamus O’Sullivan, Verlaine, Supervielle, Tennyson, Yeats, Byron, Keats, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Rimbaud and Musset.43 He also translated into Russian his own Lolita and Speak, Memory. But his greatest enterprise was the translation into English of Eugene Onegin in 1964. He expressed himself on translation in several different ways, with a professorial tone in the preface to his translation of Eugene Onegin,44 in a poem,45 in an essay,46 but also in Bend Sinister. In the seventh chapter of the novel, Krug’s reaction at Ember’s translation of Hamlet is described as follows: And Krug marveled at the strangeness of the day. He listened to the richtoned voice (Ember’s father had been a Persian merchant) and tried to simplify the terms of his reaction. Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words; a man who had only to breathe on any particle of his stupendous vocabulary to have that particle live and expand and throw out tremulous tentacles until it became a complex image with a pulsing brain and correlated limbs. Three centuries later, another man, in another country, was trying to render these rhythms and metaphors in a different tongue. This process entailed a prodigious amount of labour, for the necessity of which no real reason could be given. It was as if someone, having seen a certain oak tree (further called Individual T) growing in a certain land and casting its own unique shadow on the green and brown ground, had proceeded to erect in his garden a prodigiously intricate piece of machinery which in itself was as unlike that or any other tree as the translator’s inspiration and language were unlike those of the original author, but which, by means of ingenious combinations of parts, light effects, breeze-engendering engines, would, when completed, cast a shadow exactly similar to that of Individual T—the same outline, changing in the same manner, with the same double and single spots of suns rippling in the same position, at the same hour of the day. (107)

As we have seen earlier, Nabokov has written extensively on translation but here is a passage which is his most original and profound. He describes translation in a story—a man trying to render the genius of a writing in another tongue—and chiefly in a metaphor—that of a shadow. It is the story of two men (or we might personally add, two women)—the author and the translator who are at odds with a certain text. Translating resembles—he specifies “resembles” and not “corresponds,” as there exists the translator’s inspiration— the process of a machine which would

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be able, through various devices, such as light effects, to create a shadow of a tree similar to that of the original tree. We remember that, in the last line of the poem dedicated to Pushkin, he had qualified his task as “the shadow” of his monument. So although Nabokov raises here the issue of the original and the copy, recalling thereby our reflections on mimesis, he insists on the effect of a text rather than its mere object. Moreover, translation is, for him, necessary but not impossible, as the translator, in a complete submission to the author manages to render, not the object, but its shadow, the same shadow, not the same object. But as the shadow entertains a particular rapport of similarity and difference with the object, the translation of a text also becomes similar and different, endlessly performing and regenerating the difference present within language. The attempt to reach a pure language, devoid of any impurity, is doomed to failure. Translating resembles the lifting of a veil which reveals what is hidden, opaque and, as Nabokov explains in the introduction, yields “layers of receding or welling sense” (9) which are “characteristic of Sinisterbad” not in the sense that a tyranny supports translating activities but has to be confronted to their resistance and subversion because language contains the lively power of regeneration of “scholars, poets, scientists and children” as we remember how Nabokov indeed declared in 1944: I propose to portray in this book certain subtle achievements of the mind in modern times against a dull-red background of nightmare oppression and persecution. The scholar, the poet, the scientist and the child—these are the victims and witnesses of a world that goes wrong in spite of its being graced with scholars, poets, scientists and children.47

So in order to conclude this first part dealing with the way Nabokov was led to confront reality—of the world, of politics, of evil—there is no doubt that he advocated a certain humanist vision as he promoted the action of science, poetry, knowledge and the wonder and grace of childhood. When faced with the horror of torture and deprivation of liberty, he did not resign himself to a pessimistic attitude but remained, so it seems, confident in man’s possibilities. And it is in the protagonist Krug that Nabokov represented his vision of man. This is the reason why I now intend to analyze the relationship the author entertains with his characters.

The Author Facing his Characters The issue of characterization should not be regarded as a minor one even though it has been attacked and disparaged during the structuralist period,

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as characters were no longer considered as “real” persons but merely qualified as paper-beings. The topic has indeed more recently regained importance since “Characters are the life of literature: they are the objects of our curiosity and fascination, affection and dislike, admiration and condemnation.”48 In Bend Sinister, it is Krug, the main character who attracts our attention.

Krug, the Protagonist Adam Krug is, in the novel, a famous philosopher in a small European country that has experienced a revolution installing as a dictator one Paduk, his former schoolmate. Krug refuses to give support the regime and, whereas Paduk generates antipathy in the reader, Krug engenders sympathy in the reader and in the author all the more so as he is not only endowed with a first name echoing the biblical Adam, and thereby the created character of an author, but is also at the core of the three main thematic networks of the novel, that is, first love and friendship, then madness, and finally death. Nabokov indeed surprisingly declares in the introduction: “The main theme of Bend Sinister, then, is the beating of Krug’s loving heart, the torture an intense tenderness is subjected to—and it is for the sake of the pages about David and his father that the book was written and should be read.” (7) It seems, at first sight, perplexing that Nabokov highlights the intimate affective bond between a father and his son in a book dealing mainly with the public dimension of politics. Yet he had previously mentioned in the introduction that it is exactly thanks to “the lever of love” that Paduk’s regime succeeds in imposing its law and breaking all resistance. He writes that it is only when Paduk’s police state realizes that they have wasted their time when persecuting Krug’s friends and that it is “by grabbing his [Krug’s] little child one would force him to do whatever one wished” (7). Now both the friendship embodied in the relationship between Krug and Ember49 and the love Krug feels for his son do appear central in the novel as weapons of submission. Whereas friendship is described through erudite discussions and conversations on politics or literature, notably in Chapter 7, love is represented in a more oblique way, first in the presence of images—the puddle seen through the windows of a hospital, a mirror—in the case of Krug’s love for his dying wife, then in the delineation of the very simple everyday life led by Krug and his son. Maurice Couturier has dealt with the issue of love in his 2004 book on desire entitled Nabokov ou la Cruauté du désir. Lecture psychanalytique.50 [Nabokov or the cruelty of

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desire. A psychoanalytical reading] He pinpointed two novels: Lolita and Ada. He considers that Humbert’s desire ends in a demand for love and that Ada and Van’s love is an authentic, intense and lasting one which ends in the creation of a book. He also mentions The Gift which, according to him, narrates the story of a sublimation through the gift of writing. I, for my part, addressed the issue of love in a paper entitled “Loving and giving in Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift” which I read at the “Nabokov and Morality” Symposium held at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow on May 5 and 6, 2011. For me, beyond the love story between Fyodor and Zina which confirms, in a certain sense, Maurice Blanchot’s notion of a fundamental dissymmetry and thereby incompleteness of a loving couple,51 Nabokov chooses to expatiate on love triangles, such as the vicious one incarnated in Yasha, Rudolf and Olya and the virtuous one embodied in Fyodor and his parents which echoes the love triangle of Nabokov himself and his parents which he describes at length in Speak Memory. It is, indeed, filial love—the love for and of one’s parents—that seems central in the novel and the autobiography which ends with Nabokov’s family’s departure to the United States. We must not forget that it was not only for his wife or for himself that he emigrated in 1940 but also for his son Dmitri. In Bend Sinister, the love Krug feels for his son has the characteristics of a pharmakon, being both a joy, a bliss and a pain, chiefly when the son is taken from him. His love is an infinite, absolute, unconditional one, resembling that of Abraham for God since, as Jacques Derrida explains in Donner la mort52 [the gift of death], the sacrifice of Abraham—who agrees to kill his favourite son, Isaac—is evidence of a love which is an absolute gift, beyond exchange, debt or duty. There is also a story of sacrifice in Bend Sinister as Krug complies with Paduk when his son is imprisoned but it is a reversed sacrifice since the child dies by accident. David’s death then leads to Krug’s madness. The author decides, at the end of the novel, and in the last chapter, to grant his character Krug madness for him to be able to endure his pain. He writes: It was at that moment, just after Krug had fallen through the bottom of a confused dream and sat up on the straw with a gasp–and just before his reality, his remembered hideous misfortune could pounce upon him–it was then that I felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid towards him along an inclined beam of pale light–causing instantaneous madness, but at least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical fate. (193-194)

The passage does raise the issue of the particular attitude the author shows towards his character as he uses the first personal pronoun “I” and says “I

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felt a pang of pity” as if the character induced emotions like a real person and this strange experience is to be analyzed later by Nabokov in the introduction. But it might be of interest to examine first how Nabokov represents madness in the novel. Madness is experienced by Krug as a relief and his sudden smile expresses his indifference towards pain. Nabokov indeed writes: “With a smile of infinite relief on his tear-stained face, Krug lay back on the straw. In the limpid darkness he lay, amazed and happy, and listened to the usual sounds peculiar to prisons” (194). Madness corresponds to a leap into another world, a world of silence53 and lightness as if the insane’s body had lost its weightiness. Madness does appear as a sensitive and thought-provoking issue for Nabokov who delineated numerous cases of deviant behavior in his works, such as Kinbote’s paranoia, Luzhin’s obsession, or Humbert’s perversion and who, in the introduction to Bend Sinister, takes it up again and brings it out when he writes: Two other themes accompany the main one: the theme of dim-brained brutality which thwarts its main purpose by destroying the right child and keeping the wrong one; and the theme of Krug’s blessed madness when he suddenly perceives the simple reality of things and knows but cannot express in the words of his world that he and his son and wife and everybody else are merely my whims and megrims. (7)

Nabokov describes here the experience of madness in a very original and personal way as he does not take an exterior point of view but the interior one of Krug who, he says, “perceives the simple reality of things and knows but cannot express in the words of his world.” Nabokov’s method goes beyond the classical two-world paradigm staging the world of reality as opposed to the world of fiction created by language. Don Barton Johnson was right when he wrote in 1983: The theme of an omniscient author-narrator entering the world of his fictional characters is uncommon but not unheard-of. Nabokov makes Hitchcock-like walk-on appearances in many of his novels. In the case of Bend Sinister, however, there is an inversion of this theme for the focus is rather upon the fictive character’s apperception of and penetration into the world of his creator. The violation of the conventions of fiction is much more massive and infinitely more rare. Nabokov, apparently, saw this inversion as central to his conception of the novel, for on January 18, 1944, he wrote to Edmund Wilson saying that “Towards the end of the book […] there will be the looming and development of an idea which had never been treated before.” The fictional hero enters the world of his maker.54

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I have quoted the whole passage because Johnson had the intuition of an idea that I now wish to develop. Nabokov indeed gives an account of a situation where there is a mise-en-abyme not of merely a fictive world within a real world but of a second fictive world within the first fictive world and this second fictive world corresponds to the real world. Madness which is usually considered as the irruption of fiction in reality becomes here the irruption of reality in fiction. The character becomes aware of his own fictive nature, of his being an illusion, a mirage. Krug crosses the frame which draws the limits of the territory of fiction and encroaches on the world of reality. The inversion has the effect that it is no longer the author who thinks the character but the character who thinks the author and who has the intuition, the intimation not merely of a beyond but of an outside which is the impossible, the unthinkable. The character who has become insane knows but cannot express in the words of his world that he is the whim of his author and experiences the metaphysical vertigo that Nabokov tried to express when he answered the question he was asked as to whether he believed in God: “I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I known more.”55 There is therefore a gap between what is known and what is expressed which corresponds to the silence of what cannot be expressed, the ineffable je-ne-sais-quoi which is not related to another world but to a world elsewhere. The reality the insane character experiences is a plunging down as well as one of receding, echoing the description of reality that Nabokov gave in a 1962 interview at the BBC where he declared: “You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable.”56 The image of the “false bottoms” generates the idea of a bottomless bottom at the origin of the dizzy unbalance of this experience of reality which is associated in the novel with madness which, being the hyperbolic movement of desire, borders on death. What Nabokov says about death in the introduction is attention-grabbing as he declares that it “is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution” (11). Death is therefore for him reduced to a trick used in the unfolding of the plot and it is true that death is instrumental in the progress of the narrative of the novel. It is situated at the beginning—with the disappearance of Krug’s wife, Olga—and at the end—with the death of Krug’s son, David. But it is not only a literary device as it corresponds to a constant presence in the novel with the uncanny effect it generates. Olga, for example, in spite of being dead, is constantly present in the novel through her very absence, like a ghost haunting Krug’s life. What’s more,

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Nabokov insists not so much on death but rather on the very movement of dying as is evidenced in the case of Olga. Nabokov has thus managed to create a profound character in the case of Krug because he is the center of consciousness where love, madness and death join. But what about the other characters?

The Other Characters Nabokov declares in the introduction: My characters are not ‘types,’ not carriers of this or that ‘idea.’ Paduk, the abject dictator and Krug’s former schoolmate (regularly tormented by the boys, regularly caressed by the school janitor); Doctor Alexander, the government’s agent; the ineffable Hustav; icy Crystalsen and hapless Kolokololiteïshchikov: the three Bachofen sisters; the farcical policeman Mac; the brutal and imbecile soldiers–all of them are only absurd mirages, illusions oppressive to Krug during his brief spell of being, but harmlessly fading away when I dismiss the cast. (7)

By specifying that his characters are “not” types, “not” carriers of an idea, Nabokov goes against a certain classical and traditional vision of the character with its ideological conception of an essentialist individual and the consideration that the character is the equivalent of a human person. According to this position, the success of characterization is linked to its life-likeness and the critic who best theorized this idea was, of course, E.M. Forster who, in his 1927 Aspects of the Novel, distinguished between “flat” and “round” characters. It seems as if Nabokov had read Forster as he repeats almost exactly the expressions the latter used when he wrote the following: Flat characters were called “humours” in the seventeenth century, and are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures. In their purest forms, they are constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one factor in them, we get the beginning of the curve towards the round.57

Nabokov refuses to see his characters reduced to a mere literary category although it is paradoxically undeniable that there does exist a difference between the “richness” and “complexity” of a Krug and the lack of salience of the secondary characters that Nabokov himself lists and thereby highlights in his statement. Those are indeed what Forster called “flat” characters and even Nabokov himself affixes one single attribute to them when he mentions, for example, “icy Crystalsen and hapless Kolokololiteïshchikov” or “the farcical policeman Mac.” Here again

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Nabokov’s duplicity is in evidence as he at the same time denies something and endorses it as if he constantly wanted to draw red herrings. However that may be, what he emphasizes is the fact that his characters are mere “mirages” or “illusions” or, in other terms, not real persons. Yet even if they are not real, they are nevertheless not mere “paper-beings”, “dead” because Nabokov specifies that they are “harmlessly fading away when [he (Nabokov)] dismiss[es] the cast.” They may be, indeed, artificial constructions as Jonathan Culler considered in his 1975 Structuralist Poetics58 but are also, according to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, person-like.59 The nature of characters is indeed a strange one for Nabokov, as they are neither real, nor merely life-like, but only human-like toys the author, pulling the strings, plays with like a stage-director leading his actors (he says that he dismisses the “cast”) but such actors are disembodied and fade away as if the author dispossessed them of their power to say “I”, this “I” that only the author reserves himself the right to say when he declares “I dismiss the cast.” So Nabokov does seem to end, as regards his characters, like the master of the game and it is not surprising that he declared that they were “his galley slaves.”60 Yet, the image he evokes when he uses the expression “fading away” could well be paradoxically exploited for himself as an author and this shall be the point of my argument in the following part of this chapter. Having tried to study how Nabokov as an author faces reality and how he faces his characters, I would like to explore his attitude towards his own text.

The Author and his Text Before dealing with the way Nabokov views his own text, it might be helpful to see how he regards himself as an author.

The Author as a Deity Nabokov expresses this idea in the last paragraph of the introduction, thereby granting it maximum importance. He writes: Thus, in the second paragraph of Chapter Five comes the first intimation that “someone is in the know” – a mysterious intruder who takes advantage of Krug’s dream to convey his own peculiar code message. The intruder is not the Viennese Quack (all my books should be stamped Freudians, Keep Out), but an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me. In the last chapter of the book this deity experiences a pang of pity for his creature and hastens to take over. (11)

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Nabokov here resorts to the conventional idea of an Author-God who creates worlds and characters as if he were God. He was to repeat this notion the following year during an interview in which he declared: “A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world.”61 He therefore compares himself to God who literally infuses life into his creatures, animates them. But just as his characters were not real persons but person-like, he is not a real deity but an anthropomorphic one, a human god, as it is a deity impersonated by him. It is noticeable that Nabokov uses here again the same word as in Lolita’s postscript, that is “impersonation,” conveying the message that he plays the part of a deity, embodying it, borrowing his identity, being thereby not a real god but god-like with the implied resemblance and differences. But as he plays a role, he becomes fictionalized, blurring the opposition between fiction and reality. He inverses Krug’s gesture who encroached on the frame which separated fiction and reality by encroaching on the frame which separates reality from fiction. He also resembles a ghost, being neither completely real nor completely fictive, something like a constructed intuition of something. I would like to insist on the word “intuition” as Nabokov indeed gives account of some strange experience, one which is not clearly conceived but resembles a pre-verbal feeling as he uses the word “intimation” (recalling Wordsworth’s “intimations of immortality”) when he says that “in the second paragraph of Chapter Five comes the first intimation that ‘someone is in the know’.” Just as the character was granted a singular nature, the author is also characterized by its strangeness. But how does Nabokov envisage his text when he rereads it?

The Author Confronting his Text When he rereads his novel, Nabokov gives the impression that he embarks on a reverie. He considers that its structure is based neither on the events of the narrative nor on the characters but on the recurrence of certain images. He writes in the foreword: The plot starts to breed in the bright broth of a rain puddle.62 The puddle is observed by Krug from a window of the hospital where his wife is dying. The oblong pool, shaped like a cell that is about to divide, reappears subthematically throughout the novel, as an ink blot in Chapter Four, an inkstain in Chapter Five, spilled milk in Chapter Eleven, the infusiora-like image of ciliated thought in Chapter Twelve, the footprint of a

phosphorescent islander in Chapter Eighteen, and the imprint a soul

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leaves in the intimate texture of space in the closing paragraph. The puddle thus kindled and rekindled in Krug’s mind remains linked up with the image of his wife not only because he had contemplated the inset sunset from her deathbedside, but also because this little puddle vaguely evokes in him my link with him: “a rent in his world leading to another world of tenderness, brightness and beauty” (8).

The starting image is therefore that of a puddle, which appears in the very first sentence as follows: “An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky.” (13) It reappears in Chapter Four as “a fancy footprint or the spatulate outline of a puddle” (54), as “an hourglass-shaped blot”(66) in the same chapter (and not in Chapter Five, as Nabokov says), as “a kidney-shaped white puddle” (128) in Chapter Eleven, as “a vague shoe-shaped outline” (135) in Chapter Twelve, as “the footprint of some phosphorescent islander” (193) in Chapter Eighteen, and finally as “an oblong puddle” (200) in the closing paragraph. I have quoted all these examples at length because they give evidence of the way Nabokov proceeds not only in writing but also in reading. It is by recalling a word (“puddle”, “fancy footprint”) or a form (“hourglass-shaped”, kidney-shaped”, shoe-shaped) that he manages to create a mental image in the reader’s mind. His method is one of repetition and recall generating a memory of the text where the intratext resembles a pictorial inlay, a musical refrain, a subterranean rhythm and, rather than a sign, it is a trace which reveals the haunting presence of an image. The image appears and disappears, like an eclipse coming and going as well as stirring the reader’s subconscious and leaving a mnestic remnant, playing on the pleasure generated from the constant coming back of the Fort/Da of the couple appearance/disappearance. The image works on the text in a subterranean way in its depth and reemerges at its surface generating opacity in meaning and narrative discontinuities. But the effect of this process not only affects the reader but Krug himself as the image is the medium through which his mind is represented. The image is viewed before a concept is apprehended; it is indeed pre-verbal, linked to the Imaginary rather than the Symbolic; it is the thread at the origin of Krug’s memory (chiefly of his wife’s death) and it also links (as in his fits of madness) Krug with the author, with the intuition of an Outside. Although Nabokov does not mention it explicitly, it is noteworthy to indicate that the image of the puddle appears at the very beginning of the novel and at its very end, forming the arc of a circle and as it is first seen by Krug and then by the author, this emphasizes the particular link between the protagonist and the author (as referred to by Nabokov in the introduction)

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making Krug (whose name means “circle”) a singular double of his author, a son rather than a mere alter ego. The other image Nabokov highlights in the introduction is even more telling and is that of Krug’s wife Olga when she “divests herself of herself.” He writes: And a companion image even more eloquently speaking of Olga is the vision of her divesting herself of herself, of her jewels, of the necklace and tiara of earthly life, in front of a brilliant mirror. It is this picture that appears six times in the course of a dream, among the liquid, dreamrefracted memories of Krug’s boyhood (Chapter Five). (8)

It is indeed, in the text, during a dream that Krug sees this image—of Olga “sitting before her mirror and taking off her jewels after the ball” (76)— which superimposes that of his memory. Memory-images and dreamimages63 mingle as the dreamer participates in the scene with his emotions, such as pity and shame—Nabokov writes: “his pity and shame reached their climax” (76)—or with his half-intuitions—“Then he knew that all the rest would come off too.” (76) The dream-image is described before the reader knows that it is a dream and becomes aware of its ensuing uncanny effect. This method gives the text its surrealist dimension associated with the reverie Nabokov indulges in when he rereads his text, picking up some details here and there, as if it were at random, but in reality following a meaningful thread, that of his own oblique and drifting selections. He does indeed choose in the introduction to highlight certain intertextual allusions but states the following: It may be asked if it is really worth an author’s while to devise and distribute these delicate markers whose very nature requires that they be not too conspicuous. Who will bother to notice that Pankrat Tzikutin, the shabby old poroystic (Chapter Thirteen) is Socrates Hemlocker; that “the child is bold” in the allusion to immigration (Chapter Eighteen) is a stock phrase used to test a would-be American citizen’s reading ability […]; and that the last word of the book is not a misprint (as assumed in the past by at least one proof-reader)? Most people will not even mind having missed all this; well-wishers will bring their own symbols and mobiles, and portable radios, to my little party; ironists will point out the fatuity of my explications in this foreword and advise me to have footnotes next time (footnotes always seem comic to a certain type of mind).(10-11)

It seems as if the author is again playing hide-and-seek with the reader as he plants enigmas in his text and suggests half-solutions which are as cryptic as the enigmas themselves. The reader has to find out what is hidden, dissimulated and we all know the success in scholarship of this vertiginous quest of the endless deciphering of intertextualities which

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grant the Nabokovian text its opacity and haunting resistance. Annotations and explications will never end with Nabokovian texts and the experience of their reading is very particular —resembling nevertheless that of many other writers, such as Joyce, for example—in that we always have the impression that something is missing in our understanding. The “delicate markers” act as schibboleth64 and distinguish those who have noticed and deciphered the allusion from those who have missed it. The effect of these “markers” is that the text becomes a fabric, a network of references resembling a spider’s web where the author is situated at the center but also outside, at the periphery, leaving the text to develop and extend by itself. The text indeed seems to grow into something alive, to be animated. Nabokov prolongs the previous quotation by declaring: In the long run, however, it is only the author’s private satisfaction that counts. I reread my books rarely, and then only for the utilitarian purpose of controlling a translation or checking a new edition; but when I do go through them again, what pleases me most is the wayside murmur of this or that hidden theme. (11)

I would like to insist on the word “murmur” because it is exactly the term Maurice Blanchot uses to give account of the effect and origin of writing. Blanchot explains: Écrire, c’est se faire l’écho de ce qui ne peut cesser de parler, - et, à cause de cela, pour en devenir l’écho, je dois d’une certaine manière lui imposer silence. J’apporte à cette parole incessante la décision, l’autorité de mon silence propre. Je rends sensible par ma médiation silencieuse, l’affirmation ininterrompue, le murmure géant sur lequel le langage en s’ouvrant devient image, devient imaginaire, profondeur parlante, indistincte plénitude qui est vide. Ce silence a sa source dans l’effacement auquel celui qui écrit est invité.65 To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking—and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence. I make perceptible, by my silent mediation, the uninterrupted affirmation, the giant murmuring upon which language opens and thus becomes image, becomes imaginary, becomes a speaking depth, an indistinct plenitude which is empty. The silence has its source in the effacement toward which the writer is drawn.66

This murmur therefore corresponds to what endlessly rustles in and from the text. Roland Barthes was, in the wake of Blanchot, to refer to what he called the “music of meaning” in Le Bruissement de la langue [The Rustle

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of language].67 Writers are those who have managed to “hear” this murmur and know how to master it thanks to the power of silence. What is also of paramount importance is that they accept to self-efface and disappear while maintaining the authority and decisiveness of writing. It is perhaps at this point that we may detect the difference between an author and a writer, between the chattering and gesticulating of an author and the authentic speech of a writer, between some of Nabokov’s questionable “strong opinions” and his literary achievements whose murmur he acknowledges. Nabokov may have been aware of this dichotomy as he is well-known for having denounced “general ideas” and common speech while praising the bliss of genuine art.

