Vladimir Nabokov

Start Free Trial

Conspicuous Construction; or, Kristeva Nabokov, and The Anti-Realist Critique

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

In the following essay, Ermarth examines the tension between reflexive and representational language in Nabokov's fiction and in the theories of Julia Kristeva, the French philosopher of language.
SOURCE: “Conspicuous Construction; or, Kristeva Nabokov, and The Anti-Realist Critique,” in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 21, Nos. 2 & 3, Winter-Spring, 1988, pp. 330-39.

The conflict between realists and anti-realists re-enacts a powerful cultural habit of dualistic formulation. No sooner do we stop assuming representational values, a state aggravated, no doubt, by reading realistic novels, than we proceed to find reflexiveness everywhere; and, whether the shocking impulse is James Joyce or French philosophy, we proceed to apply that new norm with the same zeal once reserved for the old one. For those who thrive on the agony of combat my presentation will perhaps sound a dull note because I find no abyss between representation and reflexion, or between their counterparts, the symbolic and semiotic; no abyss even between realist and anti-realist conceived as two halves of a similar dualism. The differences look to me more like matters of position on the same playing field and the distinction more like a net across which a certain game is played. By emphasizing one or the other half of a dualism we reinforce a deeply rooted mental habit that not only easily contains shifts of 180 degrees—for example, the shift from mimesis to reflexion—but that also survives such shifts and actually thrives on them. How to move away from this time-honored playing field to something really new is not only a problem for critical discourse but also a much broader cultural issue.

I will concentrate on the work of two writers, one a French theorist, one a Russian-American novelist. Both participate in the current critique of Western discourse in ways that not only are mutually informative but that also suggest new directions for the energies of interpreters like ourselves. By inviting Julia Kristeva and Vladimir Nabokov into the same paragraph I suggest that they act as accomplices—perhaps unwitting ones—in that redefinition of fundamental premises which I take to be central to postmodernism. Both begin with language and its processes and for both a key step, perhaps the key step, is the reinstatement of semiosis into the symbolic order. Privately I think that the novelists were telling us earlier and better some things that have since emerged into theoretical debate; but this putative priority means only that we might look for critical tools in fiction as well as in more theoretical writing, now that theory has contributed so much to our general understanding of interpretive and cultural discourse. Nabokov's work shares with Kristeva's an emphasis on semiotic powers in language.

When Kristeva identifies the two dispositions in language as the symbolic and the semiotic she insists that neither alone exhausts linguistic function and that both are necessary. The symbolic function is the one that “communicates meaning,” the one that constitutes itself by predication, the one that is thetic and syntactical. The semiotic disposition, by contrast, remains “heterogeneous” to meaning; to it belongs the musical, rhythmic, non-sense effects of language, the ones evident in poetry or in the echolalias of children (Kristeva also cites “carnivalesque discourse, Artaud, a number of texts by Mallarmé, certain Dadaist and Surrealist experiments”). These dispositions of language, Kristeva argues, cannot be severed and the practice of emphasizing one at the expense of the other leads to disorder. Language depends on the joint function of symbolic and semiotic disposition, the joint operation of syntax and parataxis, the combined effect of rhythmic and thetic utterance.

Achieving such balance in language is not a simple matter, to put it mildly, and in part the complexity proceeds from the fact that the achievement depends upon renouncing familiar mental habits. What linguists and, presumably, the rest of us need is a theory that, in Kristeva's words, “would search within the signifying phenomenon for the crisis or the unsettling process of meaning and subject rather than for the coherence or identity of either one or a multiplicity of structures.” In other words, what we need is a theory of process rather than of product, but process forever separated from the product which formerly subverted it: process conceived as an unsettling maneuver whereby meaning and subject cease to be structures of static forms and become permanently questionable, always unfolding activities.1

