Jonathan Orsi

English 431

Nabokov.

Master of Puppets

“Ye airs and winds, ye elves of hills, of brooks of woods alone, of standing lake, and of the night approach ye everyone!” Medea invokes the unseen spirits, she conjures her orchestration, and with her powers she “makes the calm seas rough and makes the rough seas plain, And cover all the sky with clouds and chase them thence again.” With these words, we soar back to Ovid. Entranced and enchanted, with dancing visions we are spellbound. The poetic performance, the spectacle before us, has been composed and conducted with careful wit. Through Ovid the Gods speak, through his characters and stories speak Ovid, singing the soul’s song of metamorphosis. This surrogate storytelling reappears throughout time; it serves the necessary illusion of production. Much as Shakespeare’s theater is not only a stage for his actors but a stage for his own voice. As with our poetic puppeteer Nabokov, we are at witness to literary ventriloquism. We never read Nabokov ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ as it were, rather we read the vicarious voice of Nabokov, portrayed by, and through his invented puppets. With his masterful arts Nabokov creates characters and worlds, dictating and directing them with tethers, tied tight with poetry.

Nabokov uses literature as a very thin, yet extravagantly woven screen between us the reader, and himself the author. It is on this veil Nabokov conveys his voice and ideas, the projection: an irresistible image of literary prose. The screen though, keeps separate the audience to the true authorial voice, or creator. It is if we are trapped in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and we are only given shadows of Nabokov’s figure. The term shadow here, should be taken as a grim analogy, for the shadows cast by Nabokov are some of the mot colorful and vivacious yet thrown onto the page.

What is essential to understand, is that though the dialogue and ideas, the entire extent of written material has come from Nabokov’s hand, it is intended to be read and understood from the narrators mouth. Albeit fictitious, and entirely fabricated, the narrator speaking for Nabokov speaks with careful and intentional accents, and varied perceptions. It is almost as if each narrator applies their own filter to Nabokov’s voice, like holding a candle behind a piece of colored glass. To understand the intention or simply to recognition the placement of this glass is paramount.

In many ways, Nabokov’s characters could be considered a medium, especially now, in reference to the mediums between the dead and living. Crossing over however, the voice must pass through subtle distortions. Michael Wood discusses this veiling in is critical series off essays, The Magician’s Doubts stating, “Vladimir Nabokov himself is not going to show up anywhere here: there are only impersonations.(109)” This masking however, should not be considered or confused with any type of weakness, rather it is his greatest strength. It is these mouthpieces, these elaborate characters we are enthralled with. There is some debate on the likeability of characters such as Humbert, Kinbote, and Hugh (a rapist, a narcissist, and a murder respectively) but it is the elegance with which Nabokov manipulates and maneuvers these puppets, that creates and harbors our affinity with them.

Nabokov’s characters even seem to take on the role of authorship as well. With Pale Fire, the John Shade services the role of poet. It is from John Shade’s dreary and macabre life that the poem Pale Fire flowers. The invented character has been granted life by the creator. Life breathed into him by means of flowing language John Shade is created as he is, as he has been. Like a Bukowski poem Shade is, “Born like this, into this.” The characters are created, given life, but they: their history and personage are entirely controlled. Deplorable behavior and all, Nabokov’s characters are entirely intentional and entirely at bay to Nabokov’s direction. In his book, The Magician’s Doubts, Michael Wood expands upon this, invoking Socrates when he speaks to Phaedrus,

Writing you know, has this strange quality about it, which makes it really like painting: the painter’s products stand before us quite as though they were alive; but if you question them, they maintain a solemn silence. So, too, with written words: you might think they spoke as though they made sense, but if you ask them anything about what they are saying, if you wish and explanation, they go on telling you the same thing over and over forever.

Wood, through Socrates is enunciating this idea that, though the characters take and lead their own directional lives, they are still constrained by and to Nabokov’s artistic vision. Wood also beckons Humbert on this matter when he discusses opening King Lear, finding that, no matter how many time the story is opened, it shall never change, “never shall we find the king banging his tankard in high revelry.” As much as Shakespeare and Nabokov give freedom and life to their invented characters, they are still very much shackled or strung to the authors will.