An Authorless and Readerless Text If the writer is, according to Blanchot, drawn to self-effacement—and not to dying, as Barthes pretended at first –, it is not only for the rebirth of the reader—as Barthes proclaimed—as the reader too is meant to self-efface. In the previous chapter on OBEL, I mentioned the fact that there existed a certain meeting between the author and the reader or even a duel, a multiple voicing but it is neither the reader nor the author who has the last word, but the text itself or at least writing. And that is why I agree with Blanchot when he declares: The reader does not add himself to the book, but tends primarily to relieve it of an author. […] all the reader’s infinite lightness, then, affirms the new lightness of the book, which has become a book without an author. Now it is a book relieved of the seriousness, the effort, the heavy anguish, the weight of a whole life that was spilled out into it. It has become a book minus the sometimes terrible, the always formidable experience which the reader effaces and, with his providential unconcern, considers as nothing.68

I am particularly convinced—or maybe seduced—by the idea of a lightness of the reader, the text, and the author, although their physicality is not ignored. If the book has become “a book without an author”, it does not mean that there exists no author, that the author is “dead” as the word “without” contains “with” and we should take into account both the meanings of “with” and “without.” When the author self-effaces, he or she does not completely disappear but just recedes, being still present. And, indeed, when Nabokov says in the foreword: “I have never been interested in what is called social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: “great books”). I am not “sincere,” I am not “provocative,’ I am not “satirical.” I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer.” (6, my emphasis),

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he not only opposes certain commentaries on him he disagrees with but shows his wish to affirm himself, to have his voice proclaim out loud but specifying his indifference towards a certain speech, a certain world. He seems indeed divided between a desire to advance forward and retreat at the same time. Blanchot explained this phenomenon when he described Kafka’s experience of dissolution in The Space of Literature. For him, Kafka wrote a journal at the same time as his work because he was feeling he was losing himself when he was writing literature and that his journal helped him to find again a contact with the world. Nabokov’s disappearance should be understood as a continual process and his exhibitions should be considered as resistance to his self-effacing. I realize that I am again ending this chapter with the strangeness of Nabokov’s identity whose authorship leads to the issue of writing and subjectivity. Being undoubtedly an author but mainly a writer, it is in his autobiography, Speak, Memory that he best revealed himself as a subject and this shall be the concern of our next and final chapter.i

Notes 1 Vladimir Nabokov, “Introduction,” Bend Sinister, 1947 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) 5-11. 2 David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993) 71. 3 John Burt Foster, Jr., “Bend Sinister,” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov (New York & London : Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995) 26. 4 Marilyn Edelstein, “Before the Beginning. Nabokov and the Rhetoric of the Preface,” Narrative Beginnings. Theories and Practices, ed. Brian Richardson (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008) 39. 5 Charles Nicol, “Necessary Instruction or Fatal fatuity: Nabokov’s Introductions and Bend Sinister,” Nabokov Studies Volume 1 (1994) 125, 129. 6 Foster, “Bend Sinister,” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov 26. 7 D. Barton Johnson, “Bend Sinister,” Delta N°17 (Octobre 1983) 36. 8 Thus, William Woodin Rowe wrote in 1971 Nabokov’s Deceptive World, D. Barton Johnson wrote Words in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov in 1985 and Vladimir E. Alexandrov published in 1991 Nabokov’s Otherworld. 9 Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, eds. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli 1990 (London: Vintage, 1991) 80. 10 Lucien Goldmann, Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) 15, 41. 11 Goldmann 36. 12 Jean-Joseph Goux, Freud, Marx, Économie et symbolique (Paris: Seuil, 1973) 40-41.

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13 Vladimir Nabokoff-Sirine, “Pouchkine, ou le Vrai ou le Vraisemblable,” La Nouvelle Revue Française Volume 48 (1937) 376. 14 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 11. 15 Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” 48. 16 Norman Page, ed. Nabokov. The Critical Heritage (London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge and Henley, 1982) 75. 17 Page 77. 18 Jacques Derrida, “La loi du genre,” Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986) 252, 264. 19 Cf. Maurice Couturier, Roman et censure ou La Mauvaise foi d’Eros (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1996) 179-224. 20 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 34-35. 21 Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov. The American Years 41. It was Mitch Frye who drew my attention to this quotation in his 2013 article published on Nabokov Online Journal (Vol. VII) and entitled “Performing tyranny, Purloining authority: Nabokov’s Dictators.” (p.8-9) 22 Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An interview with Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature 37. 23 Brian Boyd explains that this title was chosen as a homage to the visitor who had interrupted Coleridge during his dream of “Kubla Khan” (The American Years 103). 24 Foster, “Bend Sinister,” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov 25. 25 Genette, Seuils 54-97. 26 Jacques Derrida, “Titre à préciser,” Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986) 219-247. 27 Michel Pastoureau, Traité d’héraldique (Paris: Picard, 1993) 177-178. 28 Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969) 298. 29 Christian Godin, Dictionnaire de philosophie (Librairie Arthème Fayard: Éditions du temps, 2004) 205. 30 Jacques Derrida, “My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies,” Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature, eds. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)1-32. 31 Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli (Paris: Minuit, 1988) 13, 23-24. 32 In 1993 French scholar Sabine Faye defended a dissertation at the University of Paris-Nouvelle Sorbonne entitled “Barokov: le jeu baroque dans les romans de Nabokov.” [Barokov: the baroque play in Nabokov’s novels] In her abstract, she explains how, for her, the presence of the baroque appears in the taste of Nabokov for illusions, metamorphoses and the mystery of appearances. She highlights the figures of the mask and the mirror and considers that it gives evidence of a baroque aesthetics which echoes postmodern fiction. (DOCTHÈSES/ Nabokov) 33 Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977, eds. Dmitri Nabokov and Mathew J. Bruccoli 1989 (New York: Vintage, 1991) 48-49. 34 Maurice Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980) 80. 35 Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre 132. 36 Jacques Derrida, “Demeure,” Passions de la littérature. Avec Jacques Derrida, dir. Michel Lisse (Paris: Galilée, 1996) 23.

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37 Nabokov, Bend Sinister 140. 38 Jacques Derrida, Ulysse gramophone. Deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilée, 1987) 16. 39 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Éloge de la mêlée,” Être singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996) 169-182. 40 Jacques Derrida, “La pharmacie de Platon,” La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972) 69-197. Trans. Barbara Johnson, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination (London: The Athlone Press, 1981) 61-171. 41 Michel Foucault, Les Anormaux. Cours au Collège de France (1974-1975) (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1999) 58-59. 42 Vladimir Nabokov, The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, ed. Simon Karlinski 1979 (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980) 185. 43 Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, “Translation and Self-Translation,” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov 714. 44 He declares: Can Pushkin’s poem, or any other poem with a definite rhyme scheme, be really translated? To answer this we should first define the term “translation.” Attempts to render a poem in another language fall into three categories: (1) Paraphrastic: offering a free version of the original, with omissions and additions prompted by the exigencies of form, the conventions attributed to the consumer, and the translator’s ignorance. Some paraphrases may possess the charm of stylish diction and idiomatic conciseness, but no scholar should succumb to stylishness and no reader fooled by it. (2) Lexical (or constructional): rendering the basic meaning of words (and their order). This a machine can do under the direction of an intelligent bilinguist. (3) Literal: rendering, as closely as the associative and syntactical capacities of another language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original. Only this is true translation. Vladimir Nabokov, “Foreword,” Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin (New York: Bollingen/Pantheon Books, 1964) vii-viii. 45 Cf. the poem entitled “On translating Eugene Onegin,” Poems (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961) 37-38. The poem ends with the following lines: This is my task – a poet’s patience And scholastic passion blent: The shadow of your monument. 46 It is in “The Art of Translation” that he describes “the authentic poet.” He writes: “Now comes the authentic poet […] who finds relaxation in translating a bit of Lermontov or Verlaine between writing poems of his own. […] The main drawback, however, in this case is the fact that the greater his individual talent, the more apt he will be to drown the foreign masterpiece under the sparkling ripples of his own personal style. Instead of dressing up like the real author, he dresses up the author as himself.” Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (1982; London: Picador, 1983) 319. 47 Nabokov, Selected Letters 48-49.

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48 So is the beginning of the chapter devoted to “Character” in An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory by Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle (1995; Harlow, England: Pearson/Longman, 2009) 63. 49 Both Charles Nicol and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney consider in their respective essays on Bend Sinister which appeared in the first volume of Nabokov Studies in 1994, that Nabokov’s friendship with Edmund Wilson is not only in the background of the novel with Krug’s friendship with Ember but also in the introduction where Nabokov addresses Wilson. 50 Maurice Couturier, Nabokov ou la Cruauté du désir. Lecture psychanalytique. (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2004). 51 See Maurice Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable [the unavowable community] (Paris: Minuit, 1983) 15, 72. 52 Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999). 53 In the wake of Derrida’s analysis of madness in his essay entitled “Cogito et histoire de la folie” [cogito and the history of madness] situated in L’Écriture et la différence [writing and difference] (Paris: Seuil, 1967), I have analyzed the silence of madness in an essay entitled “ The silence of madness in Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Signs and symbols’.” Published online in Psyart. An online Journal the Psychological study of Arts. A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, article 060303. Available at: http:/www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2006_hamrit01.shtml, March 19, 2006. 54 D. Barton Johnson, “’Don’t Touch My Circles’. The Two Worlds of Nabokov’s Bend Sinister.” Delta N°17 (October 1983) 37. 55 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 45. 56 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 11. 57 Edward Morgon Forster, Aspects of The Novel (1927; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) 73. 58 Culler wrote: “If structuralism’s historical distinction is valuable, its general critique of the notion of character also has the virtue of making us rethink the notion of rich and ‘life-like’ characters which has played so important a role in criticism. By arguing that the most fully drawn and individuated characters are not in fact the most realistic, the structuralist challenges that defence of the traditional novel which relies on truthfulness and empirical distinctiveness. Once we doubt that the most vivid and detailed portraits are the most life-like, we must consider other possible justifications and are in a better position to study the inevitable artifice in the construction of characters.” Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge, 1975) 232. 59 Rimmon-Kenan wrote: “In the text characters are nodes in the verbal design; in the story they are – by definition- non (or pre-) verbal abstractions, constructs. Although these constructs are by no means human beings in the literal sense of the word, they are partly modeled on the reader’s conception of people and in this they are person-like.” Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 1983) 33. 60 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 95. 61 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 32.

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62 This remark raises the issue of the Nabokovian beginning. If we remember Lolita’s (with the poem), Ada’s (with the intertextual allusion to Tolstoy) or better Laughter in the Dark’s where he gives the summary of the whole story before broaching the telling of it, we notice that Nabokov is not so much interested in giving information as to the spatio-temporal categories or the characters, but his oblique metafictional method offers a mise en abyme of the device, showing how he masters it in an ironical and self-reflexive way. 63 In order to develop the issue of the difference between memory-images, dreamimages and perception-images, it might be helpful to refer to Gilles Deleuze who wrote two books on the question of images: L’Image-temps [the Time-image] and L’Image-mouvement [The Movement-image]. For him, dreams are a series of anamorphoses. L’Image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985) 78. 64 Schibboleth was the word used in the biblical narrative according to which the people from Galaad recognized those from Ephraim from the way they pronounced the word. Jacques Derrida has expatiated on the notion of the schibboleth in his book on Paul Celan entitled Schibboleth. Pour Paul Celan [Schibboleth. For Paul Celan] (Paris: Galilée, 1986). He explains that it is the phonological difference between shi and si that is at the origin of the discriminating process. It induces a recognition and allows one to cross a border, to be accepted. (see pp.50-51) 65 Maurice Blanchot, L’Éspace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955) 18. 66 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982) 27. 67 Roland Barthes, Essais critiques IV. Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984) 94. 68 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 193. In French: “Le lecteur ne s’ajoute pas au livre, mais il tend d’abord à l’alléger de tout auteur. […] toute l’infinie légèreté du lecteur affirme la légèreté nouvelle du livre, devenu un livre sans auteur, sans le sérieux, le travail, les lourdes angoisses, la pesanteur de toute une vie qui s’y est déversée, expérience parfois terrible, toujours redoutable, que le lecteur efface et, dans sa légèreté providentielle, considère comme rien.” L’Espace littéraire 254.

CHAPTER THREE FOREWORD TO SPEAK, MEMORY

It was also in Montreux, Switzerland, that on January 5, 1966 Nabokov wrote and added his signature to the introduction to his autobiography Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited.1 Whereas Lolita’s post face (1956) and Bend Sinister’s introduction (1963) had been belatedly produced in order to correct, guide or even impose a certain way to read the novels, the introduction to Speak, Memory offers a deeper bibliographic and editorial account of the autobiography. It is made up of fifteen chapters which had been composed and published at different times (mostly between 1947 and 1951) and which appeared first as Conclusive Evidence in 1951 and was then republished as Speak, Memory in 1960 before appearing, in 1966, as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. As in the preceding chapters, I wish to first propose a brief summary of the foreword, then present scholars’ analyses which were induced not by the introduction (as there was almost none, contrary to “On a Book Entitled Lolita” and Bend Sinister’s introduction) but by the autobiography per se, and finally to explore the problematic issues it raises. Nabokov initiates his work by stating that it is “a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections ranging geographically from St Petersburg to St Nazaire, and covering thirty-seven years, from August 1903 to May 1940, with only a few sallies into later space-time” (7). He then adds that the essay that initiated the series is what corresponds to Chapter Five and that it was first written in French under the title of “Mademoiselle O” and first appeared in 1936 in Paris in Mesures. He then recalls that the essay was translated into English by Hilda Ward in the United States (where he had emigrated on 28 May 1940) and published in the January 1943 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The other chapters were published mostly by The New Yorker but also by the Partisan Review and Harper’s Magazine. As for “Mademoiselle O,” it was republished in Nine Stories in 1947 and in Nabokov’s Dozen in 1958. Nabokov then underlines the fact that, despite the apparent disorder in the writing and publication of the different chapters, an order was established as early as 1936 and this explains why he had no difficulty in assembling a volume published in

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1951 under the title Conclusive Evidence, but as the phrase unfortunately suggested a mystery story, he thought of Speak, Mnemosyne, then The Anthemion and finally settled for Speak, Memory. It was translated into Russian by himself (Drugie Berega) and published in 1954 by The Chekhov Publishing House, New York. It appeared in French (Autres Rivages) in 1961, in Italian (Parla Ricordo) in 1962, in Spanish (¡Habla, memorial) in 1963 and in German in 1964. He was, he says, “handicapped by an almost complete lack of data in regard to family history, and, consequently, by the impossibility of checking [his] memory when [he] felt it might be at fault” (9). This explains the numerous revisions and corrections. As he had translated the book into Russian in 1953 and strived, by doing so, “to do something about the amnesic defects of the original—blank spots, blurry areas, domains of dimness” (9), he was able to make the corrections of the English version and declared that “This reEnglishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task” (10). He then explains that his birthdate (April 1899) was the cause of a series of blunders as he first confused his age with that of the century and as dates are sometimes given in the Old Style (Julian calendar) or the New Style (Gregorian calendar). Since the difference between the two was twelve days and not thirteen as his passport presumes, his birthdate— which was April 10 by the Old Style—appears as April 23 on his passport. He regrets the error which nevertheless associates his birthdate with those of Shakespeare, his nephew Vladimir Sikorski, Shirley Temple and Hazel Brown. He next adds that he had made modifications for the 1966 version thanks to the conversations he had had with his relatives when he went back to Europe in 1960 and that he had preferred to delete passages he had not managed to “rework through want of specific documentation” (11) and this he had done “for the sake of over-all truth” (11). He states his hope to one day write a sequel to his memoir which he would like to call Speak on, Memory and which would evoke the 1940-1960 years he spent in America. He says afterwards that he did not make a lot of references to his novels but the reader might use the introductions he wrote to the English translations of his Russian novels as they “give a sufficiently detailed, and racy, account of the creative part of [his] European past” (11). He then alludes to the chess problem he mentioned in Chapter Fourteen and which was published in Chess Problems in 1963 and regrets that some allusions—the one against Freud, for example—had not been detected by reviewers. He eventually specifies that he changed certain proper names “to avoid hurting the living or distressing the dead” and that he set them

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off with quotation marks in the index. He ends with a small poem about this index. In the introduction to his autobiography, Nabokov thus first presents its genesis, composition and the different parts it is constituted of, then dwells on the issue of memory, its defects, obstacles or successes and finally explains the specificities of the order, patterns and plans at the origin of the structure of the book. Before dealing with the problematic issues the foreword consequently raises, I wish to present some of the analyses scholars have offered not so much on the introduction—which seems indeed very factual—but on the autobiography itself, as the foreword is a direct commentary on the book and therefore cannot be analyzed without constant references to the book. There is indeed only one remark on the introduction per se which was made by David Schields in 1987. He considers that “Nabokov’s scholarly language […] is meant to jar with the truly poetic language present elsewhere in the Foreword.”2 Indeed, there is a constant shift of tones and registers due to the variations of styles and distancing towards his remarks, through which the scholarly is deconstructed with the poetic and thus staging the destabilization of the text. Yet the autobiography induced numerous commentaries, of which I have selected those by Dabney Stuart (1978), Brian Boyd (1991, 1999), John Burt Foster, Jr. (1993), Michael Wood (1994),3 and Georges Nivat (1995).4 According to Stuart, Speak, Memory “is a construction […] It is an autobiography, but it is not a record or account of ‘facts’ […] It is imaginative narration in which events, actions, and details of landscape (both indoors and out), in themselves neutral, are formed, shaped, and rendered significant by a single, ordering consciousness. It is, in short, fiction, a molding (fingere), not opposed to ‘fact.’”5 Boyd considers that it is “among the greatest [autobiographies] ever written” and “the most artistic of all autobiographies” and that Nabokov “has managed to impart to his life a design as complex and harmonious as those of his finest novels.”6 It was indeed Stuart who had first highlighted Nabokov’s statement that “the following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be […] the true purpose of autobiography.”7 It was this phrase that Leland de la Durantaye referred to in his 2014 essay on Speak, Memory in the Cambridge Companion to Autobiography entitled “The True Purpose of Autobiography, or the Fate of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory” in which he wrote: “The true purpose of autobiography for Nabokov is not to study […] worldhistorical events, not to reflect them through the prism of a single observer, but to seek the pattern they form.”8 Foster also insists on the “design” of the autobiography as he declared: “Rather than building to an

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all-encompassing grand finale, therefore, Speak, Memory creates a more diffuse pattern that works through cumulative detail and scattered moments of illumination.”9 As for Wood and Nivat, they both underline the presence of patterns in the project but also pinpoint the issues not only of memory but of identity. In his 1999 introduction to the autobiography, Brian Boyd mentions “the gap between, on the one hand, his ‘perfect past’ […] and, on the other, the losses that would follow,”10 or, in other words, the tensions between the happiness he experienced in his childhood, and the pain and nostalgia of future exile. I now intend to first explore how the author builds his work thus dwelling on the question of patterns, designs, forms and structures of the book. Then, in the second part, I will study the role of memory and remembering in the writing of his autobiography, before finally thinking about the way the author faces himself when writing his memoirs and to the particular genre of an autobiography characterized here by the contamination of its facts by fiction.

The Author Building his Work It is not insignificant that Nabokov decided to launch on an autobiography in the late 1940s, after the publication of Bend Sinister and at a time when he was approaching fifty and thinking of the preparation of Lolita. It was Ellen Pifer who underlined “the overlapping composition of the autobiography and the novel” in her 2009 essay entitled “The ‘Mirrory Beaches’ of Memory: Lolita and Speak, Memory”11 and quoted Nabokov’s 1947 letter (Letter 164) to Edmund Wilson which said: “I am writing now 1; a short novel about a man who liked little girls […] and 2; a new type of autobiography - a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one’s personality”(37). It corresponds therefore to a significant time of transition in his life when he projected himself towards what was to become his fictional masterpiece but at the same time looked back towards his creative past and assessed his process of composition. That is why I wish to focus first on the causes and effects of the bibliographic obsession he gives evidence of in the Foreword. I will then indulge in a brief study of what corresponds to the first inspiration of his autobiography, that is Chapter five (“Mademoiselle O”), and finally analyze how the author proceeded to compose his work.

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A Bibliographic Obsession In his 1994 essay on Nabokov’s introductions, Charles Nicol had already underlined the constant presence of personal and bibliographic information in the prefaces. In the case of the Foreword to Speak, Memory, we therefore are informed that, except for “Mademoiselle O” which was written and published in France in 1936, all the other chapters of the autobiography were written in the United States—in Colorado for Chapter Three (“Portrait of My Uncle”), Massachusetts for Chapters Four (“My English Education”), Chapter Six (“Butterflies”), Chapter Seven (“Colette”) and Chapter Nine (“My Russian Education”) and eventually in New York for most of the remaining chapters. They were consequently written between 1947 and 1951 at a place—the United States—and a time—the late forties—when Nabokov had left Russia and Europe. Such elements are indeed important to take into account when reading the book as life and art are constantly interwoven in Nabokov’s case as Pifer recalls in her previously mentioned article.12 But it is with great pleasure that Nabokov mentions the bibliographic information, notably the dates of publication but chiefly the journals in which the different chapters of his autobiography were published: The Atlantic Monthly for “Mademoiselle O,” The New Yorker, Partisan Review and Harper’s Magazine. His attention to bibliographic information is all the more legitimate as Speak, Memory indeed had a very particular history. Composed of fifteen chapters which had all been written at different dates, it appeared first in 1951 at Harper & Bros (New York) under the title Conclusive Evidence, then as Speak, Memory. A Memoir in 1951, then in Russian as Drugie Berega in 1954 at The Chekhov Publishing House (New York), then as Speak, Memory in 1960, and eventually in a revised edition in 1967 under the title Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited at G.P. Putman’s Sons (New York).13 The latest edition I am aware of appeared in 1999 first in New York thanks to Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, and then in the United Kingdom at Everyman’s Library. It consists of an introduction by Brian Boyd and an appendix entitled “Chapter sixteen” or “On Conclusive Evidence” which corresponds to the sixteenth chapter Nabokov had intended to add to the book but did not, consisting of the commentary of a pseudo-reviewer. As regards the organization of the different chapters of the autobiography, it is possible to classify them chronologically, as Juliar did, or in the way they appear in the book.14 We notice that the first and last chapters (chapters one and fifteen) were composed late, around 1950, as if Nabokov had needed a retrospective point of view to devise the structure of his book. But what is also noticeable is Nabokov’s meticulousness in the way he recalls the dates and

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places of publication of the different parts of the book, revealing how he was not only a writer but also a researcher and a scientist. As a researcher, he is well-known for his monumental annotated translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in 1964 and as a scientist his Lepidoptera studies are acknowledged by the scientific community.15 Yet he was to speak of “the passion of science and the patience of poetry”16 as well as “the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science.”17 By these paradoxical statements, he emphasizes the attention to detail he advocated not only in science but also in fiction-writing. Besides, by associating poetry—which is commonly linked to passion and imagination—to precision and therefore facts, while relating science—which is commonly equated with precision and facts—to passion and therefore imagination, he not only overturns commonsense, refreshes our vision but he finally manages to anchor poetry in reality and facts. This shows how, for him, even literature can be an object of study or research, a document or an archive—and also implies that science is an artistic activity and thereby not purely objective, as desire and the subjectivity of the scientist must be taken into account. What’s more, he was to declare: “I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”18 Inverting again the commonsensical notions, he paradoxically emphasizes the constantly receding limits of both science and art as regards truth and thereby justifies his obsessive quest for bibliographic precision.