Such linguistic matters belong for Kristeva at the heart of philosophical, aesthetic, and theological matters, or rather, those matters are at heart linguistic ones. It is crucial for understanding so many of the best contemporary writers that their work addresses such problems of meaning at the level of language and with the assumption that language in its full power is poetic as well as symbolic. Poetic language, we note, is not equated with but is opposed to symbolic language. In other words, language exercised in its full power as both semiotic and symbolic and understood as a process of construction fundamental to all other conscious construction, such language does not merely point to philosophical, aesthetic, or theological discourse, it is philosophical, aesthetic, and theological discourse. This point seems worth emphasizing because many who are alarmed by semiotics (and hence by the anti-realists and their French theoretical cronies) suppose that its linguistic emphasis signals the end of clarity and morality.

It is true that Kristeva, Nabokov, and their accomplices do reemphasize what is heterogeneous to meaning, and this is tantamount to qualifying an entire cultural and conceptual disposition. The symbolic disposition of language confers identity on the speaking subject by positioning it as the transcendent motivating and originating agent of meaning, the provider of thesis and conclusion. Thus the symbolic disposition insures that the signifying economy creates and supports the speaking subject. This creation is perhaps its most important function, far more profound a function than the meanings and significations to be found in philosophical or other thematic terms. This symbolic disposition, with its subject and structure, and with its thetic impulse for results, provides a sort of linguistic Beyond, or, in Kristeva's terms, a guarantee of “a transcendence, if not a theology.” It is this speaking subject that the semiotic disposition of language unsettles (along with meaning and signification) and replaces with a “questionable subject-in-process.2

If Kristeva is correct that there is more to language than meaning and signification (i.e., more than the symbolic disposition), then this unsettling process is not an arbitrary production of an idle French intelligentsia or of novelists who just like to show off; instead this unsettling process is normative for, fundamental to, definitive of the proper functioning of language and its constructions. “It is poetic language [the semiotic disposition] that awakens our attention to th[e] undecidable character of any so-called natural language, a feature that univocal, rational, scientific discourse tends to hide.”3 Rational discourse has become arrogant towards its semiotic sibling during several centuries of positive science. By reinstating semiosis Kristeva implicitly displaces the view of language that takes it to be primarily symbolic, that is to say, referential, and with that view are displaced other cultural shibboleths, especially a thetic view of temporal process: the view that is usually invoked by the word “time” and that implies the kinds of history, causality, and moral possibility that presuppose natural law. It is this symbolic view of language, then, that seems to be implied by the great realistic novels of the nineteenth century, “a narrative form which,” as Robbe-Grillet says, “understandably remains a kind of paradise lost of the novel.”4 It is a view of language that certainly has been implied by much interpretation of fiction.

As I read the bottom line of Kristeva's project, it suggests we exorcize the scientism that has crept into our methodologies and into our transactions with the word, a scientism that has paralyzed language's potent energies and constrained it to a narrowly conceived representational function: one in which a sign simply refers, without any unsettling influence, to a world where language functions chiefly as an instrument of information. With its semiotic disposition restored language always also refers to itself as an entire formulating system wherein the sign has its place and its function as an instrument of human agency and as an entirely human invention. I should not have thought that professors of literature and language would have objected to this, although certainly they have. The disrupted representational view of language naturalizes it—takes it out of human hands—by the implication that things preceded their names. It is a view represented by Milton in Paradise Lost where Adam wakes to find a cosmos, the ultimate objet trouvé, and exercises his power over it by assigning names to things. This is also the view parodied by Garciá Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude where the village falls victim to memory loss and everyone goes around putting little signs on things in order not to forget their names.

