Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0000616, Fri, 9 Jun 1995 10:36:38 -0700

Subject
RJ: Torpid Smoke (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR'S NOTE: NABOKV-L continues its weekly series of essays
on Nabokov's short stories drawn from Roy Johnson's book manuscript.
Please address your comments to NABOKV-L.

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This week's story - TORPID SMOKE
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Another good example of this phenomenon of the poetic sketch,
which brings the short story into the condition of what Clare
Hanson has called "a form which mediates between the lyric poem
and the novel" (CH,p.9) is the next piece from February 1935,
'Torpid Smoke'. The overt subject matter is here reduced to no
more than the protagonist's dreamy reflections on the physical
world around him and the joy he finds in poetic composition. In
this sense it is not unlike one of the stories of 'organised
reflections' by Katherine Mansfield or Virginia Woolf. One senses
Nabokov gaining confidence about this time, perhaps spurred on
by his success as a novelist, and making a clearer distinction
between those effects possible in longer or shorter pieces of
prose. Here the narrative element is played down, leaving poetic
meditation and unity of tone and structure to do the work of
holding the story together.

Grisha is a nineteen year old emigre relaxing after supper in the
apartment where he lives with his father and sister. He is
allowing himself to sink into a voluptuous languor of poetic
image-making which the third person narrative reflects by passing
into the tones and rhythms of the prose poem, coming fairly close
to the dissolution of meaning into 'word music':

"an illusory perspective was formed, a remote mirage
enchanting in its graphic transparency and isolation:
a stretch of water, say, and a black promontory with
the minuscule silhouette of an araucaria" (RB,p.27).

This is Nabokov the writer in love with alliteration, verbal
sonorities, and lexical delights: most readers are driven to a
dictionary to discover that "araucaria" has more poetic
possibilities than its more prosaic meaning of "monkey-puzzle
tree". But what might be seen as verbal self-indulgence can be
justified here by its appropriateness to Grisha's late-adolescent
literary strivings. He is aware that his poems are "puerile [and]
perishable" (p.33) but he is enchanted by the process of
composition itself.

He is also indulging a physical state of being which approximates
to this mental state - one in which he feels that he is
dissolving into the material world of which he is a part:

"For example, the lane on the other side of the house
might be his own arm, while the long skeletal cloud
that stretched across the whole sky with a chill of
stars in the east might be his backbone" (p.29)

[These elements of poetic meditation and the dissolution of the
self into the everyday world are remarkably similar to the states
of mind and being which Virginia Woolf had explored in her own
short stories such as 'The Mark on the Wall' and 'Reflections in
a Looking Glass' only a few years earlier.]

In the midst of these reveries Grisha remembers seeing smoke on
a rooftop earlier that day and feels a special sense of
significance in it: "the chimney smoke hugged the roof, creeping
low, heavy with damp, sated with it, sleepy, refusing to rise,
refusing to detach itself from beloved decay" (p.30). Of course
the scene reflects his own state of being, but more than that he
feels what turns out to be the impulse towards a poetic
recreation of his observation.

This process is interrupted by the only overt 'action' of the
story: his sister asks him for some cigarettes. He gives them to
her, sinks back into his horizontal repose, and the narrative
passes into the first person to describe the thrill of
composition: "a metrical line extended and bent; at the bend a
rhyme was coming deliciously and hotly alight" (p.33). It is a
process which Grisha feels is the source of great pleasure -
"this happiness is the greatest thing existing on earth" (p.33).

There is almost no external eventfulness in the story at all:
following his predecessors Turgenev and Chekhov, Nabokov replaced
overt causality as the subject of his story with that of the
resolution of certain states of being, thus creating what is now
seen by most commentators as the truly modern short story - one
which Eileen Baldeshwiler calls 'The Lyric Short Story':

"the locus of narrative art has moved from external
action to internal states of mind, and the plot line
will hereafter consist, in this mode, of tracing
complex emotions to a closing cadence utterly unlike
the reasoned resolution of the conventional cause-and-
effect story. It is here that we observe the birth of
the 'open story'" (CM,p.206)

Although he has created a young and amateur writer as
protagonist, the depiction of this creative exultation seems very
convincing, especially since it accords with what one gathers
from those other stories of Nabokov's which deal with the
relationship between art and life and this process of being
creative. Another story from 1935 takes up this same theme and
adds to it a twist taken from his repertoire of concealed
narrators.

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Next week's story - RECRUITING
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