The Splendor of the Origin: “Mademoiselle O” Among the autobiography’s chapters, there is one that stands apart— Chapter Five—and that constitutes the origin of the inspiration of his life story. Nabokov writes in the very first paragraph of the Foreword: The essay that initiated the series corresponds to what is now Chapter Five. I wrote it in French, under the title of “Mademoiselle O”, thirty years ago in Paris, where Jean Paulhan published it in the second issue of Mesures, 1936. A photograph (published recently in Gisèle Freund’s James Joyce in Paris) commemorates this event, except that I am wrongly identified (in the Mesures group relaxing around a garden table of stone) as “Audiberti”. (7)

Biographic and editorial information about this “essay”—or rather this “story” as it is both factual and fictional—must be assumed to be conversant with its context and history. According to Brian Boyd, “Mademoiselle O” was composed in two or three days at the end of the

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first week of January 1936, Nabokov having been asked to read a piece in French in Brussels. That evening at the Pen Club—on January 24—was such a success that he was also asked to read it in Paris, the reading being so appreciated that Jean Paulhan published it in Mesures.19 As for Foster, he recalls in his chapter dedicated to “Mademoiselle O” that there are five versions of the story, as it was written and rewritten numerous times—in French and English.20 Foster rightly considers that it was one of the major breakthroughs in Nabokov’s career. The story is based on Nabokov’s childhood memory of his Swiss French-speaking governess, Cécile Miauton, who came to live with the Nabokovs in Russia from 1906 to 1913.21 Although he did take her as a model for his fiction—in the short story entitled “Easter Rain” (1925), in The Defense (1930) and in Ada (1969)—he wanted to keep his childhood memory intact as the writing of the story was, as he stated in the first paragraph of “Mademoiselle O”, his “desperate attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle.”22 But why did he re-write the story so many times? A comparison of the different versions shows how he kept some purple passages, such as Mademoiselle’s arrival at the train station with its gothic atmosphere due to the presence of the moon. He suppressed others and the disappearance in the English versions of the letter “O” in her name is, to my mind, unquestionably a pity as we lose such passages as the following one which can be quoted only in French: Je viens de l’appeler par son vrai nom, car ‘Mademoiselle O’ n’est nullement l’abréviation d’un nom en O. Cet O, ouvert à tous les vents de l’hiatus, n’est pas la majuscule d’Olivier ni d’Orose ou encore d’Oudinet, mais bien le nom intégral; un nom rond et nu qui, écrit, semble en déséquilibre sans un point pour le soutenir; une roue qui s’est détachée et qui reste toute seule debout, prête à chavirer; une bouche en rond; un monde; une pomme, un lac.23

This passage has poetic overtones that not only serve to allude to the roundness of the character’s body but are also a linguistic play on the name itself of Cécile Miauton with its phoneme “o” just as they evoke images associated with the vowel, such as a wheel, a rounded mouth, a world, an apple or a lake. Maurice Couturier recalls how Nabokov was making his mouth round when he was uttering his governess’s name during the interview with French journalist Bernard Pivot.24 On the other hand, the adjunction of an epilogue at the end of the final English version is highly significant. He writes: There is an appendix to Mademoiselle’s story. When I first wrote it I did not know about certain amazing survivals. Thus, in 1960, my London

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cousin Peter de Peterson told me that their English nanny, who had seemed old to me in 1904 in Abbazia, was by now over ninety and in good health: neither was I was aware that the governess of my father’s two youngest sisters, Mlle Bouvier (later Mme Conrad) survived my father by almost half a century. She had entered their household in 1889 and stayed six years, being the last in a series of governesses. A pretty little keepsake drawn in 1895 by Ivan de Peterson, Peter’s father, shows various events of life at Batovo vignetted over an inscription in my father’s hand: A celle qui a toujours su se faire aimer et qui ne saura jamais se faire oublier […] Sixty-five years later, in Geneva, my sister Elena discovered Mme Conrad, now in her tenth decade. The ancient lady, skipping one generation, naïvely mistook Elena for our mother, then a girl of eighteen, who used to drive up with Mlle Golay from Vyra to Batovo, in those distant times whose long light finds so many ingenious ways to reach me.25

This beautiful nostalgic passage shows how the writing of the story was an homage the author was paying to his governess, an homage tinted with the recognition of his affection for her because, as is written on the mentioned keepsake, governesses knew how to make people love and remember them. The way Nabokov describes the memory expresses the not unpleasant pain he experienced when remembering Mademoiselle, as it corresponds to the loss and mourning not only of his childhood but of his objects of love. The writing of the story resembles a testament as the author makes the image of the governess survive, as if he was paying back a debt by recreating the presence of an absent loved one through art and poetry. This may explain why Chapter Five plays such an important role in the autobiography since, being the origin of its inspiration and creation, it enabled the building of a whole structure. It serves as “the cornerstone” of the architecture: Although I had been composing these chapters in the erratic sequence reflected by the dates of first publication given above, they had been neatly filling numbered gaps in my mind which followed the present order of chapters. That order had been established in 1936, at the placing of the cornerstone which already held in its hidden hollow various maps, timetables, a collection of matchboxes, a chip of ruby glass, and even–as I now realize–the view from my balcony of Geneva lake, of its ripples and glades of light, black-dotted today, at teatime, with coots and tufted ducks. (8)

I wish to dwell on one word of the quotation: “already.” The order had— already in 1936—been devised, thought and established certainly not because he already had in his mind the whole book which only needed to be transcribed, but possibly because “Mademoiselle O” was already

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containing, anticipating the writing to come. The origin is already-there and writing necessitates a certain passivity towards what is given by memories—of childhood, relatives, countries, etc. The story is consequently a departure and an arrival as it contains its ending. It radiates in the whole book which is composed in a very singular way.

The Author’s Process of Composition It is worthwhile to recall the first sentence of the foreword as it concerns the structure of the book. Nabokov had written: The present work is a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections ranging geographically from St Petersburg to St Nazaire, and covering thirty-seven years, from August 1903 to May 1940, with only a few sallies into later space-time. (7)

Being a “correlated assemblage,” the book has undoubtedly a “structure,” this term being defined by Greimas and Courtés in their French dictionary of semiotics as “a relational network” [“réseau relationnel”],26 insisting on the presence of relations. Nabokov resorted to terms such as “patterns” or “designs” to refer to structure and we recall the often-quoted sentence of his autobiography, that is “the following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”27 So according to him, there are patterns not only in works but also in one’s life and the images he uses to represent such designs are numerous. Thus he describes the rhythm of his life as a spiral. He declares: A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life. The twenty years I spent in my native Russia (1899-1919) take care of the thetic arc. Twenty-one years of voluntary exile in England, Germany and France (1919-40) supply the obvious antithesis. The period spent in my adopted country (1940-60) forms a synthesis – and a new thesis.28

An image he uses to describe the composing of his works is that of chess, which corresponds along with butterflies to one of the typically Russian passions of Nabokov. He wrote a Russian book entitled The Defense totally devoted to the game and he seemingly writes as if he played chess or rather composed chess problems. He declared in the introduction to his Poems and Problems: Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity. The composing of those

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ivory-and-ebony riddles is a comparatively rare gift and an extravagantly sterile occupation; but then all art is inutile, and divinely so, if compared to a number of more popular human endeavors. Problems are the poetry of chess, and its poetry, as all poetry, is subject to changing trends with various conflicts between old and new schools.29

What is noticeable in this paragraph is the analogy Nabokov underlines between the composition of a chess problem and that of art, and therefore of writing. Composing is the invention of an artistic and poetic riddle inducing a visual pleasure. He resorts to other visual metaphors to represent his process of composing, including those of a puzzle or of a painting. He affirmed during a 1962 interview: I don’t write consecutively from the beginning to the next chapter and so on to the end. I just fill in the gaps of the picture, of this jigsaw puzzle which is quite in my mind, picking out a piece here and a piece there and filling out part of the sky and part of the landscape and part of the – I don’t know, the carousing hunters.30

He questions here the linearity of the process of writing, or at least, composing, and compares the writing act to painting or designing. He was to represent this process in another interview, two years later: There comes a moment when I am informed from within that the entire structure is finished. All I have to do now is take it down in pencil or pen; Since this entire structure, dimly illumined in one’s mind, can be compared to a painting, and since you do not have to work gradually from left to right for its proper perception, I may direct my flashlight at any part or particle of the picture when setting down to writing. I do not begin my novel at the beginning; I do not reach chapter three before I reach chapter four, I do not go dutifully from one page to the next, in consecutive order: no, I pick out a bit here and a bit there, till I have filled all the gaps on the paper. This is why I like writing my stories and novels on index cards, numbering them later when the whole set is complete.31

Once again, Nabokov questions commonsense notions when he declares that he does not begin at the beginning. Yet his form of expression is comprehensible. He does not begin, for example, with what would become the first chapter. Besides, there is a beginning and an end but beginnings and endings are at the same time clear-cut and questioned as they are reshuffled. So there is indeed a certain structure to the autobiography but a structure which verges on a certain rhythm as beginnings and chiefly endings of chapters punctuate the book. Perhaps because of the particular way the book was composed (with chapters written at different dates), the

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ends of the chapters entail a sense of both closure (resembling epiphanies) and suspense. The above-mentioned end of Chapter Five is an example when he writes: “in those distant times whose long light finds so many ingenious ways to reach me.” The end of the first chapter is another instance with the evocation of the vision—through one of the windows— of his father being tossed in the air just as with the end of the fifteenth and last chapter with the vision of a liner appearing suddenly behind the houses and buildings. Whether it is in the Foreword where he writes that the chapters “had been neatly filling numbered gaps” (8) or in a previously-mentioned quotation where he says that he has just to fill in the gaps of the picture, the word “gap” reappears significantly. The structures of his books are characterized by the presence of a rift, a gaping opening, a play or a limping movement. It is, for instance, not easy to localize the origin and/or center of the autobiography. Is it “Mademoiselle O”, and in that case, is it the memory of her, the affection he had for her or the mere writing of the memory? Is it situated in the first chapter when Nabokov narrates the moment when he becomes aware of “the awakening of consciousness” (18) or of his identity (when he says: “the inner knowledge that I was I” [18])? Is it to be found in Chapter Eleven (“First poem”) when he gives an account of the birth of his literary vocation? Is it to be related to the father’s death as scholars such as Georges Nivat and Michael Wood consider? When one tries to reach and fix the origin, it recedes and disappears and the effect is of a center that keeps on moving, inducing thereby a play in the structure in the way Derrida explains: Il y a trop et plus qu’on ne peut dire. Mais on peut déterminer autrement la non-totalisation : non plus sous le concept de finitude comme assignation à l’empiricité mais sous le concept de jeu. Si la totalisation alors n’a plus de sens, ce n’est pas parce que l’infinité d’un champ ne peut être couverte par un regard ou un discours finis, mais parce que la nature du champ – à savoir le langage et un langage fini – exclut la totalisation: ce champ est en effet celui d’un jeu, c’est-à-dire de substitutions infinies dans la clôture d’un ensemble fini. Ce champ ne permet ces substitutions infinies que parce qu’il est fini, c’est-à-dire parce qu’au lieu d’être un champ inépuisable, comme dans l’hypothèse classique, au lieu d’être trop grand, il lui manque quelque chose, à savoir un centre qui arrête et fonde le jeu des substitutions.32 There is too much, much more than one can say. But nontotalization can also be determined in another way: no longer from the standpoint of a concept of finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from the standpoint of the concept of play. If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not

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because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field—that is, language and a finite language—excludes totalization. This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.33

Returning to the presence of gaps in language and in the text, it is possible to see the process of writing as the emergence or the generation of a text from those voids which induce the play within language and stand at the origin of the renewal of meaning. To better understand and visualize the reserve of meaning that characterizes those gaps, it might be useful to refer to Plato’s concept of Khôra which can be defined as a receptacle, a space or an interval and has been associated with a womb or a matrix. It is, according to Derrida who devoted a whole study to this notion, “un espace apparemment vide – bien qu’il ne soit sans doute pas le vide […] une ouverture béante, un abîme ou un chasme.”34 [an apparently empty space—although it is no doubt not the void […] a gaping opening, an abyss or a chasm] Khôra gives place, prepares, anticipates, informs and gives forms to what shall become the imprint of the text. As such it is easier then to understand why Nabokov was already seeing in “the hidden hollow” of the cornerstone (“Mademoiselle O”) “various maps, timetables, a collection of matchboxes, a chip of ruby glass, and even […] the view from [his] balcony of Geneva lake, of its ripples and glades of light, blackdotted today, at teatime, with coots and tufted ducks” (8). The presence of these gaps creates a particular structure characterized by its discontinuities and disjointedness nevertheless not exempt from fluidity. It was Foster who best described, to my mind, the interweaving of these two trends in his chapter on Speak, Memory. He explains: Nabokov must have felt that the way he experienced memory justified some discontinuity of treatment, but he probably also realized that the book as written had a flow of its own. […] The flow is apparent even when the magazine essays are considered as single units, for their position in the autobiography gives them a new topical-chronological resonance. Each Chapter centers on a particular topic such as Nabokov’s passionate interest in butterflies or his awkward relations with his uncle Ruka. Within the limits set by the topic, the chapter is free to move back and forth through time, and can produce striking violations of chronological order.35

Whereas Foster well described how dislocation and fluidity represent the process of time, I think it is possible to resort to a spatial image reflecting

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those mentioned above such as chess, a puzzle, or a painting, to give an account of the co-presence of disjointedness and coherence. The image is offered by Nabokov himself who, in the eleventh chapter of his autobiography—entitled “First poem” and dealing unsurprisingly with inspiration and creation—describes a paling composed of disjointed parts. He reports: Years later, in the squalid suburb of a foreign town, I remember seeing a paling, the boards of which had been brought from some other place where they had been used, apparently as the inclosure of an itinerant circus. Animals had been painted on it by a versatile barker; but whoever had removed the boards, and then knocked them together again, must have been blind or insane, for now the fence showed only disjointed parts of animals (some of them, upside down) – a tawny haunch, a zebra’s head, the leg of an elephant.36

This “erratic” disjointedness is in keeping with the subterranean disorder of the book which deconstructs an order reconstructed afterwards by the author’s and/or the reader’s consciousness. If, for Hamlet, time was “out of joint” and he had “to set it right,”37 Nabokov wanted to combine and juxtapose remembered details in order to reconstruct his past,38 because, according to him, time is “the dim hollow between two rhythmic beats, the narrow and bottomless silence between the beats.”39 The reference to “hollows” leads back to the presence of “gaps” in memory which Nabokov alludes to as “blank spots, blurry areas, domains of dimness” (9). Yet it is thanks to his memory that he was able to write his “memoirs,” a topic that shall be the focus of the following section.

The Author Writing Thanks to Remembering When Nabokov speaks of his memory, he complains about its frailty and compares it to “a careless girl” (10). There are indeed obstacles and difficulties when one tries to remember one’s past but it is possible to overcome those impediments. So I intend to first give a rapid survey of the specificities of memory (in general as well as for Nabokov) before expounding on the way Nabokov masters its hindrances through the process of remembering and I will end with a discussion of the manner in which he reaches self-awareness through memory.

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A Fanciful Memory It is mainly psychologists and philosophers—and writers, such as Proust, for example—who have explored the issue of memory and remembering. Memory is indeed opposed to perception as one has to recall what has been inscribed in the mind. In his book entitled La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli [Memory, History, Forgetting], Paul Ricœur recalls how Plato used the metaphor of wax to describe the imprint of a trace that may or may not be effaced depending on whether one recalls or forgets.40 Freud too resorted to the image of wax present in the device called the Mystic Writing-Pad 41 to give an account of the imprint left by memory which he compares to the writing process. Writing is all the more in keeping with memory as it may be used to compensate for the defects of memory, notably forgetting, and this may explain why Nabokov said that the writing of “Mademoiselle O” was a “desperate attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle.”42 As for Blanchot and Derrida, they resort to the idea of distancing (“éloignement”) and/or disappearance to refer to mental memory images. Blanchot writes: L’image, d’après l’analyse commune, est après l’objet: elle en est la suite; nous voyons, puis nous imaginons. Après l’objet viendrait l’image. «Après» signifie qu’il faut d’abord que la chose s’éloigne pour se laisser ressaisir. Mais cet éloignement n’est pas le simple changement de place d’un mobile qui demeurerait, cependant, le même. L’éloignement est ici au cœur de la chose. La chose était là, que nous saisissions dans le mouvement vivant d’une action compréhensive, et, devenue image, instantanément la voilà devenue l’insaisissable, l’inactuelle, l’impassible, non pas la même chose éloignée, mais cette chose comme éloignement, la présente dans son absence, la saisissable parce qu’insaisissable, apparaissant en tant que disparue, le recours de ce qui ne revient pas, le cœur étrange du lointain comme vie et cœur unique de la chose.43 The image, according to the ordinary analysis, is secondary to the object. It is what follows. We see, then we imagine. After the object comes the image. “After” means that the thing must first take itself off in order to be grasped. But this remove is not simply the displacement of a moveable object which would nevertheless remain the same. Here the distance is in the heart of the thing. The thing was there; we grasped it in the vital movement of a comprehensive action—and lo, having become image, instantly it has become that which no one can grasp, the unreal, the impossible. It is not the same thing at a distance but the thing as distance, present in its absence, graspable because ungraspable, appearing as disappeared. It is the return of what does not come back, the strange heart of remoteness as the life and the sole heart of the thing.44

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I have quoted this extract at length because I think it describes very well the receding movement at the heart of a mental memory image (we shall meet this receding movement later in the figure of the author). There is here described the idea of a vanishing process within the apparition of a memory image. Derrida too was to resort to the notion of a disappearing apparition when he referred to the experience of drawing. Having stated that he does not know how to draw, he explains the reasons for his difficulty: En vérité, je me sens incapable de suivre de ma main la prescription d’un modèle: comme si, au moment de dessiner, je ne voyais plus la chose. Celle-ci s’évade aussitôt, elle disparaît à mes yeux, il n’en reste à peu près rien, elle disparaît sous mes yeux qui ne perçoivent plus en vérité que l’arrogance narquoise de cette apparition disparaissante.45 In truth, I feel unable to follow with my hand the dictate of a model: as if, when I am about to draw, I could no longer see the thing which immediately escapes and disappears to my eyes. There is almost nothing left. It disappears under my eyes which perceive in truth only the mocking arrogance of this disappearing apparition.46

This, I think, accurately describes the double movement present in the process of remembering which is both passive, being sometimes involuntary (as Proust gave examples of), and active because it sometimes requires an effort, an act of will. A recollection may resemble the process of adjusting the focal distance of a camera as Nabokov himself reports in the Foreword: “I discovered that sometimes, by means of intense concentration, the neutral smudge might be forced to come into beautiful focus so that the sudden view could be identified, and the anonymous servant named” (9). Nabokov here describes a well-known but very strange experience, but what annoys him chiefly about what he calls “the anomalies of a memory” (10) are the two following hitches: forgetting and erring.

Remembering by Overcoming the Obstacles When Nabokov decided to write an autobiography, he had, he said, to face a reality which was already past and thus give an account of facts without making mistakes. He declares: “While writing the first version in America I was handicapped by an almost complete lack of data in regard to family history, and, consequently, by the impossibility of checking my memory when I felt it might be at fault.” (9) One of the ways to be at fault with

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one’s memory is to confound dates or events and thereby create legends and secrets out of one’s family’s history, having real events disappear and imaginary ones appear in a “mocking arrogance of a disappearing apparition” (Derrida’s quotation above) as if memory twinkled like a starry night.47 Nabokov reports: When after twenty years of absence I sailed back to Europe, I renewed ties that had been undone before I had left it. At these family reunions, Speak, Memory was judged. Details of date and circumstances were checked, and it was found that in many cases I had erred, or had not examined deeply enough an obscure but fathomable recollection. Certain matters were dismissed by my advisers as legends or rumors or, if genuine, were proven to be related to events or periods other than those to which frail memory had attached them. (10-11)

Erring therefore is a pain for Nabokov whose meticulousness and attention to detail are so characteristic of him. So to counteract these lapses and errors, Nabokov ceaselessly performs revisions and corrections. “Mademoiselle O”’s five versions and Speak, Memory’s numerous editions are not the only examples of the way Nabokov re-worked and rewrote his texts. If, for Nabokov, a good reader is a re-reader, it seems that, for him, a good writer is also a re-writer. He even crossed generic singularities when he transformed a novella (The Enchanter) into a novel (Lolita) out of which he produced a screenplay (Lolita: A Screenplay).48 Revising raises the issue of repetition or rather “iterability”49, to use Derrida’s neologism, which encompasses the repetition of a text and its otherness as the process of repeating or recycling a text; the reprise of a text induces a renewal since it becomes other. Through its transformation, the text gives evidence of the endless, infinite opening of meaning. It is, to use Julia Kristeva’s neologism, a “geno-text” [géno-texte],50 which is at the origin of its self-generation. Derrida underlines the process of differentiation within language and its spectrality as a revised text keeps, as phantoms, its previous versions which act as a suppressed subterranean haunting presence. Those previous versions become the memory of the text. So by trying to correct his erring memory, he both destroys and creates: he deletes passages,51 but a new surviving text emerges. The obstacles of his memory are thus mastered by the reconstruction of his past which is considered to be the source of both pain—due to the numerous losses (loss of childhood, loss of homeland)—and happiness.