As far as I know it is nobody's ambition to establish an exclusively semiotic linguistic practice; but to emphasize the semiotic helps to demonstrate how far gone we are on the road to the other extreme. An exclusively symbolic literary theory masks the semiotic function in order to encode a supposed transcendence which is really a function of linguistic habits. What Kristeva's theory rejects is not at all the symbolic disposition of language but only such disrupted representational or symbolic practices and the theories they imply. This extends by implication to narrative and, perhaps most importantly, to the interpretation of narrative that has emphasized meaning and signification at the expense of semiotic and reflexive value. Such disrupted practices do not merely obscure the full range of value in literature, they disturb the renewal of social codes; in other words they block a moral process and often in the name of morality. Kristeva comments explicitly on this important synapse between social order and interpretive practice: “While poetic language can indeed be studied through its meaning, such study reduces it and obscures the very thing that in the poetic function … makes of what is known as ‘literature’ something other than knowledge: the very place where the social code is destroyed and renewed.”5

What Kristeva describes, Nabokov does. His word play is familiar enough. One well-known example is the sentence in Lolita where Humbert Humbert reflects, apropos of Lolita's sexual excursions at camp Climax, on the difference between “the rapist” and “therapist”: “The rapist was Charlie Holmes; I am the therapist—a matter of nice spacing in the way of distinction” (II:ii). The pun is auditory, it is visual, and it is saturated with meaning. A more extended instance of Nabokov's conspicuous construction is this passage from Ada, a novel which is one long sustained example of the restoration of semiosis into the symbolic project. Here Van Veen is being interrupted (during an assignation with amorous Lucette) by a telephone call from his secretary, Polly, who is typing his treatise on time. [The confusion between the French for “adored” and the French for “duration” is not entirely a fault of my reading]:

At this point, as in a well-constructed play larded with comic relief, the brass campophone buzzed and not only did the radiators start to cluck but the uncapped soda water fizzed in sympathy.


Van (crossly):I don't understand the first word … What's that? L'adorée? Wait a second(to Lucette).Please, stay where you are.(Lucette whispers a French child-word with twops.).Okay(pointing toward the corridor).Sorry, Polly. Well, is it l'adorée? No? Give me the context. Ah-la durée. La durée is not … sin on what? Synonymous with duration. Aha sorry again, I must stopper that orgiastic soda. Hold the line.(Yells down thecory door,as they called the long second-floor passage at Ardis.)Lucette, let it run over who cares!


He poured himself another glass of brandy and for a ridiculous moment could not remember what the hell he had been—yes, the polliphone.


It had died, but buzzed as soon as he recradled the receiver, and Lucette knocked discreetly at the same time.


“La durée … For goodness sake, come in without knocking … No, Polly, knocking does not concern you—it's my little cousin. All right. La durée is not synonymous with duration, being saturated—yes, as in Saturday—with that particular philosopher's thought. What's wrong now? You don't know if its dorée or durée? D. U. R. I thought you knew French. Oh, I see. So long.


My typist, a trivial but always available blonde, could not make out durée in my quite legible hand because, she says, she knows French, but not scientific French.

(II:v)6

A whole lot of construction is going on here. With the simultaneous commencement of phone buzz, radiator cluck, soda fizz, and door knock, we have the emphasis on coincidence, parodying well-constructed plots: a sort of temporal collage. The soda is “orgiastic” but alas, and despite long anticipation, Van and Lucette are not. The rhymes between “cory door” and “second floor” link this occasion to an amorous moment with Ada in Ardis. Another conjunction with sense as well as play is the one between “synonymous” and “sin on” which, though Polly doesn't know it, may be a good comment on the whole notion of synonymous meaning. “Saturation” and “Saturday” musically join a condition and a moment. The variations on English and French words for temporal persistence (la durée, “duration,” the “long” of “so long”) make a regular little rondo in themselves and allude to the variations on the theme of time both in Van's treatise and also in Nabokov's Ada. The echo between la durée and l'adorée is a typist's mistake in the symbolic order but is a luminous conjunction in the Nabokovian play on the theme of time where time and love are the same. Thematically speaking, of course, I am grateful for Polly's closing distinction between French and “scientific” French. The whole situation here is not so much a domestic comedy as it is a linguistic commentary. There could scarcely be a more literal competition between the symbolic and semiotic impulses than the interruption of Lucette's whimper of bliss by the secretary typing a treatise. Of course Lucette's problem always has been that, unlike her sister Ada, she makes eros “mean” something and so always fails with Van because she turns sex into a symbolic project. In this passage we have an instance of rampant reflexiveness, if not severe semiosis, which nevertheless carries meaning; the vigorous restoration of the semiotic apparently does not destroy the symbolic project but, on the contrary, colludes with it.

