The Problem of Split Identity in Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel
Look At The Harlequins!
Vladimir Nabokov has become a shared Russian-American myth figure. The writer managed to triumph over the language and cultural paradigmatic shift, and his works can illustrate the insightful exploration of mingling Russian and American cultural worlds inside the creative mind. As the writing style of Nabokov is challenging: usage of English, Russian and French languages, puns, language games with literary styles, etc., I will mainly deal with the problems that arise from the author’s Russian-American background and their influence on the creative personality. These problems are the presence of the Russian language within the English text of the novel, the figure of the narrator and his identity in the multicultural world of the text, and finally, the way of creating the space of a fictional world by means of the author’s personal cultural experience.
The novel Look at the Harlequins! dates back to 1974. This is one of Nabokov’s latest books and it includes all the previous literary experience of the author. To make some of my points more apparent I will sometimes need to make comparisons with an earlier novel Ada, or Ardor, 1969.
The first problem is that of the language. In his works Nabokov constantly uses language games and multilingual puns based not only on double meaning of words but also on their sound and graphics[1]:
(When she cried out those words, they came out in a breathless dactylic line with a swift lispy lilt, as if it were ‘lookaty’, assonating with ‘likety’ and introducing tenderly, ingratiatingly those ‘harlequins’ who arrived with festive force, the ‘har’ richly stressed in a burst of inspired persuasion followed by a liquid fall of sequin-like syllables). (p.13[2])
Simultaneous usage of three languages, incessant attention to the text itself makes the novel, metaphorically speaking, multidimensional and therefore slows down its perception and interpretation. Perfect knowledge of three languages, cultures, and literatures rendered Nabokov’s cognitive picture of the world unique amplitude and it requires the same from the reader. A word or phrase may refer to the sphere of any language and culture or to all of them at once, moreover the author makes regular allusions to his own earlier works.
Ivor Black wanted Gogol’s Town Mayor to wear a dressing gown because ‘wasn’t it merely the old rascal’s nightmare and didn’t Revizor, its Russian title, actually came from the French for “dream” rêve ?’ I said I thought it a ghastly idea. (9)
‘And whither’ he asked picking up his cap from a stump, ‘may you be rolling (kotishsya), little apple (yablochko)? Pokazyvay-ka dokumentiki (Let me see your papers).’ (p. 14)
She had Flaxen hair and freckled nose, and I chose the gingham frock with the glossy black belt for her to wear when I had her continue her mysterious progress right into the book I was writing, The Red Top Hat, in which she becomes graceful little Amy… (67)
All this is easily described and … in fact smacks of self-plagiarism, for I had given it both to Tamara and Esmeralda[3], not counting several incidental lassies in my short stories… (134).
To appreciate this, a reader needs a wide background cultural and linguistic knowledge, in other cases, as shows a survey among the readers, reading of Nabokov’s late novels becomes boring and unnecessarily drawn-out as the world of the text is compiled of elements borrowed from three different cultures.
While Ada is written almost in three languages at once, Look at the Harlequins! appears much more reader friendly. The scope of Russian words is reduced and the function of interferences has mostly a lyrico-musical expressive effect: “You were pained you said later (zhalostno bylo)” (177), “‘Metamorphoza,’you said in your lovely, elegant Russian” (177). The misunderstanding of the Russian words inside the text of Look at the Harlequins! does not lead to false interpretations or understanding gaps. Russian language marks the text as a Nabokovian one, like a sort of trademark. This kind of function is typical of personal names, translation of some epithets, writing of Russian words by means of correspondingly sounding English ones with a regressive negative shift of the meaning (Valley Blondies = влюбленность) (p. 28). As always, Nabokov mocks poor commentators of his own style:
A knowledge of Russian’ writes George Oakwood in his astute essay on my Ardis, 1970, will help you to relish much of the wordplay in the most English of the author’s English novels; consider for instance this: ‘The champ and the chimp came all the way from Omsk to Neochomsk.’ What a delightful link between a real round place and ’ni-o-chyom,’ the About-Nothing land of the modern philosophic linguistics! (p. 103).
The passage ends with habitual sarcasm towards disastrous translations from Russian into English and vice versa and a beautiful swing from the textual level of the narration to the factual one. Compared to Ada, the text of Look at the Harlequins! is graphically smoother, the syntax is less complicated and demands fewer recursive halts, although re-reading is essential, which is true of all of Nabokov’s works. Definitely the experience of Ada made the author less optimistic on the subject of the reader’s mental abilities and comprehension skills. A complexity of language created difficulties not only to readers but also to the author himself. On the one hand, he tried to avoid Joys’ failure with Finnegan’s Wake (as Nabokov treated it in his lectures[4]), on the other hand, to think over his own literary style and fate. As a result, in the novel Look at the Harlequins! he revisits such vital problems as the author’s personality, the image of the author and his books in common minds, distortions that arise from unawareness and stereotype thinking.