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A Happy Memory I am using Ricœur’s phrase extracted from the paragraph entitled “La mémoire heureuse” [“happy memory”] from his previously mentioned book on memory.52 Ricœur explains that, even though remembering may often induce mourning, recall may nevertheless be successful and lead to a happy, appeased memory. In Nabokov’s case, remembering often leads to the re-enactment of past happy events as is proven in the following passage whose beauty requires a long quotation: I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. I like to imagine, in consummation and resolution of those jangling chords, something as enduring, in retrospect, as the long table that on summer birthdays and namedays used to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of doors, in an alley of birches, limes and maples at its debouchment on the smooth-sanded space of the garden proper that separated the park and the house […] Through a tremulous prism, I distinguish the features of relatives and familiars, mute lips serenely moving in forgotten speech. I see the steam of the chocolate and the plates of blueberry tarts. I note the small helicopter of a revolving samara that gently descends upon the tablecloth, and, lying across the table, an adolescent girl’s bare arm indolently extended as far as it will go, with its turquoise-veined underside turned up to the flaky sunlight, the palm open in lazy expectancy of something–perhaps the nutcracker.53

There is a juxtaposition of a pleasure (“I witness with pleasure,” “I like to imagine”) of the process of remembering and a sense of mastery in memory (“the masterly use it makes,” “in consummation and resolution”) which is associated with serenity in the heat of summer. Nabokov here gives an account of a feeling of well-being which is highly infectious and which renders with great sharpness the visual or even cinematic dimensions of recollections (“I distinguish,” “I see,” “I note”) by resorting to adverbs and adjectives expressing different kinds of slow motions (“gently descends,” “indolently extended,” “lazy expectancy”). It is in a lyrical tone that Nabokov describes those instants of happiness because memory can be for him euphoric and ecstatic, or happy and serene. He thus concludes the third chapter of his autobiography with the following: A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory; That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps

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against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.54

Nabokov is sometimes so overwhelmed by his memory and therefore by his past that the present vanishes at the expense of another reality. There seems, in such circumstances, to be a pause whose permanence leads to an intimation of immortality. Yet his memory has another role: it helps him find self-awareness. We remember how he wrote in the very first chapter: “the inner knowledge that I was I and that my parents were my parents seems to have been established only later, when it was directly associated with my discovering their age in relation to mine” (18). It is therefore in such a manner that he became conscious of his identity, but it seems that it is mainly thanks to the writing of his autobiography that he gained real self-awareness as, indeed, autobiographies all try to answer the question “Who am I?” This leads us to the last part of this chapter which deals with the role of autobiography in the apprehension of the self.

The Author Facing Himself When Writing an Autobiography An autobiography undoubtedly raises the question of the author’s identity. I shall therefore first wonder about this problematic issue in this genre, then dwell on the contents of Nabokov’s autobiography and explain the reasons why he sometimes gives evidence of a certain reserve. I will then go on to question the very possibility of writing an autobiography, before finally ending with a consideration of what this autobiography teaches us of Nabokov’s personality and of man’s subjectivity.

What is at Stake in an Autobiography An autobiography, being the biography of an author by himself, addresses the question of bios, that is life, and paradoxically of death. But it is first and foremost a text which deals with the story of a particular life. Among the numerous scholars who have studied this issue, Philippe Lejeune is the one who stands out, as he was the first to consider in his 1975 book Le Pacte autobiographique [The Autobiographical Pact] that the autobiographical genre is more defined by its “pact” or “reading contract” [contrat de lecture] than its form. Moreover, Lejeune defines it as “un récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre vie ”55 [a retrospective prose account given by a real person about his or her own life]. As for Ricœur, he was to say: “une vie, c’est l’histoire de cette vie en

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quête de narration”56 [“somebody’s life is the story of that life, in search of narration”], insisting on the importance of narration and the agency of the author (the who of the action) and suggesting the presence of a narrative identity [identité narrative].57 Narration in autobiography implies that one should try to give an account of a certain reality (those facts mentioned in the process of remembering) and in such a way that the reader has the impression the author is telling the truth—whether he tries to be sincere, as for Rousseau, authentic, as for Sartre, or faithful, as for Renan.58 But this notion of truth is highly problematic as Derrida was to show in the two essays he devoted to the question of autobiography, in “Mnemosyne”59 which appeared in Mémoires pour Paul de Man [Memoirs for Paul de Man] and “L’animal que donc je suis (à suivre)”60 [“The animal I therefore am/follow (to be continued)”]. It is first worthwhile to note that Derrida associates the issue of autobiography with that of memory and memoirs— as in Speak, Memory—therefore facing, as we have seen, lapses and errors. But truth is something one must be in quest of while knowing it always recedes or fails to be reached. Derrida used to say in French “Il faut la vérité,” playing on the word “faut” which means “it is necessary” (truth is necessary) but “faut” comes from the French verb “faillir” which has the meaning of “falling” and “failing” (truth is lapsing). That is why, referring to Paul de Man’s essay (“Autobiography as De-facement”61), Derrida recalls that the distinction between fiction and autobiography is not an either/or polarity but is undecidable. De Man explains that it is a system of differentiation based on two elements that, in Wordsworths’s phrase, “of these [are] neither, and [are] both at once.”62 Besides, there is a trope which characterizes autobiography, according to De Man, which is prosopopeia. He writes: We can identify the figure that completes the central metaphor of the sun and thus completes the tropological spectrum that the sun engenders: it is the figure of prosopopeia, the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon). Prosopopeia is the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name, as in Milton’s poem, is made as intelligible and memorable as a face. Our topic deals with the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration.63

Thus, by restoring a voice to an absent, voiceless entity, the autobiographer confers a face on himself, as memorable as a name and therefore a signature, but disappears and effaces himself to let words take

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the lead. Just as the author recedes and ultimately effaces himself after having appeared and posited himself, the autobiographer offers a selfportrait and eventually retreats and then reappears before retreating again, in an endless apparition-retreat movement. This idea of self-effacement that De Man confines to autobiography shall be developed in a deeper way as regards authorship in the conclusion but is, I think, indebted to Blanchot whose discourse has been so well exploited in a recent French book by Pierre Zaoui entitled La Discrétion ou L’Art de disparaître64 [Discretion or The Art of diseappearing]. In his book, Zaoui advocates retreat not out of mere indifference but for reserve. Creating, giving, loving require the ability of discretion, and self-effacement therefore requires the necessary double movement we met with regards to memory, an active and passive movement which entails the capacity to welcome the other. So the genre of the autobiography is definitively linked to identity, a topic we shall tackle later. But I first wish to deal with the two issues associated with autobiography, namely reality and truth. In the case of Speak, Memory, it might therefore be useful to wonder about the duplicitous presence of facts and fiction within it, as well as the in-built impasse of the genre itself as regards truth.

What Does the Autobiography Contain? As an autobiography is supposed to report somebody’s events and thoughts, it should be as realistic as possible, as close to reality and facts as possible. Speak, Memory deals with the author’s family circle, his education, his affective life, and the birth of his vocation. A comparison between Boyd’s biography and Nabokov’s autobiography gives evidence of the author’s reliability as one who gives accurate information about his childhood, his adolescence, his studies, the places where he lived and shows an almost scientific talent in the soundness of his descriptions. Yet Nabokov wrote a letter to Doubleday in 1946 in which he declared: “I am writing you to explain a few things about my next book. This will be a new kind of autobiography, or rather a new hybrid between that and a novel.”65 Nabokov was not the first one to announce that he was going to write a new kind of autobiography. When Montaigne, for example, affirmed in his address to the reader of his Essays: “I desire therein to be delineated in mine own genuine, simple, and ordinary fashion, without contention, art, or study; for it is myself I portray”66; he was undoubtedly launching a new type of writing. Rousseau too wrote at the beginning of his Confessions: “I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present

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my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself.”67 Both are conscious of the novelty of their enterprise because their topic is themselves and they indeed paved the way to the genre of secular confessional writing (Augustine was addressing God in his Confessions). But the word that stands out in Nabokov’s sentence is “hybrid” (which reminds us of the “mongrel blend of Slavic and Germanic”68 of the language of the country of Bend Sinister) because he knew he was going to mingle facts (associated with autobiography) and fiction (associated with novels). One of the best and most telling examples of the contamination of fiction in fact is “Mademoiselle O” and this was well analyzed by Maurice Couturier in his 1993 book. Thus Couturier recalls that the status of the text had never really been established by the author, as it was integrated in his autobiography but also in his collection of short stories.69 De Man too admits in his “Autobiography As DeFacement” that “Autobiography seems to depend on actual and potentially verifiable events in a less ambivalent way that fiction does.”70 But he goes on to say that autobiography is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs to some degree in all texts. So since all texts seem to be autobiographical, none of them is or can be. De Man here proves again the relevance of Derridean concepts—not only that of undecidability but also that of impurity in relation to generic belonging. A text participates in a genre but never totally belongs to it. Another way to account for this hybridity is to recall the way Derrida considers reference and the process of referentiality. Derrida has never questioned the actuality of reality in literature but he considers that the relation to reference is “suspended.” Regarding this, Derrida said the following in his interview with Derek Attridge: “Suspended means suspense, but also dependence, condition, conditionality.”71 It is Andrew Bennett who, in his book entitled The Author, highlights this sentence and comments on it in the following way: Crucial to this claim is Derrida’s sense that if literature involves a ‘suspended relation to meaning or reference’ – where ‘suspend’ involves a state of ‘indecision’, a putting on hold, a temporal deferral – it also involves a relation of dependency, as when an addict is dependent on his drug, or, rather differently, perhaps, a bungee-jumper on his rubber cable: both are dependent, suspended, held up, kept from falling. So one way of thinking about literary texts, about the literariness of literary texts, one way of discriminating such texts from other discourses, other uses of language (scientific, philosophical, conversational, are Derrida’s examples […] ) is that they have this particular, duplicitous or double relation to meaning and reference. Literature both suspends reference and is dependent on it.72

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This clear explanation gives a good account of Nabokov’s intention to write a hybrid between an autobiography and a novel and reinforces our argument about the fact that Speak, Memory is not merely factual but literary. The reader had become well aware of this thanks to the particular pleasure it gives. So, if, according to De Man, all texts have unsurprisingly autobiographical overtones, all “good” or successful autobiographies should have a fictional or literary dimension, all the more so as it is usually considered that even biographies should not only be scientific (based on “real” facts) but artistic (well written with a sense of narrative suspense). Yet Nabokov made a point of having some facts not really hidden but silenced, namely “the creative part of [his] European past” (11) and “certain proper names” (12). For his creative past, he refers to the introductions he wrote to the English translations of his Russian novels and to a fictive production, Dar (The Gift). For his relatives and familiars, he changed their names, he says, “to avoid hurting the living or distressing the dead” (12). Nabokov therefore gives evidence of his reserve with regard to his intimate life. Another example which proves this feature is the way he mentions his father’s death. It is obvious that it was highly painful to him, but his brief and oblique allusions render the event even more poignant because it is revealed in a very discreet and reserved manner. Neither did he expatiate on his marriage and his relationship with his wife Véra, thereby demonstrating that one may wish to exhibit and/or hide at the same time aspects of one’s life in an autobiography, and showing consequently that the quest for truth is a problematic issue in autobiographies.

The Autobiography as an Impossible Genre Nabokov himself was aware that he had embarked on a genre which was characterized by its impossible self-closure as, being the account of one’s life, it should give account of (but cannot) the edges of life that is the birth and the death of the author. He was indeed well aware of this dilemma as he began the first chapter with these telling sentences: The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour), I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged–the same house, the same

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In this beautiful passage, Nabokov manages to show the proximity that exists between birth and death as both are surrounded by “eternities of darkness” and he here highlights with great originality the “prenatal abyss” which he relates to the postmortem one. Death is present and felt even before birth as it is associated with absence (“he did not exist there”) and the final metaphor comparing the baby carriage to a coffin demonstrates how the enterprise of an autobiography is not merely the evocation of one’s life but necessarily the intimation of one’s death. This may explain why Derrida changed the word “autobiography” and “autobiographical” first into “autothanatography” [autothanatographie] and then as we shall explain later, “heterothanatographical” [hétérothanatographique].74 In a recent book, Jean-Luc Nancy has shown how there is also an intuition of death in the portrait (and we remember how an autobiography can be compared to a self-portrait). He writes: “Le portrait implique une absence essentielle contemporaine de la présence vivante de son modèle.”75 [“Portraiture implies an essential and contemporary absence of the living presence of the model”]. One of the best examples is that of photography which testifies to the process of absence in the image, and it is not therefore surprising that Nabokov resorts to movies to insist on the presence of death in images, writing and autobiographies. So by being unable to give an account of one’s death the autobiographer comes up against the end of his book. The end of an autobiography being necessarily suspended, one is always tempted by a continuation, and Nabokov had the intention to compose a second volume which he meant to entitle Speak, America and in which he wanted to cover the 1940-1960 years he spent in that country. Thus he wrote in 1970 to the Library of Congress asking for letters and notes for the setting up of the second volume, he said, of his memoirs76 and, on January 31st, 1973, he wrote to the Vice-President of McGraw-Hill: A more definite plan is writing SPEAK, AMERICA a continuation of my ‘SPEAK, MEMORY.’ I have already accumulated a number of notes, diaries, letters, etc., but in order to describe my American years adequately I should need money to revisit several spots in America such as New York, Boston, Ithaca, The Grand Canyon, and a few other Western localities. About fifteen months in all would be required for completing that book which is now much clearer in my mind than it had been before. I would be

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careful not to hurt people, so that there would be no need to wait for everybody to die safely.77

We note here again his attention to realistic details (“to describe [his] American years adequately”), his discretion and reserve, and his allusion to death. His quest for “adequacy” testifies to his need to tell the truth (and not make errors). But he did not achieve this second volume. Instead he wrote a novel which appeared in 1974, Look at the Harlequins!, which is the parody of an autobiography78 and which can be considered as a sequel to his autobiography but in the oblique form of fiction. The novel narrates the life and career of someone who strangely resembles that of Nabokov himself. The homodiegetic narrator, Vadim Vadimovitch is a Russian émigré writer—like his double, the author—whose written books are reminiscent of Nabokov’s since it offers a list of books first written in Russian followed by one written in English. The first page of Look at the Harlequins! is as follows: Other Books by the Narrator IN RUSSIAN Tamara 1925 Pawn Takes Queen 1927 Plenilune 1929 Camera Lucida (Slaughter in the Sun) 1931 The Red Top Hat 1934 The Dare 1950 IN ENGLISH See under Real 1939 Esmeralda and Her Parandrus 1941 Dr Olga Repnin 1946 Exile from Mayda 1947 A Kingdom by the Sea 1962 Ardis 197079

The connections to Nabokov’s own novels are more than obvious. Tamara indeed renames his first Russian novel Machenka (Mary, in English) which is the name of the girl in the eleventh chapter of Speak, Memory. Pawn Takes Queen recalls The Defense through the thematic of chess; Camera Lucida is reminiscent of Camera Obscura; The Dare is linked to The Russian novel Dar (The Gift, in English). “A Kingdom by the Sea” was the title Nabokov had first intended to give to Lolita (as a homage to Poe’s poem). Ardis is phonetically similar to his 1969 Ada.80 Although it is

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not necessary to know Nabokov’s life and works to appreciate Look at the Harlequins!, the recognition of the intertextualities and allusions increases the reading pleasure. Vadim writes: I now confess that I was bothered that night, and the next and some time before, by a dream feeling life that my life was the non-identical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man’s life, somewhere on this or another earth. A demon, I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man, that other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier, and crueler than your obedient servant.81

Then the informed reader appreciates the mise-en-abyme device, remembers Krug’s intuition of the presence of an Author-God in Bend Sinister and notices the use of the term “impersonate” to give account of the splitting of the two writers. This oblique autobiography is Nabokov’s testamentary farewell to his readers, as he was not able to finish The Original of Laura. It was thanks to the detour of fiction that he managed to overcome the impasse of his autobiography and its impossible self-closure as well as reach a certain kind of truth. He has chosen to deconstruct the genre through parody, which, according to Gérard Genette, is a counterpoint [contre-chant] as is shown in the etymology of the word which is composed of ôde (ode) and para (beside, next to, alongside).82 It is therefore paradoxically thanks to his imagination that he succeeded in rendering the nuances of the “reality” of his existence.

The Author as a Subject Nabokov was undeniably well aware of the hybridity of the genre of his autobiography but he knew that he was also treating another issue as he declared in a 1947 letter sent to his friend Edmund Wilson, in which he said that he was writing “a new type of autobiography—a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the entangled threads of one’s personality.”83 It was therefore his intention to address the question of identity and subjectivity through the question one raises in an autobiography, that is, “who am I?” Indeed, Georges Nivat considered that “Speak, Memory is Nabokov’s dialogue with his own self.”84 So how does Nabokov see himself in his memoirs? One provisional answer is given at the end of Chapter Eleven (“First Poem”) which tells about the birth of his literary vocation through the writing of his first poem. This is how he narrates the way his recitation of it to his mother and the way she reacted:

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Presently I finished reciting and looked up at her. She was smiling ecstatically through the tears that streamed down her face. ‘How wonderful, how beautiful,’ she said, and with the tenderness in her smile still growing, she passed me a hand mirror so that I might see the smear of blood on my cheekbone where at some indeterminable time I had crushed a gorged mosquito by the unconscious act of propping my cheek on my fist. But I saw more than that. Looking into my own eyes, I had the shocking sensation of finding the mere dregs of my usual self, odds and ends of an evaporated identity which it took my reason quite an effort to gather again in the glass.85

This important passage offers a metaphor of the author’s self which recalls Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage—when the infant becomes aware of its identity through the image of itself it recognizes in a mirror. Here Nabokov has the sensation of a broken and diffracted self (“odds and ends”) disappearing and dissolving (“evaporated identity”) and metamorphosing into a new, reassembled one. We meet again the double movement we found in the structure of the book, a process of fragmentation followed by a new coherence. It appears as if the activity of writing has produced a dissolution or a dissemination of the self which is reminiscent of Kafka’s experience as described by Blanchot: Il semble que Kafka ait précisément reconnu dans ce terrible état de dissolution de lui-même, où il est perdu pour les autres et pour lui, le centre de gravité de l’exigence d’écrire. Là où il se sent détruit jusqu’au fond naît la profondeur qui substitue à la destruction la possibilité de la création la plus grande.86 It seems that Kafka recognized in precisely this terrible state of selfdissolution, where he is lost for others and for himself, the center of gravity of writing’s demand. His feeling profoundly destroyed is the first intimation of the profundity which replaces destruction with the possibility of the greatest creation.87

But self-dissolution may be opposed to a full consciousness of the self as is described by Nabokov in Chapter One (“Past Perfect”). He writes: In probing my childhood (which is the next best to probing one’s eternity) I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold. I had learned numbers and speech more or less simultaneously at a very early date, but the inner knowledge that I was I and that my parents were my parents seems to have been established only later, when it was directly associated with my discovering their age in relation to mine.88

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It is here through the image of an increasing and expanding light that Nabokov gives an account of the emergence of consciousness which originates in and induces perceptive capabilities. It resembles a physical or even corporeal experience which memory is dependent on but in a fragile way. It is thus through the remembrance of his childhood experience that Nabokov manages to represent his sense of being a subject (“I was I”) which is therefore, according to him, associated with consciousness (as for John Locke), perception (as for Maurice Merleau-Ponty), memory and time (as for Henri Bergson). The last feature is the most important one as Nabokov confirms, saying “the beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time” (18): we notice how he underlines again the idea of a birth (expressed in terms such as “beginning,” “dawning”). Later, he even adds: “I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time” (19). Therefore the whole chapter generally testifies to the author’s ability to give an account of abstract, philosophical notions through literary devices such as metaphors, images, suspense or even epiphanies. His sense of being a subject therefore oscillates between a complete loss of himself through self-dissolution and an ecstatic sense of plenitude. But it is difficult to consider the self, to observe it without a minimal distance from oneself, a certain detachment. In his 1995 book entitled Derrida and Autobiography, Robert Smith explains: Self-representation is first and foremost a matter of the subject telling its story to itself: ‘the subject becomes what it is (its essence) by representing itself to itself. The subject must have represented itself to itself before it can represent itself to others. Or, autobiography begins with self-colloquy, the autobiographer not simply writing about the self […] but writing to the self in an internal vocative mode. […] Autobiography takes the form of self-closure, but it can do so only if it has effected a minimal distancing to the self in order to address it.89

This splitting of the self first appears in Nabokov’s writing of his autobiography in the actual separation between the “I” of the first person he uses throughout the book and the “you” he suddenly uses in the fifteenth chapter when he addresses his wife: “I must know where I stand, where you and my son stand.”90 “I” is here spatially opposed to “you” and his son. Nabokov thereby creates a distance within himself thanks to the distancing of his self from his wife and son. An even better example of this inner self-distancing is the role he plays in the sixteenth chapter of the autobiography which he wrote in May 1950, after having completed the

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fifteenth chapter in early April,91 but which was never published. This chapter only appeared in 1999, first in The New Yorker, then as the appendix to the 1999 Everyman’s Library edition. It is called “On Conclusive Evidence” and is the commentary of a pseudo-reviewer of two books of memoirs—Nabokov’s and another one (When Lilacs Last) by a certain Miss Braun. Nabokov—the author of “On Conclusive Evidence”— speaks in the appendix of Mr. Nabokov—the author of Conclusive Evidence later named Speak, Memory—through the voice of a narratorreviewer. Such a device induces a metafictional parodic distance as the author of the appendix plays the role of a fictional editor, miming an authentic one. Nabokov writes and comments on his own text, as he was to do in Lolita with John Ray’s fictional foreword, in Pale Fire with Charles Kinbote’s, and even at the end of Ada. But here is the first example of metafictional paratext. It is worthwhile to note that he began with fictional paratexts, before his first authentic postscript on Lolita in 1956, followed by the introductions to the English translations of his Russian novels in the fifties, sixties and seventies. We have the impression that the pseudoreviewer is impersonating Nabokov as John Ray did, but we remember that Nabokov also had the impression he was impersonating himself. This multiple and receding mise-en-abyme has the effect of multiplying and fictionalizing the strata of Nabokov’s personality. What are, indeed, Nabokov’s different selves? Is he a reviewer, an editor, a biographer, an autobiographer, a critic, a ghostwriter or is he constituted of all those facets? It seems therefore that Nabokov faces himself in a very strange way when he talks about his texts, experiencing a sense of not only being fictionalized but depersonalized. This may explain why, in the appendix, he writes: “It would seem to the reviewer that the permanent importance Conclusive Evidence has, lies in its being the meeting point of an impersonal art form and a very personal life story.”92 What is striking in this sentence is how Nabokov—through the mask of a pseudo-reviewer— juxtaposes the impersonality of art and the actuality of a personal life story. “Impersonality” is the exact word Barthes—echoing Blanchot— resorts to when he refers to Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetics in “The death of the author”, saying “écrire, c’est, à travers une impersonnalité préalable […] atteindre ce point où seul le langage agit, “performe,” et non “moi.” 93 [Writing is, through a prior impersonality […] reaching the point where only language acts, “performs,” and not “me”]. Whereas authors may speak of their very personal lives, writers agree to be deprived of themselves, to renounce their authority in order to efface themselves and reach impersonality. We find again the oscillation between exhibition and retreat, activity and passivity in the self and we can thus better understand

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why, in 1948, Nabokov wrote: “The book […] is an inquiry into the elements that have gone to form my personality, as a writer.”94 Just as The Gift—a Russian novel which was composed in the late thirties before he left for America in 1940—told a story about the narrator/character’s realization of his being a writer, Speak, Memory may actualize this experience—a decade later—and concern Nabokov himself. The writing of his autobiography shows how he has managed to grow aware of and share his essential nature, which is to be a writer. But there is another inner separation or division of the self that Nabokov describes in the appendix through the reviewer’s words, when he writes: It is true that having practically stopped being a Russian writer, he [Mr. Nabokov] is free to discuss Sirin’s work as separate from his own. But one is inclined to think that his true purpose here is to project himself, or at least his most treasured self, into the picture he paints. One is reminded of those problems of ‘objectivity’ that the philosophy of science brings up. An observer makes a detailed picture of the whole universe but when he has finished he realizes that it still lacks something: his own self. So he puts himself in it too. But again a ‘self’ remains outside and so forth, in an endless sequence of projections.95

It seems that the self is constantly and endlessly dividing into an inside and an outside as if the self keeps on creating a void or a gap within itself in order to eject “his most treasured self” outside and welcome the other, and the other seems to be, in Nabokov’s case, his wife (and his son), the “you” he is addressing in the fifteenth chapter which is, in fact, the real last chapter. One is reminded that Nabokov said in the first chapter: “the inner knowledge that I was I and that my parents were my parents seems to have been established […] when it was directly associated with my discovering their age in relation to mine” (18). Identity seems to be linked to the awareness of otherness and intersubjectivity. In the same way, he declared in the last chapter: “I must know where I stand, where you and my son stand” (227). Once again, it is through the confrontation with, and the relationship to, his wife and son that he gains consciousness of his self, defined here in spatial terms. When the author is therefore facing himself in the autobiography, he meets his loved ones—first his parents, then his own family—whom he integrates within himself and carries, and who are indirectly the authors of his work or at least those who are the instigators. So whether the author faces his readers, as in OBEL, whether he ponders on his text, as in the introduction to Bend Sinister, or whether he faces his own self, he comes up against otherness which he incorporates so that the others speak within his own self and project their voices outside.

