Subject
[NABOKOV-L] Critical essay by J.Morris on Nabokov's "marvelous
terror"
terror"
From
Date
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A new article (and link, http://www.bookrags.com/criticism/vladimir-nabokov-crit2_29/) was sent by James Twiggs: Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Essay by J. Morris - "The Gliding Eye: Nabokov's Marvelous Terror," in The Southern Review, Vol. 35, No. 1, Winter, 1999, pp. 162-74.
NB: My resumé (see below) is rather unfaithful in relation to the essayst's main theory ("In the following essay, Morris explores Nabokov's technique of using the play of consciousness as the narrative voice.") because, while arranging the present excerpts, I chiefly focused on his careful patterning and arrangement of Nabokov-quotes. Those interested in his thesis should get it from the bookrags site directly.
"Vladimir Nabokov...was chronically unable to ...sleep through the night. 'I suffocate in uninterrupted, unbearable darkness,' goes an early poem. 'The marvelous terror of consciousness rocks my soul in emptiness.'... Fifty-five years after first describing his 'marvelous terror' -in April 1974, the month of his seventy-fifth birthday-Nabokov noted in his diary: 'Inspiration. Radiant insomnia. The flavour and snows of beloved Alpine slopes. A novel without an I, without a he, but with the narrator, the gliding eye, being implied throughout.' The Gliding Eye remained unwritten; Nabokov died on July 2, 1977...And yet, oddly, the gliding eye is after all everywhere present in Nabokov's oeuvre, is in fact a key to understanding the story of his style, his stance."
Morris attempts to envision how fiction, in Nabokov, may result from an "attempt to investigate and mimic in prose the gliding movements of human consciousness" and, spurred on by curiosity, how the writer tries to "inhabit people imaginatively." His first example comes from RLSK's V., who concludes that: "Any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations." He thinks that Nabokov rejected "realism...- the author's implicit pact with the reader to render both invisible - in favor of a kind of collegial acknowledgment of the artifices of fiction." He adds that, for Nabokov,"Non-being was fundamentally insulting, 'a dark taint, a shameful family secret'. Nabokov's characters, along with their author, return the insult, railing at death as "a dog and an abomination," "a fit of black nausea followed by infinite nothingness."
He quotes other lines from Nabokov's autobiography: "I feel the urge to . picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage," before he states that he intends "to look at the ways Nabokov did this-how his fictional eye followed the swoops and shifts of consciousness and then used this momentum to move past the earthly frame...a writer who wishes to explore-and sometimes break-the boundaries of human consciousness must devise very different strategies."
Morris chooses Nabokov's short-story "Recruiting," for his first attempt to defend his theory. As he describes it, the story's "first, omniscient sentence reads: 'He was old, he was ill, and nobody in the world needed him.' ...V. I., as Nabokov dubs him, is returning on the tram from the funeral of Professor D.,...but what he mainly thinks of ...his sister's grave...: 'The paint of the cross had peeled here and there, the name was barely distinguishable from the linden's shade that glided across it, erasing it.' (Keep an eye on that linden; it is, in an eerie sense, the story's protagonist.)... The intrusion of the I is surprising, even momentarily confusing..." After getting off the tram, V. I. sits on a bench. "Then, without warning, we're addressed in the first person again: 'I would like to understand, though, whence comes this happiness, this swell of happiness, that immediately transforms one's soul into something immense, transparent, and precious.' ...Whose soul, then, is referred to here-V. I.'s, VN's? ... the narrative immediately returns us to V. I.'s reflections...'Bees were ministering to the blooming linden tree overhead'... The scene 'sparkled through and through with vitality, novelty, participation in one's destiny, whenever he and I experienced such fits of happiness'...This pairing of the consciousnesses is startling, and is followed by its physical or plot-level analog: a man carrying a Russian newspaper sits down next to V. I., and the narrator's comment that 'it is difficult for me to describe this man; then again, it would be useless, since a self-portrait is seldom successful.' Nabokov has entered the story: the vague first-person presence has become a character.'Why did I decide that the man next to whom I had sat down was named Vasiliy Ivanovich?' Nabokov wonders. All the previous narration is now revealed as illusory...V. I.'s happiness is also a fiction... 