The emphasis on reflexive play in Nabokov and others seems to me historically intelligible as a response to the almost insane lengths to which we have transformed language into a symbolic instrument. The emphasis on artificiality in language, far from being mere dandyism or anti-bourgeois assault, is an act of restoration of full power to a language that has been bound by a thousand threads in Lilliput. Nabokov's conspicuous construction has little to do with mere self-indulgence, as is sometimes charged, and much to do with the creation of reader-accomplices who will metamorphose through such exercise from being novices to being experts at the art of walking on water, that is, at the art of performing the miracle of language without sinking into this or that message. The alliteration of Ada, its time warps, and echoes, and constantly crossing digressions, its always surprising English, mortifies the mind in flight from pleasure. Its digressiveness and its exquisiteness unsettle the reading subject, clearing it off the map for a few hours; its openness is erotic, opposed to closure and to the meanings that belong to systems more or less coherent and ruined. This novel differs from Middlemarch, certainly, but how much is a question; the answer partly depends on how much our interpretive habits favor the symbolic view of language.

Our interpretive habits notwithstanding, the novel in differing degrees seems always to have relied on both symbolic and semiotic functions. The nineteenth-century novel was no stranger to semiosis or to “the unsettling process of meaning and subject,” nor is the most unsettling contemporary novel estranged from symbolic function. The time has come for me to confess my inability to separate reflexiveness from representation on any grand scale. For example, highly reflexive paintings or novels contain all kinds of representational elements. Escher's prints, cubist collages, and Magritte's bourgeois gentlemen depend for their effect on representational values; so do reflexive fictions by Kafka, Robbe-Grillet, and Nabokov, including the exactitudes of The Metamorphosis, the parquet floor in The Voyeur, and the motels in Lolita. Even where the governing convention is reflexive, not representational, the whole could not function without both dispositions. On the other hand, the most representational painting or novel contains all kinds of reflexive elements and in fact depends on them for the creation of symbolic value. Whatever calls attention to the organizing motives of art is a reflexive device. Tintoretto's “Finding of the Body of St. Mark” (Brera, Milan), a picture organized by the most rigorous representational conventions, vigorously calls attention to its own organizing principles by making the plunging diagonal of the barrel vault converge to the vanishing point just at the upflung hand of the saint. The mirrors in Vanity Fair, the multiplied acts of waiting in Middlemarch, or of baptism in Our Mutual Friend, are reflexive functions, as are the prisons of Charterhouse of Parma and Little Dorrit and the walls, windows, and ladders of The Red and the Black. Pure abstract reflexiveness would be positively pataphysical: pure representation, too, perhaps. There is plot in Ada and Travesty, there is parataxis in Jane Austen and Stendhal. The shift to semiosis restores a balance, it does not cancel the symbolic disposition of language.

This restoration of semiosis, however, does undermine the privilege of certain ideas based on the disrupted representational view of language, especially the conventional idea of historical time as it has been reflected in fiction for more than two centuries. This linear, causal, teleological time—what Kristeva calls “the time of project and history”7—is closely identified by Kristeva with the symbolic function of language and by Robbe-Grillet with the nineteenth-century novel. In Ada the time of Balzac or Trollope scarcely exists at all or it exists as something constantly destabilized along with other systems of meaning and value.

