458
PARTISAN REVIEW
cannot imagine himself turning on his heel? Nobody can imagine in physical
terms the act of reversing the order of time. Time is not reversible ." At which
point, having invoked Heraclitus ("All is flux, nothing is stationary"), the
narrator breaks into Being ; he is here, and the book ends , but not before this
resolution, happily forwarded by the conclusive wife, is undercut as only
provisional in its sufficiency. There is, of course, no solution to that paradox
and no possible suturing of selves . "The I of the book/Cannot die in the
book. " The text is as much Vadim 's prison as the blunted body that bears him
about in the wrong world .
And that, too, is the problem of
Look at the Harlequins.
Because
Nabokov imprisons his readers in its closed echoing space as well , reminds
them how good
Ada (Ardis)
is, how incorrectly received, gives covert thanks
to
Hugh Hefner, rebukes Soviet architecture, gets in a whack or rwo at psycho–
analysis, settles some old scores at Cornell, and in short provides steady work
for a generation of annotators who in some future critical edition will make
the text look as formidably dead as the Twickenham
Dunciad.
Unlike John
Barth or Thomas Pynchon, Nabokov comfortably inhabits the funhouse.
It
is
still Forsterian to him, the place in which connections are plotted and patterns
woven. Here, then, the career is comically recited and its significance assessed ,
but this novel about novels, while it throws open numerous passages , also
exhibits their narrowness . One reverts to that image of Vadim shutting his
eyes in order
to
turn back and imaginatively restore past experience (ProuSt in
his insulated room), a performance of blinding that none of his lovers (who
belong to the world of flux) find interesting , but which, if successful, would
enable him to taste again the cakes of Tsarskoe. That world returns, memory
speaks and retrieves the cakes , an old aunt, the dead soldier in a Polish forest,
the small incestuous community of Russian exiles, the small incestuous
community of the American college, and it also circumscribes. It is true , as
V. S. Pritchett suggests, that Vadim's abortive trip
to
Leningrad does not
somehow come off in the novel , but why is this so? Because there is no text
through which to see that ugly place with its ugly folk and ugly odors. It is the
dark world Gravity rules, and while Vadim passes through it his perspective,
framed by ancient grudges, blinds the reader . The world in Nabokov' s fiction
is as exact and restricted as the world rendered in Jane Austen's novels .
At a time when a great deal of modern criticism seems intent on
exorcising the relevance of intentionality in writing, depriving the author of
his authority, and when writing itselfseems content to follow this direction ,
to
become anonymous, here, like some great relic of the nineteenth century, an
Austenian Proust, still copious, still sure, Nabokov angles for the Nabo–
kovians.
Neil Schmitz