'I felt I was infecting that stranger with the blazing creative happiness that sends a chill over an artist's skin. I wished that, despite his age, his indigence, the tumor in his stomach, V. I. might share the terrible power of my bliss'." ... Nabokov wishes to redeem V. I.'s painful existence by "infecting" him with happiness, but is it not Nabokov himself who has infected the old man with poverty and cancer?...Now comes the first intimation of the linden leaves' significance; their shadows, Nabokov's very thoughts, 'passed across the veins of his large hand and fell anew on his grayish hair.' The old man glances at his companion on the bench-creature meets creator-then puts his hat back on, gets up, and moves off, 'forever, if I am not mistaken'...Here is the story's last paragraph: 'My representative, the man with the Russian newspaper, was now alone on the bench and, as he had moved over into the shade where V. I. had just been sitting, the same cool linden pattern that had anointed his predecessor now rippled across his forehead.' That second character is now reduced to "my representative"...and the shadow of the linden leaves does not spare him... It is the impersonal shadow cast by a consciousness far beyond the understanding of the characters' shaded minds... The gliding eye of consciousness has thus transported us past the merely human to a higher, uncomprehended I, a consciousness that looks down upon us in much the same way that a writer regards his characters... Indeed, the shaping and the observing may amount to the same thing; one can imagine Nabokov agreeing with Bishop Berkeley that to be is to be perceived....When the leaves' shadow picks out first V. I. and then VN, it is both a blessing and a threat....The pattern of 'Recruiting' continues: after Krug's story, we spend the final page and a half of the book with its writer, now given a setting and a set of feelings, like any other character. This author's perception of a helpless moth twanging against his windowscreen, and of 'the glint of a special puddle' outside the window, a puddle-shape that has haunted his creature Krug throughout the novel, leaves I in the same existential peril as 'my representative' in 'Recruiting'."
Morris continues: "...Nabokov was also fascinated by the idea that the dead ...might communicate with us... In 'The Vane Sisters,' a famous and absurd story, two dead sisters provide an acrostic message in the final paragraph. The message (which the narrator's consciousness misses entirely, as would most readers without Nabokov's explication) reveals the aesthetic threads they themselves have woven into the narrator's life. Signifying, hinting ghosts also play a role in 'The Defense' and the poem 'Pale Fire.' But all such communications remain one-sided and cryptic..."
The essayist dwells on an early Russian novel, by Nabokov, "The eye" and on its character, Smurov, who believes that he is dead and concludes: 'after death human thought lives on by momentum.'... Smurov "appears to experience a disconcerting metaphysical schism: he has become a spying eye, observing his own third-person adventures. Here is I, the eye, and there is Smurov, 'comparatively a newcomer, although he hardly looks it. . I must say that he made a rather favorable impression on me those first evenings.' But the narrating I soon finds that (presumed) death and resurrection have changed Smurov for the worse: he barely exists, is in fact more robustly present in the various images and impressions other characters have of him*....Only love, tenderness, beauty can reunite Smurov with himself, and with life, but nobody offers him these things...so he is left permanently disassembled, broken into first and third persons, asserting to "you cruel, smug people" that he is happy, happy to be able to "gaze at myself" and "all the remarkable things about me-my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift." But this particular conscious eye is a hoax, a failure. Smurov, intolerable to himself, has attempted to re-become, to begin again, but the radical division of I from self is futile. He is doomed to be, after all, Smurov....Immortality was...a serious matter for Nabokov, not merely an aesthete's idle dream.
