·JULIAN MOYNAHAN
. curtains will
be
rolled back, revealing a "fiery phantasm" of reality that
is something other and truer than a sinister, deceptive show.
The prisoner in
Invitation
inhabits a solitary cell with a
trompe
l'oeil
window painted high up on one wall. While he tries in vain
to
reach up to the false window, his malicious jailers amuse themselves
by peeping in at
him.
This notion of man as an inefficient spy efficiently
spied upon is a variation on Nabokov's most arresting metaphor, that
of the world (also the body and the human cranium) as
camera obscura.
We are all locked up in a dark room where an aperture
has
been cut
in the wall through which enters a beam of light carrying a stream of
images. Prisoners of a light show scripted by demons, we stumble in
darkness and see only reflections, although certain reflections - the Lolita
reflection, for example, and behind her, the Beatrice and the Annabel
Lee reflections - are brighter and more warming than others.
Philosophically Nabokov can be categorized as a rebellious idealist.
Like Beckett he understands that man is trapped within his mental
reflections and like Beckett attempts to focus his art to bum a way
through this intolerable limiting condition. He is also something of a
gnostic, by temperament, and perhaps also through meditation on certain
accidents of his personal history.
The gnostic view is that man is hurled down into the world, from
light into abysmal darkness, and keeps sinking. He was rich and aery
once and has become poor and gross. God is elsewhere, if He exists,
and knows nothing of man's catastrophic exile, while the mundane
world - often it is presented as a whole series of worlds arranged in a
chain of dismal nonbeing - is stage-managed by malevolent and deceit–
ful demons and demiurges. The goal of the gnostic is of course tran·
scendence, beginning with efforts of concentration, self-recognition and
recollection whereby faint sparks of the supramundane fire adrift in the
abyss are gathered together and fanned into a small blaze. Then the
adept sets out on the long journey back, hoping to circumvent the
conspiracy of demons arrayed against
him
through certain magical
tricks and occult formulas and by a certain imaginative resourcefulness
representing his original, much-diminished endowment from the abode
of light.
Essentially God-deriding and amoral, anticollectivist if not anti·
social, profoundly ironic and tinged with paranoia, this left-handed
"theology" seemed to the early church fathers a conspiratorial assault
on God and His angels mounted from the smokiest depths of hell. Yet
the gnostic attitude secularized expresses certain hard truths about the
human situation that have been given considerable play in modern
thought since Nietzsche and which have been amply documented in the