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Notes 1 Vladimir Nabokov, “Foreword,” Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, 1967 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) 7-12. 2 David Schields, “Autobiographic Rapture and Fictive Irony in Speak, Memory and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,” The Iowa Review 1987 Winter 17 (1): 45. 3 Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994) 83-102. 4 Georges Nivat, “Speak, Memory,” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov 672-85. 5 Dabney Stuart, Nabokov: The Dimensions of Parody (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1978) 164. 6 Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov. The American Years 149. 7 Stuart, Nabokov: The Dimensions of Parody 166. 8 Leland de la Durantaye, “The True Purpose of Autobiography, or the Fate of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory,” The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography, ed. Maria Dibattista and Emily O. Wittman (New York: Cambridge UP, 2014) 168. 9 John Burt Foster, Jr., Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) 182. 10 Brian Boyd, “Introduction,” in Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (London: Everyman’s Library, 1999) xiii. 11 Ellen Pifer, “The ‘Mirrory Beaches’ of Memory: Lolita and Speak, Memory,” Lolita: From Nabokov to Kubrick and Lyne, dir. Erik Martiny (Paris: Sedes, 2009) 37-48. 12 Pifer writes: “Viewed together, the memoir recounting Nabokov’s Russian youth and his most celebrated American novel reveal how seamlessly interwoven are the patterns of his life and art” (37). 13 This information is given by Michael Juliar in Vladimir Nabokov. A Descriptive Bibliography (New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1986) 196-201. 14 This is how Juliar describes the contents (p.197), giving each time the date and place of publication: Excerpted: Mesures, Paris; “Mademoiselle O,” 2/2, 15Apr36. [in French; Chap.5] Excerpted: The Atlantic Monthly, Boston. “Mademoiselle O,” Jan43 [in English] Excerpted: The New Yorker, New York. “Portrait of My Uncle,” 3Jan48. [Chap.3] Written Jun47, Estes Park, CO. Excerpted: The New Yorker, New York. “My English Education,” 27Mar48. [Chap.4]. Written in Cambridge, MA. Excerpted: The New Yorker, New York. “Butterflies,” 12Jun48. [Chap.6]. Written in Cambridge, MA. Excerpted: The New Yorker, New York. “Colette,” 31Jul48. [Chap.7]. Written in Cambridge, MA Excerpted: The New Yorker, New York. “My Russian Education,” 18Sep48. [Chap.9]. Written in Cambridge, MA. Excerpted: The New Yorker, New York. “Curtain Raiser,” 1Jan49. [Chap. 10]. Written in Ithaca, NY.

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Excerpted: The New Yorker, New York. “Portrait of My Mother,” 9Apr49. [Chap.2]. Written in Ithaca, NY. Excerpted: Partisan Review, New York. “First Poem,” Sep49. [Chap.11] Excerpted: The New Yorker, New York. “Tamara,” 10Dec49. [Chap.12]. Written in Ithaca, NY. Excerpted: The New Yorker, New York. “Lantern Slides,” 11Feb50. [Chap.8]. Written in Ithaca, NY. Excerpted: The New Yorker, New York. “Perfect Past,” 15Apr50. [Chapter 1]. Written in Ithaca, NY. Excerpted: The New Yorker, New York. “Gardens and Parks,” 17Jun50. [Chap.15]. Written in Ithaca, NY. Excerpted: Harper’s Magazine, New York. “Lodgings in Trinity Lane,” Jan51. [Chap.13]. Excerpted: Partisan Review, New York. “Exile,” Jan-Feb51. [Chap.14]. It might be interesting to recall the way the chapters were organized: Chapter 1: “Perfect Past,” 15 Apr 50. Chapter 2: “Portrait of My Mother,” 9Apr49. Chapter 3: “Portrait of My Uncle,” 3Jan48. Chapter 4: “My English Education,” 27Mar48. Chapter 5: “Mademoiselle O,” Jan43 [in English] Chapter 6: “Butterflies,” 12Jun48. Chapter 7: “Colette,” 31Jul48. Chapter 8: “Lantern Slides,” 11Feb50. Chapter 9: “My Russian Education,” 18Sep48. Chapter 10: “Curtain Raiser,” 1Jan49. Chapter 11: “First Poem,” Sep49. Chapter 12: “Tamara,” 10Dec49. Chapter 13: “Lodgings in Trinity Lane,” Jan51. Chapter 14: “Exile,” Jan-Feb51. Chapter 15: “Gardens and Parks,” 17Jun50. 15 The best way to be acquainted with this aspect of Nabokov’s activities is to refer to the book entitled Nabokov’s Butterflies, edited and annotated by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle with Nabokov’s various writings and studies on butterflies (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2000). 16 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 7. 17 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 10. 18 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 98. 19 Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990) 422, 425, 426. 20 Foster, Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism 110-29. In this chapter, Foster explains that, after the French version in 1936, the story appeared in English in 1943 in The Atlantic Monthly, then in 1947 in Nine Stories (his first short-story collection as an American author). It became the fifth chapter of Conclusive Evidence (1951) and two further revisions, Foster says, first in Russian, then in English, formed Chapter 5 of his Russian autobiography Drugie Berega

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(1954) and of the final English autobiography, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1967). 21 Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years 60, 69,70. 22 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 75. 23 Vladimir Nabokov, Nouvelles complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 2010) 658-59. 24 Maurice Couturier, Nabokov ou la tyrannie de l’auteur (Paris: Seuil, 1993) 361. 25 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 92-93. 26 Algirdas Julien Greimas et Joseph Courtés, Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage (Paris: Hachette, 1979) 361. 27 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 23. 28 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 211. 29 Vladimir Nabokov, Poems and Problems (New York: Mc Graw-Hill Book Company, 1970) 15. 30 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 16-17. 31 Nabokov, Strong Opinions 31-32. 32 Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967) 423. 33 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 1978 (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2001) 365. 34 Jacques Derrida, Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993) 45. 35 Foster 180. 36 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 172. 37 William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1623 [1-5-189-90] (Paris: Aubier, 1977) 122. 38 The exact quotation is situated in Strong Opinions: “It follows that the combination and juxtaposition of remembered details is a main factor in the artistic process of reconstructing one’s past” (186-87). 39 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 186. 40 Paul Ricœur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000) 10. 41 See the description of the device in Derrida’s essay entitled “Freud et la scène d’écriture” [“Freud and the scene of writing”] in L’Écriture et la difference (32931) [Writing and Difference (280-83)] Derrida quotes there some passages of Freud’s “Note on the Mystic Writing-Pad.” 42 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 75. 43 Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire 343. 44 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 255-56. 45 Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle. L’Autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990) 43. 46 My translation. 47 Nabokov writes in his autobiography: “To fix correctly, in terms of time, some of my childhood recollections, I have to go by comets and eclipses, as historians do when they tackle the fragments of a saga” (22). 48 See my article in the Proceedings of the International Nabokov Conference of Kyoto, Japan and which is entitled “Generic glidings and Endless Writing from The Enchanter to Lolita: A Screenplay through Lolita,” Revising Nabokov Revising, ed. Mitsuyoshi Numano and Tadashi Wakashima (Kyoto: The Nabokov Society of Japan, 2010) 27-32.

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49 Derrida defines “iterability” as follows: “Cette itérabilité (iter, derechef, viendrait de itara, autre en sanskrit, et tout ce qui suit peut être lu comme l’exploitation de cette logique qui lie la répétition à l’altérité) structure la marque d’écriture ellemême, quel que soit d’ailleurs le type d’écriture…” (Limited Inc [Paris: Galilée, 1990] 27) [This iterability (iter, once again, would come from itara, other in Sanskrit, and what follows can be read as the exploitation of this logic which binds repetition to otherness) is the mark of writing itself, whatever, anyway, the type of writing ..] (my translation) 50 Julia Kristeva explains: “Le géno-texte est ainsi non pas l’autre scène par rapport au présent […], mais l’ensemble des autres scènes…” (Sèmiotikè. Recherches pour une sémanalyse [Paris: Seuil, 1969] 222. [The geno-text is thus not the other scene in relation to the present […] but the whole of the other scenes…] (my translation) 51 He writes in the Foreword: “What I still have not been able to rework through want of specific documentation, I have now preferred to delete for the sake of over-all truth” (11). 52 Ricœur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli 643. 53 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 134. A class-conscious reader may find such recollections revealing a certain privileged life but nevertheless feel empathy towards the genuine happiness rendered here about childhood. 54 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 62. 55 Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975) 14. 56 Unpublished sentence quoted by Olivier Mongin in Paul Ricœur (Paris: Seuil, 1994) 130. 57 See my article entitled “Is telling one’s life inventing it? Narration and subjectivity in Nabokov’s autobiography,” PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. December 15, 2009. Available http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/hamrit-is_telling_ones_life_inventing _it_narr. August 16, 2013. 58 This distinction between sincerity, authenticity and faithfulness is suggested by Jean-Philippe Miraux in L’Autobiographie. Écriture de soi et sincérité (Paris: Nathan, 1996) 59 Jacques Derrida, “Mnemosyne,” Mémoires pour Paul de Man (Paris: Galilée, 1988) 23-57. 60 Jacques Derrida, “L’animal que donc je suis (à suivre),” L’Animal autobiographique (Autour de Jacques Derrida), dir. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 1999) 251-301. 61 Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Cambridge UP, 1984) 67-81. 62 The exact phrase can be found in The Prelude (Book V, line 126) where Wordsworth writes: “Upon a dromedary, lance in rest, He rode, I keeping pace with him, and now I fancied that he was the very knight Whose tale Cervantes tells, yet not the knight, But was an Arab of the desert too;

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Of these was neither, and was both at once.” This expression accurately renders the paradoxical tension inherent in the notion of undecidability, which we already met with in the ethics/aesthetics impasse in Lolita. 63 De Man 75-76. 64 Zaoui, Pierre. La Discrétion ou L’Art de disparaître (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2013). 65 Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977, ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Mathew J. Bruccoli 1989 (New York: Vintage, 1991) 69. 66 Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. John Florio, 1580 (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2005) 9. 67 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of J.J. Rousseau, 1782 (McLean, Virginia: IndyPublish.com, 1903) 1. 68 Nabokov, “Introduction,” Bend Sinister 9. 69 Couturier, Nabokov ou La Tyrannie de l’auteur 358. 70 De Man, “Autobiography As De-Facement,” 68. 71 Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York, London: Routledge, 1992) 48. 72 Andrew Bennett, The Author (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) 119. 73 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 17. 74 Jacques Derrida, La Carte Postale de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980) 291. 75 Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Autre Portrait (Paris: Galilée, 2014) 19. 76 Nabokov, Selected Letters 475. 77 Nabokov, Selected Letters 508. 78 See the analysis of parody as a deconstructive device in the article by Herbert Grabes entitled “The Deconstruction of Autobiography: Look at the Harlequins!,” Cycnos 10.1 (1993): 151-58. 79 Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!, 1974 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980) 7. 80 In order to have a more complete elucidation of the intertextual allusions and comparisons between Nabokov’s works and those of the narrator, one may refer to Herbert Grabes ’ Fictitious Biographies: Vladimir Nabokov’s English Novels (La Haye: Mouton, 1977) 125-27. 81 Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! 76. 82 Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes. La Littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982)17. 83 Vladimir Nabokov, The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, ed. Simon Karlinski, 1979 (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980) 188. 84 Nivat 674. 85 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 176. 86 Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire 71. 87 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 62-63. 88 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 18. 89 Robert Smith, Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 63.

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90 Nabokov, Speak, Memory 227. 91 Brian Boyd, “Introduction,” in Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York, London, Toronto: Everyman’s Library, 1999) xxiv. 92 Nabokov, Speak, Memory (Everyman’s Library, 1999) 248. 93 Roland Barthes, “La Mort de l’auteur,” Essais critiques IV. Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984) 62. 94 Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977 88. 95 Nabokov, Speak, Memory (Everyman’s Library, 1999) 254.

CONCLUSION

It now seems possible to present the characteristics and functions of Nabokovian prefaces (knowing that, following Genette’s recommendation, I am using the term “preface” for any liminal text, be it preliminary or postliminary, consisting in a discourse produced on a following text or a preceding one) and then wonder about what they teach us about the figure of Nabokov as an author. In the introduction, I mentioned the fact that, according to Derrida, prefaces raise the issues of genre, history, text, meaning and eventually authorship. Having now analyzed the prefaces Nabokov wrote on his English novels (remembering that Speak, Memory is for the author a hybrid between a novel and an autobiography), I propose to list the prefaces, which he composed mainly in the sixties and the seventies. Here is a list which I put together from the information given in Michael Juliar’s bibliography and which is presented here in a chronological order (with the dates and places of publication, when specified). Most of them appeared on the occasion of the publications of the translations of his Russian novels into English but he also wrote introductions to his collections of short stories or poems, his own translations of foreign texts, and even his play The Waltz Invention. 1) Prefaces of two English novels and the autobiography: -

12 November 1956 (United States): Lolita 9 September 1963 (Montreux): Bend Sinister 5 January 1966 (Montreux): Speak, Memory

2) Prefaces written on the occasion of the English-language editions of his Russian novels: 25 June 1959 (Oak Creek Canyon, Arizona): Invitation to a Beheading 28 March 1962 (Montreux): The Gift 15 December 1963 (Montreux): The Defence 1 March 1965 (Montreux): Despair 19 April 1965 (Montreux): The Eye 28 March 1967(Montreux): King, Queen, Knave

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-

9 January 1970 (the place is not specified): Mary 8 December 1970 (Montreux): Glory

3) Other introductions translations):

(theatre;

short

stories;

poems,

a) -

Theatre 8 December 1965: The Waltz Invention

a) -

Short stories 18 September 1958: Nabokov’s Dozen 10 March 1966: Nabokov’s Quartet 10 April 1973: A Russian Beauty and Other Stories 31 December 1974: Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories 1975 (Montreux): Details of a Sunset and Other Stories

a) -

Poems December 1969 (Montreux): Poems and Problems

a) Translations 6 March 1958: A Hero of our Time (Translation of Lermontov’s novel) 12 September 1960: The Song of Igor’s Campaign (Translation into English of an epic text) 30 December 1964: Eugene Onegin 3)

Around Lolita

12 November 1956: “On a Book Entitled Lolita” 7 November 1965 (Palermo): Lolita translated into Russian by the author; the postface was translated into English by Earl D. Sampson in Nabokov’s Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on His Life’s Work, ed. J.E. Rivers and Charles Nicol (Austin: U of Texas P, 1982) December 1973 (Montreux): Lolita: A Screenplay What is first noticeable is that Nabokov wrote his first authentic (not fictional) preface for Lolita and that, except for his collection of short stories in 1975, he almost concluded his practice in 1973 on the occasion of Lolita or more exactly its screenplay, testifying thereby, once more, to the paramount importance of the novel in his career and lifetime. They

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were all written in a deferred time—mainly in the sixties or the seventies, when he was living in Switzerland—long after the main texts (Russian novels, for instance) were published, this was undoubtedly because of the celebrity he gained from the success of Lolita but also because they were used as a reflection on the past and were thereby historically significant. The very process of writing is therefore inscribed in a belated time which Freud referred to as Nachträglichkeit—the concept which he resorted to to provide an account of the effect of trauma and to which Derrida is indebted for his own concept of Différance.1 This belatedness is at the core of the writing procedure of prefaces as they are always composed at a later time, always after the time the main texts were written. They change as the temporal gap becomes larger and distance lengthens. Thus, in the case of Lolita, Nabokov reiterated his postfaces—1956, 1965, 1973—as if one postscript was not enough, as if the postscript could not be immobilized and frozen, pretending to stand as a final discourse, showing how the writing of prefaces was endlessly opening the texts it was about. But if we try to analyze the dates of publication of the other prefaces, we notice that he first wrote introductions to collections of short stories with Nabokov’s Dozen in 1958, which may be understandable as an introduction gives a certain coherence to the disparity of the collection, and kept on doing so until the end, in 1975. We also note that Invitation to a Beheading and The Gift were the first Russian novels to be translated into English (1959/1962) and therefore presented by Nabokov although they were the last to be written, in the late thirties. Nabokov continued writing prefaces in the sixties and seventies. As for the prefaces to the translations of his Russian novels, there are indeed almost always some commentaries on translation per se but they become more and more introspective as if the text itself were a pretext for retrospection on his life—he began writing prefaces at the age of 57—acting thereby as surviving traces of his written work, as holds enabling him to anchor on reality and public life prolonging thus his autobiography which had already played this role. Beyond this temporal function, the genre of the preface is also significant. Being a text following or preceding another text, and therefore a paratext—where “para” means “alongside,” “next to,” “beside”—it entertains a particular relationship with the “main” text as it acts as a graft inserted in the opening gaps of the text on which it comments. I am referring here to a text by Derrida in Dissemination where he defines “graft” as

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Conclusion the sustained, discrete violence of an incision that is not apparent in the thickness of the text, a calculated insemination of the proliferating allogene through which the two texts are transformed, deform each other, contaminate each other’s content, tend at times to reject each other, or pass elliptically one into the other and become regenerated in the repetition, along the edges of an overcast seam [un surjet].2

This extract epitomizes the performance of a preface which transforms the juxtaposed text and is transformed by it in a disseminating contamination. The best example is that of Lolita which can almost not be read or interpreted without its postscript which regenerates its meaning obliquely. It is indeed thanks to the role of the postscript that we have better realized our own understanding of the undecidability of the aesthetics/ethics tension. Although the reading of a preface may be optional—one can skip a preface—it may at times be necessary, as in Lolita’s case. Moreover, it is a place where the author exposes his opinion; it is a site testifying no longer to the temporality of writing but to its spatiality. Moreover, it is both turned towards the past of the text which is commented on, and towards its future readings and, as such, it becomes a promise meant to seduce the reader into beginning to read. It creates desire and acts as the preliminaries of a reading pleasure. It may clarify the meaning of a text, guide the reader and Nabokov indeed tried to correct incorrect interpretations in his first examples but gradually his prefaces became more and more like dream-like reactions to his own work as he became more and more aware of the fact they were the place where he was acting the role of an author. I chose to focus on prefaces for my corpus—as I said in the introduction—for strategic reasons because they appear useful for the analysis of authorship. Whereas an author never speaks in his name in fiction, hiding behind a narrator or characters, he may express his opinions in prefaces, just as he does in articles or interviews, and that is why Nabokov’s discourse in the prefaces is in keeping with that of the corpus of items assembled in Strong Opinions. Genette has given a name to this type of discourse in Seuils, calling it épitexte [epitext] and defining it as whatever appears outside the book—newspapers, journals, radio or television programs, conferences, symposiums, interviews, correspondences, authors’ diaries.3 I have shown, in the first chapter, that the author’s legitimacy is, under such circumstances, effective but limited as it clashes with the reader’s. Yet, his discourse is nevertheless particular to prefaces as it seems indeed an authoritative one. Derrida considers that “From the viewpoint of the fore-word, […] the text exists as something written—a past—which, under the false appearance of a present, a hidden omnipotent

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author (in full mastery of his product) is presenting to the reader as his future.”4 The author appears therefore as an “omnipotent author,” who acts, Derrida specifies later, as “a father assisting and admiring his work.”5 It is therefore an authority that seems to confirm and be confirmed by Nabokov’s own position when he declared in Mary’s introduction in 1970: I feel no embarrassment in confessing to the sentimental stab of my attachment to my first book. Its flaws, the artefacts of innocence and inexperience, which any criticule could tabulate with jocose ease, are compensated by me (the sole judge in this case and court).6 [my emphasis]

When we read this, we have the impression that Couturier is right when he argues for Nabokov’s tyrannical authority and that this strengthens the principle that the author is definitively alive and present. Yet such a theory may be qualified as Nabokov’s gesture is double and contradictory. After offering his texts to his readers, he indeed takes over and controls them, trying to “be in full mastery of his product” but his effort is illusory as he soon loses that mastery, something Derrida calls “exappropriation” which he describes as follows: Ce que je voudrais entendre par 'exappropriation’, c'est que le geste de s'approprier, et donc de pouvoir garder en son nom, marquer de son nom, laisser en son nom, comme un testament ou un héritage, il faut l'exproprier, il faut s'en séparer. C'est ce que l'on fait quand on écrit, quand on publie, quand on jette des choses sur la scène publique. On s'en sépare, ça vit, pour ainsi dire, sans nous. Et donc pour pouvoir revendiquer une œuvre, un livre, une œuvre d'art ou quoi que soit d'autre, un acte politique, une législation ou une initiative quelconque, pour se l'approprier, pour l'assigner à quelqu'un, il faut la perdre, il faut l'abandonner, il faut l'exproprier. C'est la condition de cette ruse terrible: il faut perdre ce que l'on veut garder et on ne peut garder qu'à la condition de perdre. C'est très douloureux. Le fait même de publier est douloureux. Ça part, on ne sait pas où ça va, ça porte son nom, puis, c'est horrible–on n'est même plus capable de le reconstituer soi-même, ni même de le lire. C'est ça l’exappropriation’, qui vaut d'ailleurs, non seulement pour ce dont nous parlons facilement, c'est-à-dire, des œuvres littéraires ou philosophiques, mais pour tout; pour le capital, pour l'économie en général.7 What I mean by “exappropriation” is that appropriating something, and being therefore able to keep it in one's name, to write one's name on it, to leave it behind in one's name like a testament or inheritance, you've got to expropriate it, part from it. That's what you do when you write, when you publish, when you throw something onto the public stage. You part from it and it starts living a life of its own, as it were, without us. So in order to be able to claim a work, a book, a work of art or anything else, a policy or

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Conclusion legislation or any kind of initiative, to appropriate it, to assign it to someone, it is necessary to lose it, to leave it, to expropriate it. That is the condition of such a dreadful trick: you've got to lose what you want to keep and you can only keep it if you lose it. It is very painful. The very act of publishing involves pain. It goes you don't know where, it bears your name, then it's terrible–you can't even piece it back together, or even read it. That's what I call ‘exappropriation,’ which also applies, not only to what we so easily talk about, i.e. literary or philosophical works, but also to everything else, to capital, to economy in general.