Stereotype thinking is a matter of major concern to Nabokov, he persistently attacks it in the novel: “An atmosphere of vague distress was gathering (to speak in verbal clichés about a cliché situation)” (138), “His whole manner changed – to use a cliché he deserves” (176). This problem corresponds to one of the main issues of modern cognitive linguistics. The process of thinking and understanding is subordinate to concepts, scripts and categories, formed in mind under the influence of the language and culture surroundings. To use a relative example, the understanding of a new book depends on the prior literary experience of the reader, and this experience in turn, depends on the quality of the books read previously. A reader used to ordinary fiction will apply same interpretative structures and devices to a more complicated book. Nabokov is aware of this problem, making it the usual theme of his narrator:
Coincidence is a pimp and cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of fact recollected by a non-ordinary memoirist. Only asses and geese think that the recollector skips this or that bit of his past because it is dull or shoddy (that sort of episode here, for example, the interview with the Dean, and how scrupulously it is recordered!). (177)
Stereotypes work not only while reading books but also with reference to the author’s personality. Any person, familiar with Nabokov, can make some account of his biography, no matter true or false, and this is the concept of the writer’s personality in ones mind. This concept is mainly formed under the influence of the writer’s books. Accordingly, misleading reading strategies result in wrong understanding of the books and wrong image of the writer. In Look at the Harlequins! the whole plot comes out of this problem. Real writer Nabokov creates a fictional biography of a writer Vadim Vadimovich, who is falsely mixed with a stereotypical Nabokov.
This brings us to the question of the author’s self-perception as it is expressed in the text. Both Ada and Look at the Harlequins! are fictional biographies of writers. Taking a priori the idea that the creation of a character demands the author’s introspection into his inner world, we can see that the writer-narrator of Ada is creating his world regardless to any historical or geographical boundaries. The degree of complexity is of no importance since the aim of this game is to express the internal arrangement of Antiterra as it is represented by the author’s introspection.
The conditions of world creation in Look at the Harlequins! are totally different. This time everything happens on Earth, so to say, on Terra, with its familiar history and geography, where there are the USA, Europe, and Russia behind the iron curtain. The world of the narrator depends on this external scheme. The fictional world is made not out of but inside the real one. As a result, the narrator has problems with his self-identity. While the personality of Ada’s narrator is created in ideal settings and is independent of any external influence, the narrator of Look at the Harlequins! is subordinated to a number of limits when he has to deal with reality. The real world is incompatible with his authentic self-perception. As a result, appears a split image, a constellation of details that the person himself cannot sort out into a right pattern. Since there is no doubt about the reality of the world in the novel, there is uncertainty about the completeness of the narrator’s self. We even do not know for sure his real name – VV, MacNab, Vadim Vadimovich Blonsky, etc., because he is unable to wholly inscribe himself into this world. The question “Who am I?” constantly haunts him, as well as a shade of a mirror image writer.
One more imperfection of the narrator is his mental illness – the inability to imagine a simple turn inside his mind. This incites one more aspect of the problem: the identity of the author. Jorge Luis Borges has a short story called Borges and I, where he describes the fact that ‘an individual Borges’ thinks about the ‘well-known writer Borges’ as if he were a different person[5].
Apparently, Nabokov was also concerned with this problem when he wrote about Vadim Vadimovich and his distorted mirror image. From the very beginning, the reader relates Vadim Vadimovich’s literary biography to Nabokov’s books; the author explores the difference between his real self and the stereotype that exists in the consciousness of every reader. The figure of the narrator Vadim Vadimovich emerges on the borderline between these two images. As well as the whole plot, that is made out of the deliberate distortion of stereotypes that exist on behalf of the real author. The text is full of allusions to the most crucial points of Nabokov’s own biography. Vadim Vadimovich left Russia in 1918, like Nabokov, not with his family but having killed a Russian soldier. He spent some years in Europe, wrote several books in Russian, fled to the USA, became a lecturer and later a famous writer there, then returned to Europe again.