According to Morris, "Nabokov's penultimate novel, 'Transparent Things," combines his favorite speculative themes-gods and ghosts-and how our mortal consciousness might glide toward them.As the novel begins... one of Nabokov's omniscient, lordly narrators...draws our attention to the main character-"Here's the person I want. Hullo, person!"-and his narrating consciousness flits lightly over the text: from scenes of his chosen character's life, to philosophical pensées, to some quite odd investigations of the birth and early development of a pencil.But something is off: this narrating I doesn't have the sort of control we associate with Nabokov's author-gods. For one thing, he can't get Person (as the protagonist is aptly named) to do what he wants...'Doesn't hear me'... When, halfway through the book, a certain Mr. R. is introduced, alert readers have the answer. R. is a German novelist whose jaunty attempts at idiomatic English are clearly those of the narrating consciousness. He happens, however, to be dead at the present time of the novel. Thus "Transparent Things" is narrated by a transparent thing, a specter, whose interest in Hugh Person remains to be clarified, but who has extremely limited sway over him. R. is no god, nor even a godlike author, but only a dead novelist with a keen eye for pattern." We learn that "Mr. R. ... is fond of Hugh Person...and his main concern is to warn him of a fate that R. believes has been carefully and mercilessly prepared for him...The ghosts' warnings are necessarily oblique: 'Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity.'...'After all it was for [Person] to decide, for him to die, if he wished.' Free will, at long last? Not likely, in a Nabokov novel... Hugh Person has the opportunity to choose among several prepared patterns-and R. does not understand this. '[I am] an incomparably better artist than Mr. R.,' Nabokov told an interviewer... all of Mr. R.'s meticulous attention to themes and figurations of falling are, at the end, rendered pointless, like false solutions to a chess problem. The theme we should have been noting is, of course, strangulation, and suddenly this pattern leaps to our attention, a figure-ground illusion come to life...A plausible illusion has concealed something deeper, more eerie and complex, and, in a chilly sense, more beautiful."
Morris finishes his article by quoting from "Speak, Memory": "It is certainly not then-not in dreams-but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits." ..."Although nothing much can be seen through the mist...there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction."
..............................................................................................................................
* - this is the phenomenon Nabokov describes in his foreword to "The Eye" as creating catoptric "rain-sparkling crystograms" (JM)
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NB: My resumé (see below) is rather unfaithful in relation to the essayst's main theory ("In the following essay, Morris explores Nabokov's technique of using the play of consciousness as the narrative voice.") because, while arranging the present excerpts, I chiefly focused on his careful patterning and arrangement of Nabokov-quotes. Those interested in his thesis should get it from the bookrags site directly.
"Vladimir Nabokov...was chronically unable to ...sleep through the night. 'I suffocate in uninterrupted, unbearable darkness,' goes an early poem. 'The marvelous terror of consciousness rocks my soul in emptiness.'... Fifty-five years after first describing his 'marvelous terror' -in April 1974, the month of his seventy-fifth birthday-Nabokov noted in his diary: 'Inspiration. Radiant insomnia. The flavour and snows of beloved Alpine slopes. A novel without an I, without a he, but with the narrator, the gliding eye, being implied throughout.' The Gliding Eye remained unwritten; Nabokov died on July 2, 1977...And yet, oddly, the gliding eye is after all everywhere present in Nabokov's oeuvre, is in fact a key to understanding the story of his style, his stance."
Morris attempts to envision how fiction, in Nabokov, may result from an "attempt to investigate and mimic in prose the gliding movements of human consciousness" and, spurred on by curiosity, how the writer tries to "inhabit people imaginatively." His first example comes from RLSK's V., who concludes that: "Any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations." He thinks that Nabokov rejected "realism...- the author's implicit pact with the reader to render both invisible - in favor of a kind of collegial acknowledgment of the artifices of fiction." He adds that, for Nabokov,"Non-being was fundamentally insulting, 'a dark taint, a shameful family secret'. Nabokov's characters, along with their author, return the insult, railing at death as "a dog and an abomination," "a fit of black nausea followed by infinite nothingness."
