Nabokov's last two novels may not measure up to the achievement of Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, but both show the deft touch of an artist who knows the intricacy of his craft. The two novels are, to be sure, very different, for while the narrative strategy of Look at the Harlequins! has much in common with the retrospective texture of Ada, Transparent Things lacks that sophisticated, mazelike quality which readers have come to associate with Nabokov's fiction. In his Encounter review of Transparent Things, Jonathan Raban disparaged it as the work of “a novelist who has grown tired and irascible at his own cleverness” and who has thus merely created “a paper chase of transparent metaphors which lead back to the groaning novelist, weighed down by a world he has himself created.”¹ Because the artist always faces the dilemma of having to re-create himself as well as his world with each succeeding text, however, Nabokov's last two novels deserve to be examined in their own terms. Both works continue the familiar Nabokovian concentration upon the problems of establishing a text, and thus it may be possible to regard the two novels as Nabokov's final statement concerning the essential nature of his art. In order to provide some focus to my discussion of these works, I intend first to explore their narrative strategies and then to comment upon the appropriateness of these strategies as a “final statement.”

That the establishing of text remains a significant problem in Nabokov's last novels is evident in the characterization of Mr. R. in Transparent Things. As an accomplished writer, Mr. R. has possessed, throughout his life, that expansive and fluid perspective which is in touch with the essential arbitrariness of human experience. When it comes to writing his own fiction, however, Mr. R. has created a world of stature and significance that belies this fundamental arbitrariness. The narrator of Transparent Things provides a shrewd insight into the contradiction of Mr. R.'s position when he recounts how Mr. R.'s editor, Hugh Person, tries to cajole him into modifications of the characters and the title of his latest novel, Tralatitions. Mr. R. determinedly refuses on the ground that any alteration would radically disfigure the character of his conception for the work. Indeed, when reminded of the libel suits the book would be likely to encounter in its present form, Mr. R. merely suggests that he has “paid for [his art] once in solitude and remorse, and now was ready to pay in hard cash any fool whom his story might hurt.”² Obviously confident and self-assured, Mr. R. has generated over the years a profound respect for his own handling of experience and thus, without hesitation, thinks nothing of committing himself completely to the development of his own peculiar text. With such an insistent claim to the realization of his own text, however, he seems to transgress the one law common to all of Nabokov's fiction—that there exists no text of authority whereby human experience can finally be measured and judged.

The irony that attaches to Mr. R.'s stance applies even more specifically to his editor. Transparent Things focuses upon Hugh Person, whom Mr. R. himself regards as “one of the nicest persons I knew” (p. 83), but who, by failing to explore the textures of his own imagination, finally becomes conscious of having squandered his life “in a sick dream” (p. 96). Hugh does possess some genius, but because he lacks originality, or because he does not act upon his genius by challenging and extending it, he ends up throwing his life away—first as a secretary to Atman (a fraudulent symbolist), then as an entrepreneur in stationery (who markets the Person fountain pen), and finally as an editor for a publishing firm (where he eventually takes charge of Mr. R.'s texts). At one point in the novel, shortly after meeting Armande, he even confides in his diary that “I am an all-round genius” (p. 28), but by then it is evident that something has gone wrong with his life. Lacking that confidence which is crucial to the success of the artist in any field and which certainly underlies Mr. R.'s distinguished career as a writer, Hugh at that point not only finds himself separated from a life of achievement but also at a serious disadvantage when dealing with other people. His relationship with Armande is a good case in point.

Hugh is fearful of approaching Armande, and from the beginning he allows her to define the character of their relationship, particularly in matters of sex. Such allowance is disastrous. Armande fancies herself a realist, one who reads “hard realistic stuff” (p. 26) and who thus expects Hugh to be likewise “serious, and plain, and believable” (p. 63). Moreover, by depending upon ideas derived from other people, she has moved completely out of touch with the imaginative character of being that is the source, throughout Nabokov's fiction, of emotional vitality. In her presence, therefore, Hugh himself never has the opportunity to develop that same primary source of energy. Not surprisingly, having deferred to her perspective, he eventually discovers in himself a profound core of hate: “I hate Witt. … I hate life. I hate myself” (p. 55). By marrying Armande, Hugh has fully separated himself from any lingering sense of responsibility for exploring his own world of perceptions, and finally, having given up the one marginally original game that has continued into his adult life (the tennis played while he lulls himself to sleep), he becomes the complete victim of his own folly. Throughout the marriage, instead of examining his own perceptions, Hugh engages only in what amounts to an editorial examination of Armande's unpredictable behavior. By regarding the strange aspects of her conduct “as absurd clues in a clever puzzle” (p. 63), he tries to establish the emotional equivalent of an authoritative text for her life. Despite his repeated analyses of her behavior, however, he never locates reasonable explanations, and all his effort turns out to have been for naught.