The reader must have noticed that I speak only in a very general way about my Russian fictions of the Nineteen – Twenties and Thirties, for I assume that he is familiar with them or can easily obtain them in their English versions. At this point, however, I must say a few words about The Dare (Podarok Otchizne was its original title, which can be translated as ‘A Gift To The Fatherland’). (84)
Everything more or less corresponds with Nabokov’s own life. Though, Vadim Vadimovich has visited Soviet Russia and never met his father who died before his birth. The purpose of it is to make some conclusions out this deliberate mixture of true and imaginary facts. The distortion does not hide anything; on the contrary, it reveals the nature of stereotype thinking. The whole novel is made of typical images, devices, and processes characteristic of Nabokov’s style. The author himself falsifies all these stereotypes. Nabokov had the experience of commenting his own novels and that doomed all the future commentators and compilers of guides to Nabokov. As a survey of readers’ opinions shows, the commentary can be of little help to understand Nabokov’s prose, but it does not reduce the number of questions and often misleads the reader. The answers to the questions are usually on the surface of the text; in its boundary conditions, that is in other words, in the episodes, when the dynamic movement of the plot stops and the narrator concentrates on the details that add to the problem of writing itself, the problem of ‘Reality’, time and space. The defiant syntax and vocabulary of the text is a part of this strategy. To read through a sentence often means to overcome almost an endless sequence of subordinate clauses, consult a dictionary and recollect the university course of literature:
Nikifor Nikodimovich, to use his tongue-twisterish Christian name cum patronymic, was rumored to have been for years on end an admirer of my beautiful and bizarre mother, whom I knew mainly from stock phrases in an anonymous memoir. A grande passion can be a convenient mask, but on the other hand, a gentlemanly devotion to her memory can alone explain his paying for my education in England and leaving me, after his death in 1927, a modest subsidy (the Bolshevist coup had ruined him as it had all our clan). I must admit, however, that I felt embarrassed by the sudden live glances of his otherwise dead eyes set in a large, pastry, dignified face, of the sort that Russian writers used to call ‘carefully shaven’ (tshchatel’no vybritoe), no doubt because the ghosts of patriarchal beards had to be laid, in the presumed imagination of readers (long dead by now). (15)
These three sentences can illustrate Nabokov’s work with mental concepts on several levels. Reference to Russian writers, here, supposedly, to Tolstoy is made on semantic, syntaxic, and visual levels. The semantic level is the allusion to Anna Karenina plot, the level of syntax is the usage of long complex clause sentences, and the so-called visual level is the reference to patriarchal beard. These already existing concepts are manipulated with in a semantically new context. On the whole they form a new, more complex, independent concept of Nabokov’s own style, and this is how the old literary scripts and concepts can be reinterpreted in a secondary lingual representation. What is to be appreciated here, is the masterful revisit and development of literary tradition.
All these matters are concentrated in the problem of the narrator’s mental illness, a variant of a borderline situation in the novel.
Already twice in my young life a fit of total cramp – the physical counterpart of lighting insanity – had all but overpowered me in the panic and blackness of bottomless water. (35)
Time after time the narrator approaches the line, where he is about to go beyond the limits of his own world, in which there is not enough dimensions to treat his dementia, but is unable to cross it. When the final turn happens the narrator finds himself in a different reality, this reality can be judged as Nabokov’s hereafter, a peculiar term, offered by the writer’s wife Vera. The new reality in Look at the Harlequins! in fact means the end of the story. The narrator made the turn in his mind, regained his consciousness and reconstructed his new identity, out of the formerly incompatible elements.
The character, created on the borderline of self-consciousness and of stereotype, happens to reach and cross the frontier himself. This situation is traditionally, without inventing seemingly new ways of the plot development, tested by love. Nabokov uses a device, typical to romantic and sentimental tradition. His last and true lover reads Ardis that refers to Nabokov’s Ada, the latter in turn has constant references to Chateaubriand. False loves result in distorted novels, the outline of which is presented at the very beginning of the novel. The final in the story true love results in Look at the Harlequins! itself. The novel turns inside out. As a result, there appear a number of questions, and ambiguity between authentic and counterfeit details, between the multiple senses and references. That demand not solution but the recognition of a new level of the problems that are developed in this convoluted novel.
The action of the novel Look at the Harlequins! takes place in Europe, the USA and Soviet Russia. The creation of the settings is marked by a peculiar usage of typical details in creating a sentient space. Nabokov compiled the picture of Russia out of most usual images associated with the country: bad service, KGB spy, vodka, soap and perfume Red Moscow and kotleta po kievsky (p. 163,164). As Nabokov had never been to Soviet Russia, the image of the country in the novel consists of elements that can be easily obtained through media or from tourists. Nabokov never hides the fact: in the Leningrad episode he mentions postcards, Intourist folder and the narrator’s recollections, and adds that everything has a ‘fairy-tale touch’(162). These are hints to the real source of information about Russia though the episode itself is wholly invented.
