350
RICHARD POIRIER
But Nabokov does not write parody merely to show that "an
adopted method" is more remote from reality than
is
some method
devised by him or by
his
characters. His other-directed parody merely
clears the ground and establishes some of the criteria for a parody
of the creativity being exercised
in
his own works. The parody in
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
or
Lolita
or
Pale Fire
is directed
at his authorial as much as at his characters' efforts to make others
believe
in
the reality of schemes, plots, games, deceptions. His
is
a
parody of an extraordinarily compassionate kind, resisting all but the
most delicate translation into interpretive language. Unfortunately,
nearly all of his interpreters are hung up on the formulas of art-life,
fiction-reality, even though Nabokov
is
unusually impatient with such
distinctions. Humbert is not an example of a man victimized by
mistaking art for reality or for living in a relationship that violates
the limitations of time and physical nature. These things may
be
said, of course, and they are true, just as it is true that King Lear
had a bad temper. It
is
possible to be right and stupid, and such a
way of being right about Humbert thwarts precisely those responses
- of fascination, affection, bewilderment and awe - that Humbert
and Nabokov call for. We are faced, to put it another way, with a
performed "thing," existing in spite of the realities and moralities
anyone can propose against it. That's true for the book as much as
for the career of Humbert. Performance creates more life and reality
than do any of the fictions opposed to it either by readers, as against
Nabokov, by other characters, like Quilty as against Humbert, or by
America, to whose fictions the book gives a guided transcontinental
tour. When it comes to living there is nothing in Nabokov other than
games and fiction to live by; when it comes to dying or to the pas–
sage of time, then all fictions are equally good and equally useless.
Nabokov can only be as explicit about these matters as
his
own liv–
ing,
his
own insatiable taste for fictions, alloWs him to be, and he is
quite capable of proposing, as Borges more assertively does, that he
has dreamed even himself into existence and that, biggest joke of
all, he comes into existence, for himself and for us, only by expressing
himself in fiction.
Borges pushes this parody of creation to its furthest limits. He
altogether obliterates any distinction between fiction and the analysis
of it, thereby unabashedly making into
his
subject matter what I've
suggested
is
always implicit in the literature of self-parody: that it is