In this long quotation, Derrida gives a good account of Nabokov’s ambivalent attitude in the writing of his prefaces as he indeed responds to his readers and critics. In the case of Lolita, he defends his novel, pleads against censorship and wrong interpretations. He never forgets to intersperse his text with polemical statements. His attitude is therefore one of authority, all the more so as he is constantly deceptive or even unreliable. It is rarely possible to trust him, to take his word for granted. He himself warns in the introduction to King, Queen, Knave that his “good old partners […] will think [he is] bluffing.”8 Yet this authority seems to be undermined by features which sometimes indicate a certain fragility or vulnerability due to moments of disillusionment, regret and pain. David M. Bethea had already underlined Nabokov’s vulnerability in 1995 when he described what he calls the two chief, competing quiddities of his personality: his seeming invulnerability, which at moments of hyperconsciousness or ‘cosmic synchronization’ in the novels approaches God’s position on the outside, and his real–though exquisitely disguised–vulnerability, which was an extension of his love for others that, despite his great gifts was subject to the wages of time.9

This vulnerability is apparent, for example, when he refers to the feelings he experienced when he translated Lolita into Russian. Indeed he wrote in 1967 in the postscript he added to the Russian edition of Lolita that “the history of this translation is a history of disillusionment.”10 Likewise, this is how he commented on Kubrick’s film: “My first reaction to the picture was a mixture of aggravation, regret, and reluctant pleasure.”11 Regret is often due to a feeling of loss and the sense of the irreversibility of time. What Bethea rightly calls “the two competing quiddities of his personality” may correspond to Nabokov’s inner tension between his attempts for mastery and his loss of full mastery, what Derrida calls “mastery without mastery” in connection with the double gesture of appropriating something, that is controlling it, having it under one’s power

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and, at the same time, expropriating it, losing control, loosening one’s grip. It is therefore possible for a reader to approach and feel empathy for this aspect of his personality which corresponds to the author’s real intimacy which is not a biographical one—Nabokov’s secrecy is intact— but which is situated at the place where his thought is being unfolded even before it is clearly articulated, when it is still merely a pre-ontological intuition. This intuition is at the core of an ontological vertigo inducing an existential anxiety that only writing enabled Nabokov to overcome. He referred to that anxiety in the Foreword he wrote to Glory in 1970 when he declared: My second wand-stroke is this: among the many gifts I showered on Martin, I was careful not to include talent. How easy it would have been to make him an artist, a writer, how hard not to let him be one, while bestowing on him the keen sensitivity that one associates with the creative creature; how cruel to prevent him from finding in art–not an ‘escape’ (which is only a cleaner cell on a quitter floor), but relief from the itch of being!12

Here Nabokov expresses a very strong opinion about art and creation which deepens and specifies his well-known definition of art which he gave in his postscript to Lolita, when he wrote: “For me, a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”13 Art, therefore, for Nabokov, affords ecstatic, blissful moments of happiness and generosity but it also helps to relieve what he calls “the itch of being” which may be understood as the desire to live but also the pain it is connected to. We may remember Nabokov’s plea for life when he exclaimed: “The main thing is to experience that tingle in any department of thought or emotion. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.”14 So, the “itch of being” may be related to this “tingle” in thought or emotion, but it may also allude to something else as the term “being” may correspond to something more than mere life and be comprised not only of the will to live but also of the approach of death inducing existential anxiety. Indeed, beyond and behind his mask where he exhibits authority, there lies not only vulnerability, or even the thrill of living, but a feeling of death as already alluded to in the very first lines of his autobiography and later explicitly mentioned in his last unfinished novel’s subtitle, “Dying is fun.”15 Being includes both Eros

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and Thanatos, as it is situated before or beyond these two drives and Nabokov knew he had to, not die, but efface himself in order to be, not only an author—the author of his mere discourse—but a writer. It is in that sense that speech may differ from writing as speech belongs, in Nabokov’s case, to his secular, mundane self, whereas he approached another state of being when he was writing. Authorship is therefore related to style as he declared twice: “The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”16 Style, here, should be understood as the specificities of Nabokov’s writings, what makes them singular and recognizable, what corresponds to his voice and/or signature, what makes him unique. It is, indeed, as he said himself,17 because he wrote Lolita that he became a famous author.

Notes 1 For a more profound analysis of the link which I argue exists between Freud’s Nachträglichkeit and Derrida’s Différance, see my article entitled “Nachträglichkeit,” PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. Available at: http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/hamrit-nachtrglichkeit. August 4, 2014. Received: February 20, 2008, Published: July 16, 2008. Copyright © 2008 Jacqueline Hamrit. 2 Derrida, Dissemination 355. 3 Genette, Seuils 316-17. 4 Derrida, Dissemination 7. 5 Derrida, Dissemination 44. 6 Vladimir Nabokov, “Introduction,” Mary. 1970 (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1973) 10. 7 Jacques Derrida, “Dialogue entre Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy,” Rue Descartes n°52 (2006): 94. 8 Vladimir Nabokov, “Foreword,” King, Queen, Knave, 1968 (London: Penguin Books, 1993) ix. 9 David M. Bethea, “Style,” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov 697. 10 Vladimir Nabokov, “Postscript to the Russian Edition of Lolita,” trans. Earl D. Sampson in Nabokov’s Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on his Life’s Work, ed. J.E. Rivers and Charles Nicol (Austin: U of Texas P, 1982) 190. 11 Vladimir Nabokov, “Foreword,” Lolita: A Screenplay (New York: McGrawHill International, Inc., 1974) xiii. 12 Vladimir Nabokov, “Foreword,” Glory, 1971 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974) 10. 13 Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” The Annotated Lolita 314-15. 14 Vladimir Nabokov, “L’Envoi,” Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (San Diego, New York, London: A Harvest Book, Bruccoli Clark, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1980) 382.

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15 Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (London: Penguin Books, 2009) i. 16 Vladimir Nabokov, “Introduction,” Mary, 1970 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973) 10. 17 He declared in 1966: “Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name” (Strong Opinions 107).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bibliographical Sources 1) Books and Articles Edmunds, Jeff. “Nabokov, ou Le Vrai et l’invraisemblable.” An annotated bibliography of French Nabokov Criticism www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm (2/27/98) Field, Andrew. Nabokov: A Bibliography. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1973. 250 pp. Juliar, Michael. Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1986. 780 pp. Schuman, Samuel. Vladimir Nabokov: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. 214 pp. Zimmer, Dieter. Vladimir Nabokov: Bibliographie des Gesamtwerks. Reinbeck: Rowolt, 1963. 50 pp. —. Vladimir Nabokov: A Bibliography of Criticism. June 2002 ( www.libraries.psu.edu//nabokov /zembla.htm with updates by Jeff Edmunds (updated 11/3/09)

2) Journals and Online Resources Nabokov Studies. Ed. Zoran Kuzmanovitch. Davidson College, Davidson NC28036, USA. Th e Nabo kovian. Ed. Priscilla Meyer. Russian Department. Wesleyan U. Middleton, CT 06459 www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/tn.htm The International Vladimir Nabokov Society www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/nabsoc.htm Nabokv – L, [email protected]. Nabokov Online Journal http://www.nabokovonline.com Nabokov Museum: www.nabokovmuseum.org The Nabokov Society of Japan http://vnjapan.org Société Française. Vladimir Nabokov www.vladimir-nabokov.org/ association-chercheurs-enchantes-version-anglaise Zembla: http: www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm.

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Primary Sources 1) Novels First Written in Russian a) First English editions Mary. 1926. Trans. Michael Glenny and the author. New York: Mc GrawHill, 1970. 114 pp. King, Queen, Knave. 1928. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1968. 272 pp. The Defense. 1930. Trans. Michael Scammel in collaboration with the author. New York: G. P. Popular Library, 1964. 254 pp. The Eye. 1930. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. New York: Phaedra, 1965. 114 pp. Glory. 1932. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1971. 205 pp. Laughter in the Dark. 1933. Trans. The author. New York: The BobbsMerrill Company, 1938. 292 pp. Despair. 1936. Trans. The author. London: John Long, 1937. 286 pp. Trans. The author. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966. 222 pp. The Gift. 1937. Trans. Michael Scammell with the collaboration of the author. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1963. 378 pp. Invitation to a Beheading. 1938. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. New York: Putnam's Sons, 1959. 223 pp. The Enchanter. 1939. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Putnam, 1986. 127 pp. b) Pocket Editions Mary. 1926. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973. 106 pp. King, Queen, Knave. 1928. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993. 272 pp. The Luzhin Defense. 1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994. 266 pp. The Eye. 1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992. 103 pp. Glory. 1932. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974. 188 pp. Laughter in the Dark. 1933. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963. 187 pp. Despair. 1936. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981. 176 pp. The Gift. 1937. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981. 333 pp.

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Invitation to a Beheading. 1938. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963. 191 pp. The Enchanter. London: Pan Books, “Picador,” 1986. 127 pp.

2) Novels Written in English a) First Editions The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Norfolk: New Directions, 1941. 205 pp. Bend Sinister. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947. 242 pp. Lolita. Paris: The Olympia P, 1955. 188 + 223 pp. Pnin. New York: Doubleday, 1957. 191 pp. Pale Fire. New York: G. P. Putman's Sons, 1962. 315 pp. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1969. 626 pp. Transparent Things. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1972. 104 pp. Look at the Harlequins! New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1974. 253 pp. The Original of Laura. (Dying is Fun). Ed. Dmitri Nabokov. London: Penguin Classics, 2009. 278 pp. b) Pocket Editions The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. 1941. New York: New Direction Paper Book, 1959. 205 pp. Bend Sinister. 1947. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974. 201 pp. Lolita. 1955. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981. 315 pp. Pnin. 1957. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960. 160 pp. Pale Fire. 1962. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973. 248 pp. Ada. 1969. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971. 477 pp. Transparent Things. 1972. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975. 107 pp. Look at the Harlequins! 1974. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980. 197 pp.

3) Autobiography Conclusive Evidence. New York: Harper, 1951. 240 pp. Rev. ed. Speak, Memory: a Memoir. New York: Grosset Dunlap, 1960. 240 pp. Rev. ed. Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967. 316 pp. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. 1967. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969. 242 pp.

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Speak, Memory. 1967. Revised edition with a new appendix, containing the previously unpublished chapter 16. London: Everyman’s Library, 1999. 268 pp.

4) Letters and Interviews Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973. 345 pp. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters. Ed. Simon Karlinsky. 1979. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980. 346 pp. Dear Bunny, dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971. Revised and Expanded Edition. Ed. Simon Karlinski. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. Selected Letters, 1940-1977. Ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Mathew J. Bruccoli. 1989. New York: Vintage, 1991. 582 pp.

5) Poems, Short Stories, Plays a) Collections of Poems Poems. New York: Doubleday, 1959. 43 pp. Poems and Problems. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1971. 218 pp. Selected Poems. Ed.Thomas Karshan. (New translations by Dmitri Nabokov) New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. 203 pp. b) Short Stories i) First Editions Nine Stories. New York: New Directions, 1947. 126 pp. Nabokov's Dozen. New York: Doubleday, 1958. 214 pp. Nabokov's Quartet. New York: Phaedra, 1966. 104 pp. A Russian Beauty and Other Stories. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1973. 268 pp. Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1975. 238 pp. Details of a Sunset and Other Stories. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1976. 179 pp. La Vénitienne. Trans. Bernard Kreise et Gilles Barbedette. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. 210 pp. Collected Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. 659 pp.

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ii) Pocket Editions Nabokov's Dozen. 1958. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960. 173 pp. A Russian Beauty and Other Stories. 1973. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975. 237 pp. Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories. 1975. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981. 219 pp. Details of a Sunset and Other Stories. 1976. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994. 179 pp. Collected Stories. 1995. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997. 663 pp. c) Plays Lolita: A Screenplay. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. 213 pp. The Waltz Invention. 1938. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov and the author. New York: Phaedra, 1966. 111 pp. The Man from the USSR and Other Plays. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. 342 pp.

6) Literary Criticism, Essays, Translations a) First Editions Translations Three Russian Poets. Norfolk: New Directions, 1944. 37 pp. A Hero of our Time. New York: Doubleday, 1958. 210 pp. The Song of Igor's Campaign. New York: Vintage, 1960. 135 pp. Eugene Onegin. New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1964. 345 + 547 + 539 + 560 pp. Verses and Versions. (Three Centuries of Russian Poetry selected and translated by Vladimir Nabokov) Ed. Brian Boyd and Stanislav Shvabrin. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2008. Essays, Lectures Nikolai Gogol. 1944. Norfolk: New Directions, 1959. 174 pp. “The Creative Writer.” Bulletin of the New England Modern Language Association 4.1 (1942): 21-29. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980. 385 pp. Lectures on Ulysses. Bloomfield Hills, MI: Bruccoli Clark, 1980. 144 pp. Lectures on Russian Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. XVII + 324 pp.

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Lectures on Don Quixote. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. XIX + 219 pp. “Pouchkine, ou Le Vrai et le Vraisemblable.” [by Vladimir NabokoffSirine]. La Nouvelle Revue Française 48 (1937): 362-78. a) Pocket Editions Lectures on Literature. London: Picador, Pan Books, 1983. 385 pp. Lectures on Russian Literature. London: Picador, Pan Books, 1983. 332 pp.

Secondary Sources 1) Biographies Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. 607 pp. —. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. 783 pp. Desanti, Dominique. Vladimir Nabokov. Paris: Julliard, 1994. 229 pp. Diment, Galya. Pniniad. Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeltel. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1997. 202 pp. Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Part. New York: Viking, 1977. 285 pp. Grayson, Jane. Vladimir Nabokov. London: Penguin, 2001. 146 pp. Nabokov, Dmitri. “In Memoriam.” In Memoriam: Vladimir Nabokov 1899-1977. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977. 41-42. —. “On Revisiting Father’s Room.” Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute. Ed. Peter Quenell. New York: William Morrow, 1980. 126-36. —. “Things I Could Have Said.” Cycnos 10.1 (1993): 75-76. —. “A Few Things That Must Be Said on Behalf of Vladimir Nabokov.” Nabokov’s Fifth Arc. Ed. Julius Edwin Rivers and Charles Nicol. Austin: U of Texas P, 1982. 35-42. Proffer, Ellendea, ed. and comp. A Pictorial Biography. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1991. 133 pp. Prokosch, Frederick. Voices: A Memoir. New York: Farras, Strauss Giroux, 1983. 343 pp. Schiff, Stacy. Véra (Mrs Vladimir Nabokov). 1999. New York: Modern Library, 2000. 456 pp. Semochkin, Aleksandr. Nabokov’s Paradise Lost: The Family Estates in Russia. St. Petersburg: Liga Plus, 1999. 127 pp.

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Van Antwerp, Margaret A, ed. Dictionary of literary biography documentary series: An Illustrated chronicle: Saul Bellow, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1983. 397 pp. Zimmer, Dieter E. Nabokov’s Berlin. Berlin: Nicolai, 2001. 155 pp.

2) General Works Related to Nabokov Albright, Daniel. Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, and Schoenberg. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. 221 pp. Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: U of California P, 1975. 248 pp. Beaujour, Élisabeth Klosty. Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the «First» Emigration. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. XII + 263 pp. Bevan, David, ed. Literature and Exile. Amsterdam: Rudop. 1990. 163 pp. Berberova, Nina. The Italics Are Mine. Trans. Philippe Radley. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1969. 600 pp. Bruss, Elisabeth W. Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Structure of a Literary Genre. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976. 184 pp. Bruss, Paul. Victims: Textual Strategies in Recent American Fiction. Lewis Burgla: Bucknell UP, 1981. 259 pp. Christensen, Inger. The Meaning of Metafiction: A Critical Study of Novels by Sterne, Nabokov, Barth and Beckett. Bergen: U Forglaget, 1981. 175 pp. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of SelfInvention. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. 288 pp. Kristeva, Julia. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. 294 pp. Mc Cracken-Flesher Caroline, ed. Why the Novel Matters: A Post-Modern Perplex. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 388 pp. Milbauer, Asher Z. Transcending Exile. Conrad, Nabokov, I. B. Singer. Miami: Florida International UP, 1985. 141 pp. Paine, Sylvia. Beckett, Nabokov, Nin. Motives and Modernism. New York: Kennibat Press, 1981. 102 pp. Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel, ed. Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989. XI + 485 pp. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 201 pp Seidel, Michael. Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. 164-96. Stark, John. The Literature of Exhaustion: Borges, Nabokov and Barth. Durham: Duke UP, 1974. 195 pp.

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3) Works on Nabokov’s Works Alexandrov, Vladimir E. Nabokov's Otherworld. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. 270 pp. —. ed. The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Garland, 1995. 798 pp. Allan, Nina. Madness, Death and Disease in the Fiction of Vladimir Nabokov. Birmingham Slavonic Monographs n°23, 1994. 89 pp. Appel, Alfred, Jr. Nabokov's Dark Cinema. New York: Oxford UP, 1974. 324 pp. Appel, Alfred, Jr., and Charles Newman, eds. Nabokov. Criticism, Reminescences, Translations and Tributes. New York: A Clarion Book Simon & Schuster, 1970. 387 pp. Asaert, Hilde. De Vicienze Verbeelding: Over Vladimir Nabokov. Borgehout: Dedalus, 1983. 23 pp. Bader, Julia. Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972. 162 pp. Barabtarlo, Gennady. Aerial View: Essay on Nabokov's Art and Metaphysics. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. 301 pp. Blackwell, Stephen. The Quill and the Scalpel. Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 2009. 276 pp. Bloom, Harold, ed. Vladimir Nabokov: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 302 pp. Blot, Jean. Nabokov. Paris: Seuil, 1995. 223 pp. Boyd, Brian. Stalking Nabokov (Selected Essays). New York: Columbia UP, 2011. 452 pp. Boyd, Brian, and Robert Michael Pyle, eds. Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings. London: Penguin, 2000. 783 pp. Chupin, Yannicke. Vladimir Nabokov. Fictions d’écrivains. Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2009. 487 pp. Clancy, Laurie. The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. London: McMillan, 1984. 177 pp. Clark, Beverly L. Reflections of Fantasy: The Mirror Worlds of Carroll, Nabokov and Pynchon. New York: Peter Lang, 1986. 195 pp. Connolly, Julian W., ed. Nabokov and His Fiction : New Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 250 pp. —. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 254 pp. Cornwell, Neil. Vladimir Nabokov. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1999. 142 pp. Couturier, Maurice. Nabokov. Lausanne: L'Âge d'Homme, 1979. 173 pp.

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—. Nabokov ou La Tyrannie de l'auteur. Paris: Seuil, 1993. 418 pp. —. Nabokov ou La Cruauté du désir (Lecture psychanalytique) Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2004. 372 pp. —. Nabokov ou La Tentation française. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. 264 pp. De La Durantaye, Leland. Style is Matter. The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Ithaca &London: Cornell UP, 2007. 211 pp. Delage-Toriel, Lara, and Monica Manolescu, dir. Kaleidoscopic Nabokov. Perspectives françaises. Paris: Michel Houdiart Éditeur, 2009. 228 pp. Dembo, Lawrence Sanford, ed. Nabokov: The Man and His Work. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1967. 282 pp. Desanti, Dominique. Vladimir Nabokov. Paris: Julliard, 1994. 229 pp. Dragunoiu, Dana. Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2011. 319 pp. Dureau, Yona. Nabokov ou Le Sourire du chat. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. 506 pp. Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. 397 pp. —. The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Crown Publishers, 1986. 417 pp. Foster Jr., John Burt. Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. 260 pp. Fowler, Douglas. Reading Nabokov. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974. 224 pp. Fraysse, Suzanne. Folie, écriture et lecture dans l’œuvre de Vladimir Nabokov. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’U de Provence, 2000. 410 pp. Gibian, George, and Stephen Jan Parker, eds. The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov. Ithaca: Center for International Studies, Cornell University, 1984. 256 pp. Grabes, Herbert. Fictitious Biographies: Vladimir Nabokov's English Novels. La Haye: Menton, 1977. 132 pp. Grayson, Jane. Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov's Russian and English Prose. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. 257 pp. Grayson, Jane, Arnold McMillin and Priscilla Meyer, eds. Nabokov’s World. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. 237 + 241 pp. Green, Geoffrey. Freud and Nabokov. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988. 128 pp. Hyde, George Malcom. Vladimir Nabokov: America's Russian Novelist. London: Marion Boyars, 1977. 227 pp. Johnson, Donald Barton. Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985. 223 pp.

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Johnson, Kurt. Nabokov’s Blues: the Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 2001. 372 pp. Karges, Joann. Nabokov's Lepidoptera: Genres and Genera. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985. 88 pp. Karlinsky, Simon, and Alfred Appel, Jr., eds. The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West, 1922-1971. 1973. Rev. ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977. 473 pp. Karshan, Thomas. Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 269 pp. Khrushcheva, Nina L. Imagining Nabokov. Russia Between Art and Politics. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2007. 233 pp. Larmour, David H.J. Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's Prose. London: Routledge, 2002. 176 pp. Lee, Lawrence L. Vladimir Nabokov. Boston: Twayne, 1976. 168 pp. Leving, Yuri, ed. The Goalkeeper. The Nabokov Almanac. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010. 324 pp. Levy, Alan. Vladimir Nabokov: The Velvet Butterfly. Sag Harbor, New York: Permanent P, 1984. 160 pp. Lokrantz, Jessie Thomas. The Underside of the Weave: Some Sylistic Devices Used by Vladimir Nabokov. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, n° 11, 1973. 133 pp. Long, Michael. Marvell, Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1984. 270 pp. Maar, Michael. Speak, Nabokov. Trans. Ross Benjamin London, New York: Verso, 2009. 148 pp. McGraw Jr., Harold W., Alfred Appel Jr., Julian L. Moynaham, Alfred Kazin, John H. Updike and Dmitri Nabokov. In Memoriam. Vladimir Nabokov. 1899-1977. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1977. 42 pp. Maddox, Lucy. Nabokov's Novels in English. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983. 177 pp. Manolescu, Monica. Jeux de mondes. L’ailleurs chez Vladimir Nabokov. Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2010. 384 pp. Morton Donald. E. Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974. 164 pp. Moynahan, Julian. Vladimir Nabokov. U of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, n° 96, 1971. 47 pp. Naiman, Eric. Nabokov, Perversely. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010. 305 pp. Norman, Will, and Duncan White, eds. Transitional Nabokov. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. 311 pp. Numano, Mitsuyoshi and Tadashi Wakashima, eds. Revising Nabokov Revising. The Proceedings of the International Nabokov Conference.

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March 24-27, 2010. Kyoto, Japan. Kyoto, Japan: The Nabokov Society of Japan, 2010. 211 pp. Oustinoff, Michaël. Bilinguisme d'écriture et auto-traduction: Julien Green, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001. 294 pp. Packman, David. Vladimir Nabokov: The Structure of Literary Desire. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1982. 122 pp. Page, Norman, ed. Nabokov: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. 253 pp. Parker, Stephen Jan. Understanding Nabokov. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1987. 160 pp. Pichova, Hana. The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov & Milan Kundera. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002. 148 pp. Pifer, Ellen. Nabokov and the Novel. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. 197 pp. Pitzer, Andrea. The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Pegasus Books, 2013. 432 pp. Proffer, Carl R, ed. A Book of Things about Vladimir Nabokov. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1974. 305 pp. Quenell, Peter, ed. Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1979. 139 pp. Raguet-Bouvard, Christine. Vladimir Nabokov: La Poétique du masque. Paris: Belin, 2000. 128 pp. Rampton, David. Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 233 pp. —. Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St Martin's P, “Modern Novelist Series,” 1993. 143 pp. —. Vladimir Nabokov. A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 214 pp. Rivers, Julius Edwin, and Charles Nicol, eds. Nabokov's Fifth Arc: Nabokov & Others on His Life's Work. Austin: U of Texas P, 1982. 317 pp. Roth, Phyllis A. Critical Essays on Vladimir Nabokov. Boston: GK Hall & Co, 1984. 242 pp. Roth-Souton, Danièle. Vladimir Nabokov: L’Enchantement de l’exil. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994. 256 pp. Rowe, William Woodin. Nabokov's Deceptive World. New York: New York UP, 1971. 193 pp. —. Nabokov and Others: Patterns in Russian Literature. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979. 185 pp. —. Nabokov's Spectral Dimension. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981. 142 pp.