To those for whom history means the relativization of every system except history, the anti-historical effort in fiction may seem urgent, violent, perhaps overstated. But the modern idea of history is not the only one and, even to the Renaissance humanists who inspired it, it might seem a bit odd to suppose that history could have the power to stabilize meaning.8 Current efforts at linguistic restoration can appear as one further step in a methodological revolution that began five hundred years ago, that corresponds to the rise of print culture, and that has often been betrayed by a thetic impulse for resolution which has been aimed primarily at saving essences. The continuity of that tradition, its central dispute between dogma on the one hand and, on the other, history broadly conceived as open-ended process, accommodates Kristeva and Nabokov, although they are sometimes carelessly excised from it. Primary conventions, for better or worse, have massive staying power and the news of their demise is usually premature.

Once reflexiveness and semiotic function have regained their rightful place in theory and usage, we may seem to have replaced an Either/Or with a Both/And. The illusory appearance of renovation, however, should not mask the fact that Both/And merely reencodes the same dualisms with their same mental and linguistic baggage rather than gesturing toward a new modality. Such subversion is familiar to feminists, who have always faced a major problem in trying to avoid the trap of simply inverting privilege within the same old dualistic constructions. (The importance of this problem makes most unfortunate Kristeva's eventual move to gender the two dispositions of language, so that the semiotic becomes maternal and the symbolic paternal. Although she disclaims any biological basis for this gendering, holding instead for cultural function, still the gendering invokes biology as destiny and seems an unnecessary subversion of her linguistic argument.) The problem with dualism is its capacity to achieve the appearance of change by merely inverting an already established power structure. The previously depreciated Other, whether it is called semiotic or maternal, now assumes priority and privilege over its formerly depreciated opposite, changing the terms but retaining the system. In terms of expediency as well as in terms of ethics such reincarnation is undesirable; it subverts the impetus for change. Sooner or later the designated Other—whether it is the symbolic or the semiotic disposition of language, the maternal or paternal function, the reflexive or representational convention—becomes depreciated as the dualism asserts its apparently inevitable tendency to resolve into hierarchy. Women have been perpetual carriers of the depreciated half of binarisms, whatever the changing content of those binarisms may be. Even when that content changes radically over time, women's position in the (rarely explicit) hierarchy remains the same. In short, the trouble with dualisms is their well-known repressions; unsexing dualisms, if that were possible, would still leave them to function as disguised hierarchies.9 No sooner does imbalance appear, for example, in the reflexion-representation duo, than combat ensues and victory is claimed. The disguised hierarchy generates teleology which in turn generates transcendence.

Anti-realists and theoretical feminists both attack the abuses of a deeply entrenched but manifestly eroded system of assumption and privilege. Together they affirm and extend the massive reexamination of Western discourse itself: its obsession with power and knowledge, its constraint of language to primarily symbolic function, its ethic of winning, its categorical and exclusive modes of definition, its belief in the quantitative and objective; its linear time and individual subject, and above all its common media of exchange (time, space, money) which guarantee certain political and social systems. While the emphasis in such critiques sometimes seems to elide any of the demonstrable virtues of this metaphysic, still it seems important to look beyond its dualisms. Kristeva, despite her unfortunate gendering of linguistic dispositions, looks beyond them to something more dynamic, something with more play: in short, to the unsettling process that qualifies but does not unseat meaning and subject. The semiotic, she says, is “a disposition that is definitely heterogeneous to meaning but always in sight of it”: a statement that also might serve as a definition of parody, that favorite Nabokovian and anti-realist device.10

This process, this play in language that makes way for imagination, is constitutive in Ada. This novel confirms Nabokov's claims: first, that the plot of great literature lies in the style and, second, that readers should be construction workers not consumers. The style of Ada is a tissue of little moments that act more like intersections than like stages along the way of plot. The language moves from one exquisite detail to the next leaving none of the mnemonic residues of realism. In the polliphone passage the stock plot is no more than a vaudevillian echo; meanwhile an activity of alliteration radiates from one center after another. Adoration invokes duration, saturation calls up Saturday, absent Ada is more present than visible Lucette; the clatter of coincidence mimics the amorous conjunction sought so desperately by poor Lucette and makes more poignant still the exquisiteness of the truly erotic as we experience it everywhere in Nabokov's style. The rhythm of language and love overriding time and death in Ada could not be more demonstratively remote from the “action” of the sober novel of meaning and signification produced by our critics if not our writers. In Ada the detail is not a base for transcendental excursion but rather a moment among paratactic moments; it belongs not to the development-and-climax plot that Nabokov parodies but to the imaginative activity involved in riding through one anticlimactic departure after another. Surprising, digressing, recurring: Nabokov's details support a thematic anthemion, a floral pattern where words do not point to a Beyond of structure and meaning but are, in the essential participation of readers, all there is of structure and meaning.