Hugh's editorial relationship to Armande's life is obviously inferior to Mr. R.'s authorial relationship to the texts he creates, but both characters, by committing themselves to the establishment of their respective texts, seem to violate that fundamental textlessness which is at the heart of Nabokov's fiction. In Nabokov's work all “reality” is a text in need of editing. If, however, the process of editing assumes that there is an ultimate “reality” that is discoverable by careful scrutiny of the available evidence, then that process must emerge as self-defeating and dangerous to its originator. One of the dictionary definitions of “text” is “an ultimate source of information or authority.” This is the sort of text for which many of Nabokov's characters search—Armande in her admiration for “hard realistic stuff,” Hugh in his editorial search for the “reality” of Armande's life. But there is another kind of text, the Nabokovian literary text, which imitates the shifting nature of reality and becomes an authoritative source by virtue of showing that there are no authoritative sources. In his last two novels and throughout his career Nabokov parodies the first kind of text in order to establish the second kind, the text that creates “reality” by dramatizing the many ways in which it eludes human perception.

At the very beginning of the novel the narrator provides a telling comment concerning the delicacy that must attend any relationship to a text. Recognizing that the past is particularly seductive because the future enjoys “no such reality … as the pictured past and the perceived present possess” (p. 1), the narrator suggests that most people, in the process of perceiving an object (person, place, or thing), “involuntarily [sink] into the history [the text] of that object.” For the narrator, consequently, any sustaining of the imagination requires, above all, a facing up to this dangerous skewing of perception toward the past. As he suggests, “Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment” (p. 1). Jonathan Raban, in disparaging such skimming, has cited both Lolita and Armande as good examples of skimmers.³ In actuality, however, Lolita and Armande represent the opposite tendency, for both of them have submerged themselves in the attitudes and conceptions that over the years have created the social fabric of their respective milieus. The narrator makes their position clear: “A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film” (p. 2). Lolita and Armande simply do not take such care. They are both so dominated by prevailing attitudes that they repeatedly break through the tension film at the surface. If, in Nabokov's world, genius and originality depend upon maintaining sufficient distance between oneself and the texts of the past so that imaginative responses to the present remain viable, then Lolita and Armande represent colossal failures.

The narrator's emphasis upon skimming over matter shows Nabokov's determination to clarify in this novel his uses of the past. While critics have sometimes applauded his characters' retreat into the past, Nabokov himself recognizes that all texts, even those of the past, are multi-faceted, very complex, and frequently contradictory. When his most original characters mine the resources of the past, therefore, they are not so much retreating into it as attempting to create a web that can contain it in all its complexity. Whether I cite Pnin or Shade or the elder Van Veen, it should be clear that none of these characters inhabit a stable past from which he can extract a single, authoritative text. Instead, each of them, with each succeeding moment of the present, finds himself in the predicament of having to create a new web for the past that takes into account all the adjustments in attitude and insight that have emerged in the present. Van Veen's extensive modulation of his past and present relationship with Ada is probably the best example of this process, but Pnin's juxtaposition of Russia and America also serves nicely. In Nabokov's fiction, static texts—those that presume to possess a final authority—are dangerous commodities because they no longer engage their originators in the modifications that are crucial to sustained vitality and creativity. In Transparent Things, which begins and ends with Hugh's return (at age 40) to the Ascot Hotel, where he expects to recover “a moment of contact with [Armande's] essential image in exactly remembered surroundings” (p. 95), the danger becomes fully apparent. For when Hugh commits himself to the recovery of an exact configuration of the past, he divorces himself from the necessity of making his present act of perception a condition of that past. The consequence is that he cuts himself off from the processes of perception and virtually commits aesthetic suicide. In these terms, of course, the difference between Hugh and Mr. R. finally emerges. Both men may commit themselves to their texts, but while Hugh's commitment reflects an editorial relationship in which the text dominates him, Mr. R.'s commitment reflects an authorial relationship in which the text, even when located in the past, remains a function of his acts of perception in the present. In the letter he writes as he is dying, Mr. R. declares (p. 84):

I used to believe that dying persons saw the vanity of things, the futility of fame, passion, art, and so forth … but now I feel just the contrary: my most trivial sentiments and those of all men have acquired gigantic proportions. … The more I shrivel, the bigger I grow. … Total rejection of all religions ever dreamt up by man and total composure in the face of total death! If I could explain this triple totality in one big book, that book would become no doubt a new bible and its author the founder of a new creed. Fortunately for my self-esteem that book will not be written—not merely because a dying man cannot write books but because that particular one would never express in one flash what can only be understood immediately.

Mr. R. scrupulously established the texts of his various books, but he is not, finally, dominated by their versions of the truth. On the contrary, he dies with a sense of his insufficiency as an artist and of his previous failure to express the “totality” of things.