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Shapiro, Gavriel. The Sublime Artist’s Studio. Nabokov and Painting Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2009. 293 pp. —. ed. Nabokov at Cornell. Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1999. 288 pp. Sharpe, Tony. Vladimir Nabokov. London: Edward Arnold, 1991. 116 pp. Stegner, Page. Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Dial P, 1966. 141 pp. —. ed. Nabokov's Congeries. New York: Viking's P, 1968. 536 pp. —. ed. The Portable Nabokov. 1971. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. 536 pp. Stuart, Dabney. Nabokov: The Dimensions of Parody. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1978. 191 pp. Tammi, Pekka. Problems of Nabokov's Poetics: A Narratological Analysis. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1985. 391 pp. Toker, Leona. Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. 243 pp. Wood, Michael. The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. 252 pp. Wylie, Barbara. Vladimir Nabokov. London: Reaktion Books, 2010. 223 pp. Zanganeh, Lila Azam. The Enchanter. Nabokov and Happiness. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. 229 pp. Zunshine, Lisa, ed. Nabokov at the Limits. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1999. 396 pp.

4) Monographs Alladaye, René. The Darker Shades of Pale Fire. An Investigation into a Literary Mystery. Paris: Michel Houdiart Éditeur, 2013. 198 pp. Andrews, David. Aestheticism, Nabokov, and Lolita. Lewiston: F. Mellen Press, 1999. 161 pp. Appel, Alfred, ed. The Annotated Lolita. 1970. New York: Vintage, 1991. 459 pp. Barabtarlo, Gennady. Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov's Pnin. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1989. 314 pp. Berdjis, Nassim Winnie. Imagery in Vladimir Nabokov's Last Russian Novel ([Dar]), its English Translation (The Gift), and other prose works of the 1930s. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. 396 pp. Blackwell, Stephen. Zina’s Paradox: The Figured Reader in Nabokov’s Gift. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 215 pp. Bloom, Harold, ed. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1993. 206 pp.

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Bouchet, Marie. Lolita. Neuilly: Atalande, 2009. 189 pp. Boyd, Brian. Nabokov's Ada: The Place of Consciousness. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985. 245 pp. —. Nabokov’s Pale Fire: the Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. 303 pp. —. AdaOnline, http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz Cancogni, Annapaola. The Mirage in the Mirror: Nabokov's Ada and Its French Pre-Texts. New York: Garland, 1985. 367 pp. Chupin, Yannicke, and René Alladaye. Aux Origines de Laura. Le dernier manuscript de Vladimir Nabokov. Paris: Presses de l’Université ParisSorbonne, 2011. 379 pp. Clegg, Christine, and Nicolas Tredell, eds. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2000. 172 pp. Connolly, Julian. Nabokov's Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992. 279 pp. —. Nabokov’s Invitation to a beheading: A Critical Companion. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1997. 193 pp. —. A Readers’s Guide to Nabokov’s “Lolita”. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2009 186 pp. Couturier, Maurice. Lolita. Paris: Didier-Érudition, 1995. 125 pp. - - -. ed. Lolita. Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1998. 131 pp. Delage-Toriel, Lara. Lolita de Vladimir Nabokov et de Stanley Kubrick. Pornic: Éditions du Temps, 2009. 192 pp. Desternes, Jean. L'Affaire Lolita. Défense de l'écrivain. Paris: Olympia, 1957. 109 pp. Leving, Yuri. Keys to The Gift. A guide to Nabokov’s Novel. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011. 534 pp. —. ed. Anatomy of a short story. Nabokov’s Puzzles, Codes, “Signs and Symbols”. New York: Continuum, 2012. 410 pp. Garzeli, Enrico. Circles without Center. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1972. 170 pp. Kuzmanovich, Zoran, and Galya Diment, eds. Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008. 190 pp. Maar, Michael. The Two Lolitas. Trans. Perry Anderson London, New York, 2005. 107 pp. Machu, Didier. Lolita ou Le Tyran confondu. Lecture de Vladimir Nabokov. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2010. 446 pp. Machu, Didier, and Taïna Tuhkunen, dir. Lolita. Roman de Vladimir Nabokov (1955) et film de Stanley Kubrick (1962) Paris: Ellipses, 2009.

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Manolescu, Monica, and Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris. Lolita, Cartographies de l’obsession (Nabokov, Kubrick). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009. 174 pp. Martiny, Erik, dir. Lolita. From Nabokov to Kubrick and Lyne. Paris: Éditions Sedes, 2009. 158 pp. Mason, Bobbie Ann. Nabokov's Garden: A Guide to Ada. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1974. 196 pp. Maixent, Jocelyn. Leçon littéraire sur Vladimir Nabokov, de La Méprise à Ada. Paris: PUF, 1995. 195 pp. Meyer, Priscilla. Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Nabokov's Pale Fire. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1988. 277 pp. Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House, 2003. 347 pp. Naumann, Marina Turkevitch. Blue Evenings in Berlin: Nabokov's Short Stories of the 1920's. New York: New York UP, 1978. 254 pp. Nicol, Charles, and Gennady Barabtarlo, eds. A Small Alpine Form.: Studies in Nabokov's Short Fiction. New York: Garland, 1993. 239 pp. Pifer, Ellen, ed. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. A casebook. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.209 pp. Proffer, Carl R. Keys to Lolita. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968. 160 pp. Raguet-Bouvard, Christine. Lolita: Un Royaume au-delà des mers. Bordeaux: Presses de l’U de Bordeaux, 1996. 313 pp. Shrayer, Maxim. The World of Nabokov’s Stories. Austin: U of Texas P, 1999. 396 pp. Thibault, Paul J. Social Semiotics as Praxis: Text, Social Meaning Making, and Nabokov’s Ada. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. 303 pp.

5) Journals with Special Issues on Nabokov L'Arc. Numéro consacré à Nabokov. Ed. Michel Gresset 99 (1985): 100 pp. Cahiers de l’Émigration Russe. Special issue on Nabokov. Ed. Nora Buhks. 2 (1993): 121 pp. Cahiers de l’Émigration Russe. Special issue on Nabokov. Ed. Nora Buhks. 5 (1999): 192 pp. Canadian American Slavic Studies. Special Vladimir Nabokov Issue. Ed. Donald Barton Johnson. 19.3 (1985): 240-374. Cycnos. Special Vladimir Nabokov issue. Nabokov: Autobiography, Biography and Fiction. 10.1 (1993): 165 pp.

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Cycnos. Special Vladimir Nabokov issue. Nabokov: at the Crossroads of Modernism and Postmodernism. 12.2 (1995): 193 pp. Delta. Special Vladimir Nabokov Issue. 17 (1983): 135 pp. Europe. Special Vladimir Nabokov issue. 791 (1995): 220 pp. In Memoriam: Vladimir Nabokov, 1899-1977. New York: Mac Graw-Hill, 1977. 42 pp. Magazine Littéraire. Special Vladimir Nabokov issue. Ed. Gilles Barbedette. 233 (1986): 100 pp. Modern Fiction Studies. Special Vladimir Nabokov issue. 25 (1979): 391554. RLT. «Nabokov.» Special Issue. 24 (1991). 463 pp. Textuerre Ed. Jean-Jacques Celly. 67 (1990): 150 pp.

6) Articles Alhambra, Maria. “Time Camouflaged or the Riddle of the Map: Paratextual Elements and Temporal Structure in the 1966 Revision of Speak, Memory.” The Proceedings of the International Nabokov Conference. Revising Nabokov Revising. March 24-27, 2010. Ed. Numano, Mitsuyoshi and Tadashi Wakashima. (Kyoto, Japan: The Nabokov Society of Japan, 2010) 39-43. Barthes, Roland. “La Mort de l’auteur,” Essais critiques IV. Le Bruissement de la langue. (Paris: Seuil, 1984) 61-67. Couturier, Maurice. “Nabokovania.” RFEA 58 (1993): 411-20. Derrida, Jacques. “Dialogue entre Jacques Derrida, Philippe LacoueLabarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy,” Rue Descartes n°52 (2006): 87-99. Edelstein, Marilyn. “Before the Beginning: Nabokov and the Rhetoric of the Preface,” Narrative Beginnings, Theories and Practices, ed. Brian Richardson (Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2008) 29-43. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?”, Textual Strategies. Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari, 1979 (London: Methuen & Co, Ltd, 1980) 141-160. Frye, Mitch. “Performing tyranny, Purloining authority: Nabokov’s Dictators,” Nabokov Online Journal Vol. VII (2013) 1-24. Hamrit, Jacqueline. “Nachträglichkeit,” PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. December 15, 2009. Available http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/hamrit-nachtrglichkeit. July 16, 2008 [or whatever date you accessed the article]. Received: February 20, 2008, Published: July 16, 2008. Copyright © 2008 Jacqueline Hamrit

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—. “Lolita à l’épreuve de la théorie des genres littéraires,” Lolita. Roman de Vladimir Nabokov (1955) et film de Stanley Kubrick (1962), dir. Machu, Didier, and Taïna Tukhunen (Paris: Ellipses, 2009) 43-54. —. "The ordeal of undecidability in Lolita,” Kaleidoscopic Nabokov. Perspectives françaises, dir. Delage-Toriel, Lara, and Monica Manolescu (Paris: Michel Oudiart Éditeur, 2009) 85-92. —. “Generic glidings and Endless Writing from The Enchanter to Lolita: A Screenplay through Lolita,” The Proceedings of the International Nabokov Conference. Revising Nabokov Revising. March 24-27, 2010. Ed. Numano, Mitsuyoshi, and Tadashi Wakashima. (Kyoto, Japan: The Nabokov Society of Japan, 2010) 27-32. —. Is telling one’s life inventing it? Narration and subjectivity in Nabokov’s autobiography,” PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. December 15, 2009. Available http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/hamritis_telling_ones_life_inventing_it_narr. August 16, 2013. Ingleheart, Jennifer. “Burning Manuscripts: The Literary Apologia in Ovid’s Tristia 2 and Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘On a Book Entitled Lolita’,” Classical and Modern Literature, 26/2 (2006): 79-109. Nicol, Charles. “Necessary Instruction or Fatal Fatuity: Nabokov’s Introductions and Bend Sinister.” Nabokov Studies 1 (1994): 115-29. Poulet, Georges. “Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History (Vol.1, No. 1, New and Old History, Oct., 1969): 53-68. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/468372 Accessed 18/08/2008 Scheiner, Corinne. “In Place of a Preface: Reading Chapter one of Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark as a Foreword to the English translation,” Proceedings of the International Nabokov Symposium 2002. 26 June 2003. http://www.nabokovmuseum.org/PDF/Scheiner.pdf Shields, David. “Autobiographic Rapture and Fictive Irony in Speak, Memory and the Real Life of Sebastian Knight,” The Iowa Review 1987 Winter; 17(1): 44-54. Sohier, Jacques. “Féerie pour un scandale: l’art et la morale dans Lolita (1958) de Vladimir Nabokov,” Revue LISA/LISA e-journal (Online), Writers, writings, Literary studies, Online since 02 February 2010, connection on 14 July 2013. URL: http://lisa.revues.org/3249; DOI: 10.40000/lisa.3249

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Literary Works Borges, Jorge Luis. “Livre des préfaces,” Livre des Préfaces. 1975. Trans. Françoise Rosset. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. 9-265. Montaigne, Michel de. Essays. Trans. John Florio, 1580 Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2005. 285 pp. Gray, Alasdair, ed. The Book of Prefaces. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000. 640 pp. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions of J.J. Rousseau, 1782 McLean, Virginia: IndyPublish.com, 1903. 525 pp. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. 1850. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971. 573 pp. Theory Agacinski, Sylviane, Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Philippe LacoueLabarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Bernard Pautrat. Mimesis des articulations. Paris: Flammarion, 1975. 364 pp. Anzieu, Didier. Le Corps de l’œuvre. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. 377 pp. Arasse, Daniel. Le Détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture. Paris: Flammarion, 1996. 464 pp. Aristote. Poétique. Trans. Michel Magnien. Paris: Le livre de Poche classique, 1990. 256 pp. Attridge, Derek, ed. Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992. 456 pp. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. La Représentation de la réalité dans la littérature occidentale. 1946. Trans. Cornélius Heim. Paris: Gallimard, 1968. 562 pp. Bachelard, Gaston. La Poétique de l’espace. Paris: PUF, 1957. 215 pp. —. La Poétique de la rêverie. Paris: PUF, 1960. 187 pp. —. La Psychanalyse du feu. Paris: Gallimard, «folio essais,» 1949. 185 pp. Bakhtine, Mikhaïl. Esthétique et théorie du roman. 1975. Trans. Olivier Dara. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. 489 pp. —. La Poétique de Dostoïevski. 1963. Trans. Isabelle Kolitcheff. Paris: Seuil, 1970. 349 pp. —. L’Œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen-Âge et sous la Renaissance. Trans. Andrée Robel. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. 473 pp. Barthes, Roland. Le Bruissement de la langue. Paris: Seuil, 1984. 417 pp. —. La Chambre claire: Notes sur la photographie. Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1980. 193 pp.

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—. Critique et vérité. Paris: Seuil, 1966. 86 pp. —. Le Degré zéro de l’écriture. Paris: Seuil, 1953. 190 pp. —. Leçon. Paris: Seuil, 1978. 46 pp. —. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil, 1957. 238 pp. —. L’Obvie et l’obtus. Essais Critiques III. Paris: Seuil, 1982. 286 pp. —. Le Plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil, “Tel quel,” 1973. 108 pp. —. Roland Barthes. 1975. Paris: Seuil, “Écrivains de toujours,” 1995. 175 pp. —. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Paris: Seuil, 1971. 191 pp. —. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, “Tel quel, ” 1970. 278 pp. Barthes, Roland, Leo Bersani, Philippe Hamon, Michael Riffaterre, and Ian Watt. Littérature et réalité. Paris: Seuil, 1982. 185 pp. Bataille, Georges. L’Érotisme. Paris: Minuit, 1957. 307 pp. —. La Littérature et le mal. Paris: Gallimard, “Folio Essais,” 1957. 205 pp. Baudrillard, Jean. Le Crime parfait. Paris: Galilée, 1995. 209 pp. —. L’Échange symbolique et la mort. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. 347 pp. —. L’Illusion de la fin. Paris: Galilée, 1992. 173 pp. —. Le Paroxyste indifférent. Paris: Grasset, 1997. 207 pp. —. Simulacres et simulations. Paris: Galilée, 1981. 236 pp. —. Le Système des objets. Paris: Gallimard, 1968. 245 pp. —. La Transparence du mal. Paris: Galilée, 1990. 181 pp. Benjamin, Walter. Essais I. 1922-1934. 1955. Trans. Maurice de Gandillac. Paris: Denoël, 1983. 212 pp. —. Œuvres choisies. Trans. Maurice de Gandillac. Paris: Julliard, 1959. 327 pp Bennett, Andrew. The Author. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 151 pp. Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. 1995. Harlow: Pearson, 2009. 379 pp. Bennington, Geoffroy, and Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida. Paris: Seuil, “Les Contemporains,” 1991. 381 pp. Benveniste, Émile. Problèmes de linguistique générale, 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. 356 pp. —. Problèmes de linguistique générale, 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. 288 pp. Bergé, Pierre. L’Art de la préface. Paris: Gallimard, 2008. 289 pp. Blanchot, Maurice. L’Amitié. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. 332 pp. —. L’Attente, l’oubli. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. 162 pp. —. La Communauté inavouable. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983. 95 pp. —. L’Écriture du désastre. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. 220 pp.

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—. L’Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. 649 pp. —. L’Espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, “Idées,”1955. 382 pp. —. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln, London: The University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 279 pp. —. Lautréamont et Sade. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1963. 188 pp. —. Le Livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. 344 pp. —. Le Pas au-delà. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. 187 pp. Bois, Yve-Alain, and Rosalind Krauss. L’Informe - Mode d’emploi. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996. 252 pp. Bourdieu, Pierre. Les Règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil, 1992. 486 pp. Brunn, Alain. L’Auteur. Paris: Flammarion, 2001. 241 pp. Calle-Gruber, Mireille, and Elisabeth Zawisza, dir. Paratextes. Études aux bords du texte. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000. 349 pp. Calvino, Italo. La Machine littérature. 1980. Trans. Michel Orcel et François Wahl. Paris: Seuil, 1984. 254 pp. Chamarat, Gabrielle, and Alain Goulet, dir. L’Auteur. Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 1996. 215 pp. Charles, Michel. Introduction à l’étude des textes. Paris: Seuil, 1995. 394 pp. —. Rhétorique de la lecture. Paris: Seuil, 1977. 301 pp. Childers, Joseph, and Gary Hentzi. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 362 pp. Cixous, Hélène, and Jacques Derrida. Voiles. Paris: Galilée, 1998. 87 pp. Compagnon, Antoine. La Seconde main ou Le Travail de la citation. Paris: Seuil, 1979. 415 pp. Couturier, Maurice. La Figure de l’auteur. Paris: Seuil, 1995. 268 pp. —. Roman et censure ou La Mauvaise Foi d’Éros. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1996. 256 pp. Cuddon, John Antony. A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. 761 pp. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge, 1975. 301 pp. —. On Deconstruction. Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. 307 pp. Davies, Tony. Humanism. London: Routledge, 1997. 152 pp. De Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. 327 pp. Deleuze, Gilles. Critique et clinique. Paris: Minuit, 1993. 191 pp. —. Différence et répétition. Paris: PUF, 1968. 409 pp. —. L’Image-temps. Paris: Minuit, 1985. 379 pp.

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INDEX RERUM -

A Absence 15, 36, 52, 77, 79, 86 Aberrant reading. See Reading Aesthetics 10-11, 19, 34, 61, 97, 102, 119 Affect 17, 48, 55, 71, 74, 83 Ambiguity 6, 12, 129 Ambivalence 11 Anonymity. See Name Anti-Americanism 13 Art 6, 11-12, 17-19, 22, 26, 32-38, 41-42, 58, 61, 69, 71-73, 83, 91, 93-94, 97, 103, 105, 114-119, 124, 126, 129, 131, 133 Cinema 80, 115 Music 51, 55, 58 Painting 73, 76, 119 Photography 86 Theatre 100 Artificiality 21 Artistry11 Author-God. See Authorship Authority. See Authorship Authorship 1-2, 25, 59, 83, 99, 102, 106 Author-God 54, 88 Authority 1, 8, 26, 57-58, 60, 91, 103-105, 123, 129 death of the author 1-2, 85, 91 face 82 identity 15, 25, 54, 59, 81 mastery without mastery 104 name of the author 26 signature 5-6, 23, 30, 64, 82, 106

voice 20, 59, 82, 91-92, 106

Autobiography. See Genre autothanatographie 86 hétérothanatographique 86 B Baroque 41, 60-61 Bastardy 30, 39-40 Belatedness. See Time Bibliography. See Genre Bilingualism. See Multilingualism Biography. See Genre Blank. See Gap “Bliss” 9, 11, 18, 49, 58, 105 Bluff 104 Body 17, 50, 70 Butterflies 30, 72, 75, 94, 115 C Censorship 8-10, 26, 104 Chance 41, 60, 133 Characterization 48, 52 Chess 65, 72-73, 76, 87 Childhood 47, 67, 70-72, 79, 83, 89, 90, 95-96, 117 Cinema. See Art Clinamen 41 Comedy 13, 36-3 Conjurer. See Magic Consciousness 24, 32, 34, 45, 52, 66, 74, 76, 89-90, 92, 104, 120 unconscious 21, 89 Contradiction 12, 32, 44 Creation 32, 34, 49, 71, 76, 89, 105 Cruelty 19, 31, 49

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D

F

Death 19, 26, 36, 48-49, 51-52, 55, 74, 81, 85-87, 105, 115 survival 70 Death of the Author. See Authorship Deconstruction 23, 97, 126 Deferral. See Time Différance 101, 106 Difference 43, 47, 52, 54, 58, 62-63, 65, 95, 128 Deity. See God Democracy. See Politics Desire 7-8, 16, 21, 23, 38, 49, 51, 59, 69, 83, 102, 105, 118 Destination 23 Destinerrance 23 Detail 67, 69, 79 Deviation 40-41 Disorder. See Order Dissemination 89 Double game See Play Dream 31, 41, 49, 53, 56, 60, 63, 88, 102 Duplicity 53 Dystopia. See Genre

Family 7, 37, 40, 49, 65, 78-79, 83, 92, 110, 114 Face. See Authorship Farce. See Genre Fiction 9, 11, 14, 18, 25, 29, 32, 5051, 54, 82-84, 88, 93, 105, 115, 122, 129 metafiction 63, 91, 114 non-fiction 1 Filiation 40 son 31, 40, 45, 48-50, 56, 90, 92 father 38, 40, 46, 48, 71, 74, 85, 103, 113 Foreword. See Preface Form 18, 55 Freedom 9-10, 22, 37-38, 41, 43 liberty 47 Friendship 48, 62

E Editor 5, 8, 12, 25, 32, 41, 64, 69, 91 Effacement 58 self-effacement 2, 58, 83 Elsewhere 19, 51, 66 Enigma 18, 39, 57 Epiphany 18, 74, 90 Eroticism 10, 11 Ethics 10-11, 19, 34, 40, 97, 102 morals 6 Exappropriation 2, 103, 104 Exile 15, 20, 67, 72, 87, 94, 114, 117-118 Extratext. See Text

G Game. See Play Gap 51, 67, 92, 101 blank 65, 76 hollow 71, 75-76 opening 16, 74-75, 79, 101 Géno-texte (geno-text) 79, 96 Genre autobiography 2, 25, 49, 59, 64, 66-69, 71-75, 78, 80-88, 90, 92-93, 95-97, 99, 101, 105, 110, 114, 122-123, 133 biography 81, 83, 106, 113-114, 122 dystopia 36, 44 farce 36, 37, 45 law of the genre 11 pornography 5, 10, 11 Ghost 25, 35, 52, 80 ghostly 24, 35 phantom 79, 119

136

Index rerum

spectral 25, 119 spectrality 79 specter 35-36 Gift 49, 73, 85, 87, 92, 99, 101, 104-105, 109, 120 giving 49, 82-83 God 49, 54, 84 deity 31-32, 53-54 Graft 101 H Happiness 18, 67, 79-80, 96, 105, 119 Hauntology 35 Heraldry 39 History 1, 14, 35, 42, 65, 77-79, 99 Hybridization 31, 41-44 I Identity 14-15, 20, 59, 67, 74, 8183, 88-89, 92 Identity. See Authorship Illusion 31, 41, 51-53, 60 Image 31, 46, 51, 53, 55-56, 71-72, 75-78, 89-90 dream-image 56, 63 memory image 56, 63 mental image 55 Imagination 18, 69, 88, 114 imaginary 33-34, 36, 55, 57, 79 symbolic 34, 55 Impersonality 7, 91 impersonal 91 personal 2, 3, 12, 20, 31, 50, 62, 64, 68, 72, 91 Impurity 44, 47, 84 purity 15, 36, 44-45 pure 20, 36, 40, 44, 47, 52, 69, 90 Indifference 34, 38, 50, 59, 83 Inspiration 6, 14, 16, 46-47, 67, 69, 71, 76