Nabokov though, doesn’t simply cast his figure in colorful shades of shadow; he sheds authorship onto his them. With Pale Fire, we are handed a poet and commentator and we clearly see the discussion of these relationships flowing throughout the text. With deeper inquiry however, we see that it is this displacement of authorship, these fabricated voices, these viceroys of literature, who not only flow through the text, but carry the entire burden.

In the novel Lolita however, we often forget or disassociate Humbert with authorial voice. So entrapped are we with powerful prose and a seductive story we lose sight and recognition that this text is Humbert’s dairy-rewritten- from memory, in a jail cell no less! Humbert has succeeded in seducing our sense, as if in a form of literary Stockholm Syndrome, have become endeared to our captor. We hang on every word, invest trust in the text, and begin to pity the pederast.

With belief established in the manuscript, we again, are audience to another production, this time with Humbert conducting. As the text is meant to be understood as a recount of events, we recognize Humbert as the storyteller. He uses lofty language, humor, alliteration, poetry, pity, a whole plethora of devices to enchant the reader. The chase scenes, love scenes, even murder scenes have all been orchestrated by Humbert to romanticize and elevate himself out of despise.

Humbert employs as cast of characters to carry his story. Lolita, Charlotte, Quilty the elusive yet omnipresent Audrey McFate, even Gordon, the described “haggard masturbator” perform in Humbert’s production. This notion of director/puppeteer is glanced at by Humbert himself on page 57 of Lolita, the preamble for the infamous davenport scene.

Main character: Humbert the Hummer. Time: Sunday morning in June. Place: Sunlit living room. Props: old, candy-stripped davenport, magazines, phonograph, Mexican knickknacks (the late Mr. Harold E. Haze-God bless the good man—had engendered my darling at the siesta hour in a blue-washed room, on a honeymoon trip to Vera Cruz, and Mementoes, among these Dolores, were all over the place).

While this may be more of an example of Humbert’s humor, or creative wit, it shed’s an introspective light to the “reality” of the text.

The above-mentioned “reality” may be better suited with one or two more scratches of quotation. Frame outward: here is where the trick occurs. The moment we connect with, or accept Humbert, we have been subject to Nabokov’s slight of hand. Duped in the old double take. If Humbert’s manuscriptal-mirage has fooled us, then Nabokov has done it twice over. What we are witness to is a literary ventriloquism, or as Michael Wood tags it, “a verbal vaudeville, a series of literary impersonations performed by the author.” It is almost as if Nabokov has reincarnated himself into his text, appearing as panting pedophile.

This authorial self-imposition, mirrors and re-mirrors itself from Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest. Nabokov can be seen as Prospero, “by his art…put[ting] the wild waters in this roar. (1.2.1-2)” Like Prospero, Nabokov manipulates his characters with seductive style. The characters are given the illusion of independence, but are all the while at bay to the tempest’s will. Though Nabokov never fully articulates this relationship, Prospero unveils himself, exposing the wires of control, “You demi-puppets that by moonshine do the green sour ringlets make…weak masters though ye be, I have bedimmed the noontide sun, called forth the mutinous wind, and twixt the green sea and the azured vault set roaring war. (5.1.36-47)”

If another mirror is set in place however, we may be more attuned to say that Humbert would make a better Prospero. Certainly when we remind ourselves -as we have done earlier -that the text of Lolita is Humbert’s creation, and recognize the characters therein are subject to his potent art. The preference of Humbert to Prospero especially highlighted when it is considered that both Prospero and Humbert are visible and present throughout text. Though they create the world in which they live, both Prospero and Humbert are still very much characters. Living on, in an even further reflected sky however, fly the real conductors.

If we follow the marionette strings, upward, ascending off the page and out of the text, we see the true puppeteer. The stage becomes visible, the characters drawn back to the page. Exposed, but never reduced. The performance is instead disbanded, as Prospero decrees:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air. And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve. And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made of.(4.1.148-158)

We may be freed from the story itself, but we shall never be freed from the Nabokov’s enchantment. The moment we enter his world of texts, the moment we are witness to his performances, we become entwined. Never shall we become detached, never will the strings split for fray, instead we will forever remain suspended in disbelief and awe in poetic pageantry that is Nabokov’s work.

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
The Tempest 3.2.148-156

Works Cited

Wood, Michael. The Magician's Doubts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Shakespeare, William and David Bevington. The Tempest. New York: Bantam Books, 1988.