He quotes other lines from Nabokov's autobiography: "I feel the urge to . picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage," before he states that he intends "to look at the ways Nabokov did this-how his fictional eye followed the swoops and shifts of consciousness and then used this momentum to move past the earthly frame...a writer who wishes to explore-and sometimes break-the boundaries of human consciousness must devise very different strategies."
Morris chooses Nabokov's short-story "Recruiting," for his first attempt to defend his theory. As he describes it, the story's "first, omniscient sentence reads: 'He was old, he was ill, and nobody in the world needed him.' ...V. I., as Nabokov dubs him, is returning on the tram from the funeral of Professor D.,...but what he mainly thinks of ...his sister's grave...: 'The paint of the cross had peeled here and there, the name was barely distinguishable from the linden's shade that glided across it, erasing it.' (Keep an eye on that linden; it is, in an eerie sense, the story's protagonist.)... The intrusion of the I is surprising, even momentarily confusing..." After getting off the tram, V. I. sits on a bench. "Then, without warning, we're addressed in the first person again: 'I would like to understand, though, whence comes this happiness, this swell of happiness, that immediately transforms one's soul into something immense, transparent, and precious.' ...Whose soul, then, is referred to here-V. I.'s, VN's? ... the narrative immediately returns us to V. I.'s reflections...'Bees were ministering to the blooming linden tree overhead'... The scene 'sparkled through and through with vitality, novelty, participation in one's destiny, whenever he and I experienced such fits of happiness'...This pairing of the consciousnesses is startling, and is followed by its physical or plot-level analog: a man carrying a Russian newspaper sits down next to V. I., and the narrator's comment that 'it is difficult for me to describe this man; then again, it would be useless, since a self-portrait is seldom successful.' Nabokov has entered the story: the vague first-person presence has become a character.'Why did I decide that the man next to whom I had sat down was named Vasiliy Ivanovich?' Nabokov wonders. All the previous narration is now revealed as illusory...V. I.'s happiness is also a fiction... 'I felt I was infecting that stranger with the blazing creative happiness that sends a chill over an artist's skin. I wished that, despite his age, his indigence, the tumor in his stomach, V. I. might share the terrible power of my bliss'." ... Nabokov wishes to redeem V. I.'s painful existence by "infecting" him with happiness, but is it not Nabokov himself who has infected the old man with poverty and cancer?...Now comes the first intimation of the linden leaves' significance; their shadows, Nabokov's very thoughts, 'passed across the veins of his large hand and fell anew on his grayish hair.' The old man glances at his companion on the bench-creature meets creator-then puts his hat back on, gets up, and moves off, 'forever, if I am not mistaken'...Here is the story's last paragraph: 'My representative, the man with the Russian newspaper, was now alone on the bench and, as he had moved over into the shade where V. I. had just been sitting, the same cool linden pattern that had anointed his predecessor now rippled across his forehead.' That second character is now reduced to "my representative"...and the shadow of the linden leaves does not spare him... It is the impersonal shadow cast by a consciousness far beyond the understanding of the characters' shaded minds... The gliding eye of consciousness has thus transported us past the merely human to a higher, uncomprehended I, a consciousness that looks down upon us in much the same way that a writer regards his characters... Indeed, the shaping and the observing may amount to the same thing; one can imagine Nabokov agreeing with Bishop Berkeley that to be is to be perceived....When the leaves' shadow picks out first V. I. and then VN, it is both a blessing and a threat....The pattern of 'Recruiting' continues: after Krug's story, we spend the final page and a half of the book with its writer, now given a setting and a set of feelings, like any other character. This author's perception of a helpless moth twanging against his windowscreen, and of 'the glint of a special puddle' outside the window, a puddle-shape that has haunted his creature Krug throughout the novel, leaves I in the same existential peril as 'my representative' in 'Recruiting'."