Interpretation 7, 10-12, 15-17, 19, 22, 45, 102, 104 Intersubjectivity. See Subjectivity Intertext . See Text Intimacy 29, 37, 105 Intratext . See Text Introduction. See Preface Intuition 19, 51, 54-56, 86, 88, 105 Invention 72-73, 99-100, 112, 114, 128 Irony 6, 93, 114, 123 parody 37, 43, 45, 87-88, 93, 97, 119 satire 13, 37, 45 Iterability 79, 96 K Khôra 75, 95, 127 Kindness 18-19, 28, 105 L Laughter 4, 37, 63, 109, 123 Law 1, 8, 11, 13, 36, 48 Legitimacy 102 Liberty. See Freedom Life 9, 14, 17, 37, 48-49, 54, 58, 6669, 71-72, 77, 82, 85-88, 91, 93, 96, 101, 103, 105, 110, 113, 116, 123 Loss 2, 20, 71, 79, 90, 104 Love 7, 14, 17, 19-21, 36-37, 48-49, 71, 104 M Madness 31, 41, 48-52, 55, 62, 115 Magic 120 conjurer 16, 21 magical 20, 21 magician 21, 93, 119 Mastery 2, 21, 35, 80, 103-104 Mastery without mastery. See Authorship

Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces Memory 7, 15, 18, 55, 59, 64-68, 70-71, 74-83, 88-90, 92-99, 116, 118, 123 forgetting 77-78 recall 55, 80 Metafiction See Fiction Metaphor 23, 46, 73, 77, 82, 86, 8990 Metatext. See Text Mimesis 34, 35, 47, 124 Mise-en-abyme 25, 88, 91 Misreading . See Reading Model 24-25, 33-34, 63, 70, 78, 86 Monolingualism. See Multilingualism Monstrosity 13, 41, 44-45 Morals. See Ethics Mourning 71, 80 Multilingualism 20 bilingualism 118 monolingualism 20, 2728, 127 Music. See Art N Nachträglichkeit 101, 16, 123 Name 8, 82, 102-104, 107 pseudonym 8 Name of the Author. See Authorship Narration 10-11, 66, 82, 96, 123 Narrative identity 82 Nazism. See Politics O Order 43, 64, 71, 76, 99 disorder 15, 64, 76 Origin 21, 72, 74 Otherness 79, 92, 96 P Pain 67, 71, 105 Painting. See Art

137

Paratext. See Text Parody. See Irony Passion 17, 21, 23, 28, 45, 61, 69, 72, 75, 128, 131 Past 56, 67, 76, 78-81, 101-102 Pedophilia 7, 10, 13 Phantom. See Ghost Pharmakon 44, 49 Philosophy 16, 35, 40, 92 Photography. See Art Play 8, 42, 43, 60, 70, 74-75 - game 1, 53, 69, 72 - double game 11 Pleasure 2, 12, 17-19, 21, 31, 35, 42, 55, 68, 73, 80, 85, 88, 102, 104 Poeroticism 11, 37 Poetry 11, 60, 73, 112 Politics 30, 32-34, 36-38, 47-48, 117, 132 democracy 9, 37-39 Nazism 33, 37 Totalitarianism 33, 36-37, 45 Tyranny 2, 28, 31-33, 47, 60, 123 Portrait 62, 68, 75, 86, 93-94, 127, 132 self-portrait 81, 86 Postface. See Preface Postscript. See Preface Preface 1, 46, 100-102 foreword 1-4, 12, 24, 54, 56, 59, 61, 64, 66-69, 72, 74, 78, 91, 93, 96, 105106, 123 introduction 1, 2, 4, 25, 30-33, 35, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47-48, 50-53, 56, 59, 6466, 68, 72, 85, 91-93, 97104, 106-107, 123 postscript 25 postface 1-2, 100-101 authentic preface 1, 100 fictive preface 25 Presence-absence 36 Pseudonym. See Name

138

Index rerum

Publisher 5-9 Puzzle 73, 76, 120 R Reader 1, 11, 15-16, 18, 21-25, 43, 48, 55-58, 61, 69, 79, 81, 83, 85, 88, 96, 102-103, 105, 120 bad readers 17 good readers 17-18, 22, 28, 79 Reading 10, 15-16, 18-19, 22, 28, 30, 56-57, 68, 84, 88, 102, 116, 121 aberrant reading 15, 24 misreading 10-11, 15 unreadibility 15 Reality 25, 31-37, 40-43, 47, 49-54, 56, 69, 78, 80-84, 88, 101 Representation 33-35, 90, 114 Reserve 40, 75, 81, 83, 85, 87 Resistance 8, 47-48, 57, 59 Responsibility 7, 13, 37 Rhythm. See Time S Satire. See Irony Schibboleth 57, 63 Science 12, 42, 47, 69, 92, 115 Secrecy 21, 105 secret 16, 21-22, 28, 79, 118, 128 Self. See Subjectivity Self-portrait. See Portrait Shadow 40, 46-47, 61 Signature. See Authorship Silence 8, 21, 51, 57-58, 62, 76 Sincerity 72, 96 Society 7, 8, 10, 13 Space 19, 29, 55, 59, 63-64, 72, 75, 80, 95, 97, 126 Specter. See Ghost Speech 8, 10, 33, 38, 43, 45, 57-59, 80, 82, 89, 106

Structure 25, 38, 54, 66-68, 71-75, 89, 114, 118-119, 126, 131 pattern 66-67, 72, 93, 119, 120 Style 41, 51, 62, 65-66, 106, 116, 127 Subject. See Subjectivity Subjectivity 25, 69, 88, 96, 123 subject 59, 90 self 89-92, 106, 120 intersubjectivity 23, 92 Survival. See Death T Tenderness 13, 18-19, 28, 48, 55, 89, 105 Territory 10, 19, 51 Text extratext 1 geno-text 96 intertext 37, 44-45 intertextualities 45, 57, 88 intratext 55 paratext 3-4, 25, 39, 91, 101, 126 paratextual 122 Theatre. See Art Thought 10, 17, 24, 36-38, 50, 55, 83, 105 Threshold 1, 4, 21 Time 40, 76, 90 belated time 101 belatedness 101 deferral 84 deferred time 101 rhythm 46, 55, 72-73, 76 Totalitarianism. See Politics Trace 55, 67, 77, 88, 101 Tragedy 20-21 Translation 2-4, 28, 45-47, 61, 65, 69, 78, 82-83, 85, 87-88, 96 Tyranny. See Politics

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U

W

Unconscious . See consciousness Undecidability 12-13, 27, 84, 97, 102, 123 undecidable 12, 15, 82 Unheimlichkeit 37 Unreadibility. See Reading

Woman 19, 28 World 38-45, 47, 50-51, 54-55, 59, 62, 66, 70, 85, 116-117, 119 Writer 11, 14-16, 18, 20, 22-25, 28, 35, 54, 58-59, 69, 77, 79, 87-88, 92, 105-106, 112, 114, 117 Writing 9-11, 14, 16, 19, 21-23, 26, 42, 44, 46, 49, 55, 57-59, 62, 69, 62, 69, 72-77, 81, 83-84, 86, 89, 91, 95-96, 101-102, 105-106, 123,128

V

Voice. See Authorship Void 41, 75, 92 Vulnerability 104-105

INDEX NOMINUM

A Agacinski, Sylviane 124 Alhambra, Maria 122 Albright, Daniel 114 Alexandrov, Vladimir E. 115 Alladaye, René 119 Allan, Nina 115 Alter, Robert 114 Andrews, David 119 Anzieu, Didier 124 Appel, Alfred 28, 117 Arasse, Daniel 124 Aristotle 11, 34, 35 Asaert, Hilde 115 Attridge, Derek 8, 26, 36, 38, 84, 97, 124 Auerbach, Erich 124 B Bachelard, Gaston 124 Bader, Julia 115 Bakhtin, Mikhail 124, 131 Barabtarlo, Gennady 115, 119, 121 Barth, John 15, 114 Barthes, Roland 2-3, 58, 63, 91, 98, 122, 125 - Essais Critiques IV. Le Bruissement de la langue 3, 58, 63, 98 - Le Plaisir du texte 2-3, 125 Bataille, Georges 8 Baudelaire, Charles 46 Baudrillard, Jean 125 Beardsley, Monroe C. 16, 27

Beaujour, Elisabeth Klosty 20, 28, 46, 61, 114 Beckett, Samuel 14, 114, 118 Benigni, Roberto 37 Benjamin, Walter 125 Bennett, Andrew 16, 27, 62, 84, 97, 125 Bennington, Geoffroy 125 Benveniste, Émile 125 Berberova, Nina 114 Berdjis, Nassim Winnie 120 Bergé, Pierre 126 Bergson, Henri 90 Bersani, Leo 125 Bethea, David M. 104, 106 Bevan, David 114 Blackwell, Stephen 115, 120, 156 Blanchot, Maurice 7, 19, 23-24, 26, 29, 42, 49, 57-59, 61-63, 77, 83, 89, 91, 95, 97, 126, 132 - Le Livre à venir 7, 26, 126 - l'Espace littéraire 63, 95, 97, 126 - The Space of Literature 29, 59, 63, 95, 97, 126 - L'Écriture du désastre 61, 126 - La Communauté inavouable 62, 126 Bloom, Harold 115, 120 Blot, Jean 115 Bois, Yve-Alain 126 Borges, Jorge Luis 115, 124 Bouchet, Marie 120 Bourdieu, Pierre 126 Bowers, Fredson 26, 28, 106, 112113 Boyd, Brian5, 8, 26, 60, 66-69, 83, 93-95, 98, 112-113, 115, 120

Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces Bradbury, Malcolm 14, 27, 36 Brooke, Rupert 46 Brown, Hazel 65 Bruccoli, Mathew J. 60, 61, 97, 11 Brunn, Alain 126 Bruss, Elizabeth W. 114 Bruss, Paul 114 Buhks, Nora 122 Butler, Judith 15 Byron, George 46 C Calle-Gruber, Mireille 126 Calvino, Italo 126 Cancogni, Annapaloa 120 Carroll, Lewis 46, 115 Celly, Jean-Jacques 112 Chamarat, Gabrielle 126 Charles, Michel 126 Childers, Joseph 126 Christensen, Inger 114 Chaplin, Charlie 37 Chupin, Yannicke 115, 120 Cixous, Hélène 126 Clancy, Laurie 115 Clark, Beverley L. 115 Clegg, Christine 120 Compagnon, Antoine 126 Connolly, Julian W. 115, 120 Cornwell, Neil 116 Couturier, Maurice 1-3, 5, 8, 11, 18, 22-23, 26, 28, 37, 49, 60, 62, 70, 84, 95, 97, 103, 116, 120, 122, 126 - Nabokov ou La tyrannie de l'auteur 1, 3, 28, 95, 97, 116 - La figure de l'auteur 1, 3, 5, 26, 28, 126 - Roman et censure ou La mauvaise foi d'Eros 8, 26, 60, 126 - Textual Communication: A PrintBased Theory of the Novel 23, 28

141

- Nabokov ou La Cruauté du désir. Lecture psychanalytique 49, 62, 116 Covici, Pascal 8 Cuddon, John Antony 126 Culler, Jonathan 53, 62, 126 D Davies, Tony 127 De La Durantaye, Leland 116 Delage-Toriel, Lara 116, 120, 123 Deleuze, Gilles 19, 40-41, 60, 63, 127 De Man, Paul 15, 27, 82-85, 96-97, 127 Dembo, Lawrence Sanford 116 Derrida, Jacques 1-3, 8, 11-13, 1516, 20-21, 23, 25-29, 35-36, 3839, 41-44, 49, 60-63, 74-75, 7779, 82, 84, 86, 90, 95-97, 99, 101-104, 106, 122, 124-128, 131-133 - La Dissémination 3, 12, 27, 44, 61, 127 - Dissemination 1, 3, 12, 27, 44, 61, 89, 101, 106, 127 - Donner la mort 26, 49, 62, 127 - "This Strange Institution Called Literature" 8, 26, 29, 60, 127 - Parages 26, 60, 128 - Force de loi 27, 127 - Acts of Religion 27, 127 - Le Monolinguisme de l'autre 20, 27-28, 127 - Passions 21, 28, 61, 128 - A Taste for the Secret 28, 128 - "My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendez-vous with some Epicurean Stereophonies" 60 - "Demeure" 61, 77 - Ulysse gramophone. Deux mots pour Joyce. 61, 128 - L'Écriture et la différence 62, 95, 127 - Writing and Difference 95, 127

142

Index nominum

- Khôra 95, 127 - Mémoires d'aveugle. L'Autoportrait et autres ruines 95, 127 - Limited Inc 96, 127 - Mémoires pour Paul de Man 82, 96, 127 - "L'animal que donc je suis (à suivre) ” 82, 96 - La Carte postale de Socrate à Freud et au-delà 97, 127 - "Dialogue entre Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy" 106, 122 - Spectres de Marx 35, 128 Desanti, Dominique 113, 116 Desternes, Jean 120 Didi-Huberman, Georges 128 Diment, Galya 113, 120 Dragunoiu, Dana 116 Dupee, Fred 5 Dureau, Yona 116 Dutoit, Thomas 26, 128 E Eakin, Paul John 114 Eco, Umberto 128 Edelstein, Marilyn 2-4, 32, 59, 122 Edmunds, Jeff 108 Empson, William 129 Epstein, Jason 5 F Fathy, Safaa 128 Faye, Sabine 60 Ferrari, Federic 128 Field, Andrew 108, 113, 116 Fish, Stanley 10, 26, 129 Forest, Philippe 129 Forster, Edward Morgan 52-53, 62, 129 Foster Jr., John Burt 31-32, 39, 5960, 66, 70, 75, 93-95, 116

Foucault, Michel 8, 22, 28, 45, 61, 122, 129 Fowler, Douglas 116 Freud, Sigmund 77, 95, 97, 101, 116, 127 Frye, Mitch 60, 123 G Garzeli, Enrico 120 Genet, Jean 12 Genette, Gérard 1, 3, 7, 11, 26, 39, 60, 88, 97, 99, 102, 106, 129 - Seuils 1, 3, 26, 60, 102, 106, 129 - Palimpsestes. La Littérature au second degré 97, 129 Gibian, George 116 Girodias, Maurice 5, 8 Godin, Christian 41, 60, 129 Gogol, Nikolai 112 Goldmann, Lucien 34, 60, 129 Goulet, Alain 126 Goux, Jean-Joseph 34, 60, 129 Grabes, Herbert 97, 116 Gray, Aladair 124 Grayson, Jane 113, 116 Green, Geoffroy 116 Greenblatt, Stephen 129 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 72, 95, 130 Gresset, Michel 121 Guattari, Felix 127 Guillaume, Marc 128 Gunn, Giles 129 H Hamon, Philippe 125 Harari, Josué V. 28, 122, 130 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 12 Heidegger, Martin 15, 127, 130 Hentzi, Gary 126 Hölderlin, Friedrich 15 Hyde, George Malcom 117

Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces I Ingleheart, Jennifer 6, 26, 123 J Jakobson, Roman 130 Jameson, Fredric 130 Jauss, Hans Robert 130 Jenny, Laurent 130 Johnson, Donald Barton 32, 50-51, 59, 62, 117, 122 Johnson, Kurt 117 Joyce, James 14, 43, 57, 61, 69, 128 Juliar, Michael 26, 68, 93, 99, 108 K Kafka, Franz 14, 30, 59, 89, 114, 127 Kahane, Eric 18 Karges, Joann 117 Karlinsky, Simon 61, 97, 111 Karshan, Thomas 111, 117 Kazin, Alfred 117 Keats, John 46 Kerrigan, William 60, 133 Kofman, Sarah 124 Kohn-Pireaux, Laurence 130 Kristeva, Julia 79, 96, 114, 130 Krauss, Rosalind 126 Khrushcheva, Nina L 117 Kubrick, Stanley 26, 37, 93, 104, 120-121, 123 Kuzmanovitch, Zoran 108, 120 L Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 106, 122, 124 Lalande, André 130 Lacan, Jacques 23, 89, 130-131 Laplanche, Jean 130 Larmour, David H. J. 117 Lasky, Melvin 5 Laughlin, James 8

143

Lawrence, D.H. 16 Leclaire, Serge 130 Lee, Lawrence L 117 Lejeune, Philippe 81, 96, 131 Lévinas, Emmanuel 19, 28, 131-132 Leving, Yuri 117, 120 Levy, Alan 117 Lisse, Michel 61, 130-131 Littau, Karin 17, 27-28, 131 Locke, John 90 Lodge, David 131 Lokrantz, Jessie Thomas 117 Long, Michael 117 Lotman, Iouri 131 Louichon, Brigitte 131 Lubitsch, Ernst 37 Lucy, Niall 131 Lukács, Georg 131 Lyotard, Jean-François 131 Lyne, Adrian 93, 121 M Maar, Michael 117, 121 Machu, Didier 26, 121, 123 Maddox, Lucy 117 Maixent, Jocelyn 121 Major, René 131 Malabou, Catherine 128 Mallarmé, Stéphane 31, 91 Mallet, Marie-Louise 96, 131 Mannoni, Octave 131 Manolescu, Monica 27, 116-117, 121, 123 Martiny, Erik 93, 121 Marx, Karl 35, 60, 127-129 Mason, Bobbie Ann 121 Mc Cracken-Flesher, Caroline 114 McGraw Jr., Harold W. 117 McMillin, Arnold 116 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 90, 132 Meyer, Priscilla 108, 116, 121 Miauton, Cécile 70 Milbauer, Asher Z. 114 Miller, Hillis J. 15 Millett, Kate 132

144

Index nominum

Miraux, Jean-Philippe 96, 132 Montaigne, Michel de 83, 97, 124 Morton, Donald E. 117 Moynahan, Julian 117 Musset, Alfred de 46 N Nabokov, Dmitri 49, 60-61, 97, 109-113, 117 Nafisi, Azar 121 Naiman, Eric 117 Nancy, Jean-Luc 44, 61, 86, 97, 106, 122, 124, 128-130, 132 Naumann, Marina Turkevitch 121 Newman, Charles 28, 115 Nicol, Charles 2-4, 32, 59, 62, 68, 100, 106, 118, 121, 123 Nietzsche, Friedrich 17, 40, 127, 132 Nivat, Georges 66-67, 74, 88, 93, 97 Norman, Will 118 Numano, Mitsuyoshi 26, 95, 118, 122-123 O Orwell, George 30 O'Sullivan, Seamus 46 Oustinoff, Michaël 118 P Packman, David 118 Page, Norman 118 Paine, Sylvia 114 Paquet-Deyris, Anne-Marie 121 Parker, Stephen Jan. 116, 118 Parnet, Claire 127 Pastoureau, Michel 40, 60, 132 Paulhan, Jean 69-70 Pautrat, Bernard 124 Picard, Michel 132 Pichova, Hana 118 Piégay-Gros, Nathalie 132

Pifer, Ellen 67-68, 93, 118, 121 Pitzer, Andrea 118 Pivot, Bernard 70 Plato 34, 40-41, 44, 61, 75, 77, 132 Poe, Edgar 14 Poirié, François 132 Pontalis, Jean-Baptiste 130, 133 Pouchkine, Alexandre Serguelevitch (Pushkin) 35, 47, 60-61, 69, 113 Poulet, Georges 24, 29, 123, 132 Proffer, Carl R. 118, 121 Proffer, Ellendea 113 Prokosch, Frederick 113 Proust, Françoise 132 Proust, Marcel 78, 130 Pyle, Robert Michael 94, 115 Pynchon, Thomas 15, 115 Q Quenell, Peter 113, 118 Quéré, Henri 132 R Rabau, Sophie 132 Rabelais, François 125 Raguet-Bouvard, Christine 118, 121 Ramond, Charles 132 Rampton, David 31, 59, 118 Rancour-Laferrierre, Daniel 114 Reid, Mayne 46 Renan, Ernest 82 Richardson, Brian 4, 59, 122, 132 Ricœur, Paul 77, 95-96, 132 Riffaterre, Michael 125, 133 Rimbaud, Arthur 46 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 53, 63, 133 Rivers, Julius Edwin 100, 106, 113, 118 Robert, Marthe 133 Roger, Jérôme 131 Romanski, Philippe 26, 128 Rorty, Richard 114 Rosset, Clément 133

Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces Roth, Phyllis A. 118 Roth-Souton, Danièle 18, 118 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 15, 82-83, 97, 124 Rowe, William Woodin 59, 119 Royle, Nicholas 62, 125, 133

145

Thibault, Paul J. 121 Tredell, Nicolas 120 Toffler, Alvin 37 Toker, Leona 119 Tuhkunen, Taïna 26, 123 U

S Updike, John H. 27, 114, 117 Sarraute, Nathalie 133 Sartre, Jean-Paul 37-38, 82 Scammel, Michael 109 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie 133 Scheiner, Corinne 2-4, 123 Schields, David 66, 93 Schiff, Stacy 113 Schuman, Samuel 108 Seidel, Michael 114 Semochkin, Aleksandr 114 Shakespeare, William 40, 44-46, 65, 95 Shapiro, Gavriel 119 Sharpe, Tony 119 Shrayer, Maxim 121 Shvabrin, Stanislav 112 Sibony, Daniel 133 Sikorski, Vladimir 65 Singer, Burns 114 Smith, Joseph H. 60, 133 Smith, Robert 90, 97, 133 Sohier, Jacques 6, 26, 124 Stark, John 115 Starobinski, Jean 133 Stegner, Page 119 Steiner, George 20, 28, 133 Stiegler, Bernard 128 Stuart, Dabney 66, 93, 119 Supervielle, Jules 46

V Van Antwerp, Margaret A 114 Vattimo, Gianni 128 Verlaine, Paul 46, 52 Vincent, Jean-Pierre 118 W Wakashima, Tadashi 26, 95, 118, 122-123 Ward, Hilda 64 Watt, Ian 125 Weil, Dominique 133 White, Duncan 118 Wilson, Edmund 30, 32, 45,51, 6162, 67, 88, 97, 111 Wimsatt, W.K. 16, 27 Winnicott, Donald W 133 Wordsworth, William. 27, 54, 82, 96, 124 Wood, Michael 66-67, 74, 93, 119 Wortham, Simon Morgan 23, 29, 133 Wylie, Barbara 119 Y Yeats, William Butler 46

T Tammi, Pekka 119 Tate, Allen 30 Temple, Shirley 65 Tennyson, Alfred 46

Z Zanganeh, Lila Azam 119 Zaoui, Pierre 83, 97, 133 Zawisza, Elisabeth 126 Zimmer, Dieter E. 108, 114 Zunshine, Lisa 119

i

I wish to specify that it was thanks to Stephen H. Blackwell (who so kindly read and corrected my manuscript before publication) that I became aware of Siggy Frank’s conclusion of her Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination and whose final sentence is as follows: “Nabokov, whoever he might be, recedes into the background and dissolves into his art in an ultimately theatrical gesture which asserts the autonomous reality and identity of his art.” (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012, p.194) This idea of a receding and dissolving author is very close to my argument and should hopefully reinforce it.