The information is divided into two opposite points of view towards the Soviet regime. Both of them represent polar concepts of perception the country. Each of them is tested inside the authors system of values according to Nabokov’s own scale, based on aesthetic and artistic but never on political principles.
People I admired with grateful fervor, not only because their high-principled art had enchanted my prime, but also because the banishment of their books by the Bolshevists represented the greatest indictment, absolute and immortal, of Lenin’s and Stalin’s regime (97).
The Soviets-approving point of view, that belongs to Russian émigré Ninel Lengly and a KGB spy Oleg Orlov, is supported by vulgar and superficial facts, that syntactically take the form of weird sovetisms: ‘Art and Progress in the Soviet Land, including the restoration of lovely old churches’(119),‘the study of foreign languages stands at a remarkable level in the Soviet Land’(120). Even a lyrical description of a circus can induce Orlov’s proud remark: ‘Pouf! They can’t compete with our Soviet circus’ (164). Notably this last phrase has a triple meaning: it discloses the spy, falsifies the slogan ‘Soviet means the best’ and compares Soviet regime with a circus. This point of view demonstrates the mode of perception of the reality with a frame of mind, formed by culture and language alien to the author’s one. The concepts and the system of values formed in different social surrounding do not correspond and form one of the counterpoints of the novel. In this struggle emerges the essence of the creative identity.
Proving his own ideas, Nabokov laughs over all emanations of Soviet art:
The statue of Pushkin erected some ten years before by a committee of weathermen. An Intourist folder had yielded a tinted photograph of the spot. The meteorological associations of the monument predominated over its cultural ones Frockcoated Pushkin, the right-side lap of his garment permanently agitated by the Nevan breeze rather than by the violence of lyrical afflatus, stands looking upward and to the left while his right hand is stretched out the other way, sidewise, to test the rain (a very natural attitude at the time lilacs bloom in the Leningrad parks). (166)
This disapproving point of view belongs to the author and, therefore, to the narrator. Vadim Vadimovich’s perception of the country reveals the authors emotional image of the country: weak attempts to seem a well-to-do country cannot hide its vulgar, insensitive, rotten pith. Treacherous smell always gets on the narrator’s nose and nerves: everywhere… invisible onion soup was cooking on invisible stoves (166). This is the representation of the concept, formed in another culture. Nabokov tried to imitate the stylistic difference between the two frames of mind. One of them is recreated in syntactically and lexically odd Ninel Lengly’s speech and writing (120), in the writing of lieutenant Vladimir Blagidze (55-56), in the speech of Oleg Orlov (172).
The other frame is expressed in the narrator’s own speech. His style, according to the plot, is the good one. That enables him to transform the image compiled of details familiar to tourists, to postcard images: “pistachio palace instead of the remembered pinkish one” (p. 165). And finally this surrounding is brilliantly combined with vague childhood recollections. “To be quite honest, only the dogs, the pigeons, the horses, and the very old, very meek cloakroom attendants seemed familiar to me.” (p. 166). The wrong perception is poetically falsified, substituted by details, important to the other assessment of the world and this way inbuilt into the novel.
The whole picture, created by means of standard details, may seem very abstract, or subjective, as the construct has to correspond to reality. To avoid this, the author does two things. The picture of Russia is obviously stereotypical but it can be interpreted as a conscious continuation of the problem of stereotype thinking, this time used on the level of textual space. The second thing is the reflection of this theme in the American part of the novel. Ninel Lengly, one of the negative characters, is very skeptical about the country and her point of view represents the same “foreign” alienation of perception, this time toward the American way of life.
As a result, both Russian and American readers can have equal understanding of the episodes because personal interpretative images are balanced by these two parallel and opposing elements of the narrative. On the whole, this opposition serves to demonstrate set models of assessment, familiar to the people of a certain culture. It points out the crisis of consciousness, restricted by different kinds of schemes and clichés. To see unpredictable and changeable black and white harlequins that perform in and form the novel is one of the possible interpretations of Look at the Harlequins!
[1] See: Johnson D.B. Worlds In Regression. Ann Arbor, 1985. Shapiro G. Setting His Myriad Faces In His Text. // Nabokov And His Fiction: New Perspectives. Cambridge, 1999.
[2] Nabokov V. Look at the Harlequins! London: Penguin Books, 2001.
[3] Vadim Vadimovich’s Tamara refers to Nabokov’s Mary, Esmeralda – to Lolita.
[4] Набоков В.В. Лекции по зарубежной литературе. М, 1998. – с. 367-464.
[5] Борхес Х.Л. Борхес и Я // Круги Руин. СПб: Азбука, 2000ю – с. 5-7.