This unsettling process, moreover, is not entirely new; the explicit effort to dispose of the teleological tic is at least a century old. What semiosis implies for humanism is an open and important question; we have nothing like adequate preparation for answering it. If humanism is synonymous with causality, Judaeo-Christian morality, and historical time as it was conceived between (roughly) 1500 and 1900, then perhaps humanism is in deep trouble, but I am not persuaded that the problem or so-called crisis has yet even been fully conceived. Humanism preceded and provided the basis for much of the cultural metaphysic currently challenged by anti-realist writers; certainly it preceded the modern idea of historical time, an idea that it generated; but if humanism has been incorrectly identified with the time of history and project then humanism needs redefinition before it can be understood to be in crisis or not. If humanism can be defined in philological terms (there is, shall we say, a certain precedent for this), if it involves care for textuality and language, attention to difference between textual moments, an expanded sense of language as a model not just for well-made urns but for each human system in all its complex multivalence, then perhaps humanism is only just finding its own demystified way. In any case, the current emphasis on semiosis does move us well beyond some complacencies and does dispute the privilege of representational language; however this does not seem tantamount to a cultural bonfire. Those who identify themselves by means of privileged positions based on hidden hierarchies and teleologies may be irritated, but their irritation is not about the end of morality or humanism; it is about the end of hegemony.

As for Kristeva and Nabokov, the unsettling of meaning and subject seems consistent with social and moral function. The crises where Kristeva wants us to locate are “inherent in the signifying function and, consequently, in sociality.”11 That is scarcely a world-denying remark. The author of Lolita has demonstrated that crime is not a legal matter; that what has been denied a certain girl-child is the right to her own imagination, something that Humbert Humbert buys for himself at her eternal expense. The restoration of semiosis makes possible the renewal of social codes that would otherwise fall victim to disrupted linguistic habits. Reflexion and representation, rather than being disarticulated halves of a disarticulating dualism, simply may be two among a variety of motives. The construction of conventions where various motives can coexist without finality and defeat: this enormous literary and linguistic effort has begun. Its fortunate rhythms are most evident in the work of contemporary novelists.

Notes

  1. Julia Kristeva, “From One Identity to An Other,” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 132, 133-35, 125.

  2. Kristeva, Ibid., pp. 124, 135.

  3. Kristeva, Ibid., p. 135.

  4. Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 32. Published between 1953 and 1963, the essays were first collected as Pour un Nouveau Roman by Les Editions Minuit in 1963.

  5. Kristeva, “One Identity to An Other,” Desire in Language, p. 132.

  6. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, annotated edition by Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1955), pp. 152; and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York: McGraw Hill, 1969), pp. 286-87.

  7. Julia Kristeva, “Women's Time,” trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs, Vol. 7, no. 1 (Autumn, 1981), 18.

  8. Their recognition that the past was past—one of the truly original moments in the history of consciousness—included a far different understanding than that of positivist historians backed by two centuries of science.

  9. For discussion of the hierarchy lurking in dualistic formulation see Margaret Homans, “The Masculine Tradition,” in her Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 12-40.

  10. Kristeva, “One Identity to An Other,” Desire in Language, p. 133.

  11. Kristeva, Ibid., pp. 124-25.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Nabokov and the Medieval Hunt Allegory

Next

Nabokov Before Proust: The Paradox of Anticipatory Memory

Loading...