Morris continues: "...Nabokov was also fascinated by the idea that the dead ...might communicate with us... In 'The Vane Sisters,' a famous and absurd story, two dead sisters provide an acrostic message in the final paragraph. The message (which the narrator's consciousness misses entirely, as would most readers without Nabokov's explication) reveals the aesthetic threads they themselves have woven into the narrator's life. Signifying, hinting ghosts also play a role in 'The Defense' and the poem 'Pale Fire.' But all such communications remain one-sided and cryptic..."
The essayist dwells on an early Russian novel, by Nabokov, "The eye" and on its character, Smurov, who believes that he is dead and concludes: 'after death human thought lives on by momentum.'... Smurov "appears to experience a disconcerting metaphysical schism: he has become a spying eye, observing his own third-person adventures. Here is I, the eye, and there is Smurov, 'comparatively a newcomer, although he hardly looks it. . I must say that he made a rather favorable impression on me those first evenings.' But the narrating I soon finds that (presumed) death and resurrection have changed Smurov for the worse: he barely exists, is in fact more robustly present in the various images and impressions other characters have of him*....Only love, tenderness, beauty can reunite Smurov with himself, and with life, but nobody offers him these things...so he is left permanently disassembled, broken into first and third persons, asserting to "you cruel, smug people" that he is happy, happy to be able to "gaze at myself" and "all the remarkable things about me-my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift." But this particular conscious eye is a hoax, a failure. Smurov, intolerable to himself, has attempted to re-become, to begin again, but the radical division of I from self is futile. He is doomed to be, after all, Smurov....Immortality was...a serious matter for Nabokov, not merely an aesthete's idle dream.
According to Morris, "Nabokov's penultimate novel, 'Transparent Things," combines his favorite speculative themes-gods and ghosts-and how our mortal consciousness might glide toward them.As the novel begins... one of Nabokov's omniscient, lordly narrators...draws our attention to the main character-"Here's the person I want. Hullo, person!"-and his narrating consciousness flits lightly over the text: from scenes of his chosen character's life, to philosophical pensées, to some quite odd investigations of the birth and early development of a pencil.But something is off: this narrating I doesn't have the sort of control we associate with Nabokov's author-gods. For one thing, he can't get Person (as the protagonist is aptly named) to do what he wants...'Doesn't hear me'... When, halfway through the book, a certain Mr. R. is introduced, alert readers have the answer. R. is a German novelist whose jaunty attempts at idiomatic English are clearly those of the narrating consciousness. He happens, however, to be dead at the present time of the novel. Thus "Transparent Things" is narrated by a transparent thing, a specter, whose interest in Hugh Person remains to be clarified, but who has extremely limited sway over him. R. is no god, nor even a godlike author, but only a dead novelist with a keen eye for pattern." We learn that "Mr. R. ... is fond of Hugh Person...and his main concern is to warn him of a fate that R. believes has been carefully and mercilessly prepared for him...The ghosts' warnings are necessarily oblique: 'Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity.'...'After all it was for [Person] to decide, for him to die, if he wished.' Free will, at long last? Not likely, in a Nabokov novel... Hugh Person has the opportunity to choose among several prepared patterns-and R. does not understand this. '[I am] an incomparably better artist than Mr. R.,' Nabokov told an interviewer... all of Mr. R.'s meticulous attention to themes and figurations of falling are, at the end, rendered pointless, like false solutions to a chess problem. The theme we should have been noting is, of course, strangulation, and suddenly this pattern leaps to our attention, a figure-ground illusion come to life...A plausible illusion has concealed something deeper, more eerie and complex, and, in a chilly sense, more beautiful."
Morris finishes his article by quoting from "Speak, Memory": "It is certainly not then-not in dreams-but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits." ..."Although nothing much can be seen through the mist...there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction."
..............................................................................................................................
* - this is the phenomenon Nabokov describes in his foreword to "The Eye" as creating catoptric "rain-sparkling crystograms" (JM)
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/