It is striking that the narrator of Transparent Things himself seems to fall into the textual trap he forswears. Repeatedly, as when he recounts the history of the pencil located in the desk in Hugh's room at the Ascot or the history of the room in which Hugh takes his first prostitute, the narrator seems to indulge in the kind of textual re-construction of the past with which he associates Hugh. Finally, though, Hugh is engaged in an editorial (or sentimental) pilgrimage, in the “enforced re-creation of irrecoverable trivia” (p. 94), whereas the narrator plays with the texts of the past in the fashion of Mr. R. He is not directly involved in the history of the pencil or of the room and thus does not seek to establish the exact configuration of the past. Knowing, in fact, that such an attempt is impossible, he moves well beyond Hugh's stance and allows himself the luxury and the imaginative stimulation of playing with the open textures inherent in all texts, even those of the past. Whereas Hugh has victimized himself by committing himself to the pursuit of exact texts, the narrator constantly expands his play with the multidimensional texts before him and takes genuine delight in ferreting out each new facet or “flavor” (p. 36). In a somewhat paradoxical sense, then, the source of this narrator's genius is that he suspends himself in as “textless” a reconsideration of his experience as possible. Such suspension, much like Pnin's, allows him to bring the texts of experience into genuine contact with his present mode of being. More than that, however, once in this new contact with each other, the play between the texts of the past and of the present can create those wonderful, sometimes completely unanticipated textures which readers have come to associate with Nabokov's fiction. At the same time, this narrator has avoided the pursuit of an avant-garde text, which in his mind “means little more than conforming to some daring philistine fashion” (p. 34). Having created for himself a spaciousness of mind that separates him from conformity to the sentiments of the past, he also has recognized the dangers of succumbing to the prevailing fashions of the present. He is—as much as any narrator can be in Nabokov's fiction—his own man.

The narrator of Transparent Things reinforces the creative character of his relationship to the text by developing the contrast between Mr. R. and Hugh Person and then indicating his own similarity to Mr. R. The doubling of his own situation in these two men is of crucial importance to his narrative, but when contrasted to the narrator's use of doubling in Look at the Harlequins!, its role in Transparent Things seems fledgling at best. There is a good reason for this. Once Nabokov has clarified his use of the past—the fact that it is predicated upon a creative rather than an editorial relationship to the texts of the past—he can free his narrator to seek out facets in the texts of the past that still lie unrealized. One of the best—and now very familiar—means of realizing such facets is the technique of doubling. By its very nature, doubling separates the narrator from the obligations of realism or, more properly, from the requirement of textual exactitude. Not surprisingly, therefore, in Look at the Harlequins!—which is a retrospective on a whole career—doubling serves as the structural principle for the novel. Not only does Vadim N.'s career play off that of Nabokov himself,⁴ it also plays off the lives of other characters who represent what Vadim N. might have become had he not pursued a career as an author. The novel, consequently, enjoys a very ambiguous status. Whereas the reader might be tempted to regard Vadim N. as a loose disguise for Nabokov himself (and the considerations of Vadim N. as Nabokov's own), it eventually becomes apparent, if only because Vadim N. is such an adroit gamer, that he must be given his due as a character in his own right. By giving him his due, moreover, the reader will perceive Vadim N. as the full realization of that creative relationship to text which supports the narrator's genius in Transparent Things.

Vadim N. frequently employs the double as a means of measuring a particular aspect of his experience. Near the beginning of the novel, for example, while recounting the history of his “‘numerical nimbus’ syndrome,”⁵ Vadim alludes to a “Mr. V.S.” with whom the doctor treating his syndrome has associated him. A little later, he alludes to a Lieutenant Starov who has taken the job in the White Cross that Vadim himself has turned down. Then it turns out that it is this man—a “White Russian, Wladimir Blagidze, alias Starov” (pp. 69–70)—who guns Iris down. And finally, much later in the novel (and in this instance within a parenthetical remark), Vadim considers whether “Count Starov [presumably the lieutenant's father] … was my real father” (p. 227). By the time readers have accumulated all these references, they should have begun to suspect that the lieutenant—with the frustrations of a boring job that lead him, perhaps, to the act of murder—represents what Vadim believes he himself might have become, had he not concerned himself with the very difficult but enlivening creation of texts. While the lieutenant—in the manner of Hugh Person—has wedded himself to a well-defined, rather restrictive career, Vadim has plumbed the depths of the imagination and has created for himself a texture of experience far beyond the lieutenant's ability to conceive.

Professor Notebooke and his wife are also doubles for Vadim N. Notebooke, while described as “meek myopic old” (p. 131), is at least a skilled translator whose sister is rather suggestively named Phoneme (p. 159). He, too, much like Vadim, has interested himself in the deployment of texts. Unlike Vadim, however, who is chiefly concerned with exploring and fostering his own texture of experience, Notebooke seems interested only in the extension of other writers' texts. In this context, therefore, the distinction already cited between Mr. R. and Hugh Person again surfaces with some intensity. As a translator who attends to the subtle dimensions of language, Notebooke does not have as narrow a relationship to text as Hugh Person, but it is clear, especially given Vadim's rather summary presentation of Notebooke's abilities, that he does not enjoy the spacious fields of imaginative play that belong to Vadim himself. Notebooke simply represents that academic dryness of mind that would have been Vadim's had he not devoted himself to the evocation and the extension of his own being. The contrast between Vadim and Notebooke, while rather boldly hinted at in the latter's name, is probably most evident in the fact that it is Notebook's wife who suggests that Vadim purchase a “Junior Manicure Set” (p. 163) for Bel and encourages him to hire “an experienced, preferably German, governess to look after [Bel] day and night” (p. 173). The wife represents the text of propriety—a text from which Vadim, by virtue of the rather idiosyncratic character of his life as an artist, has increasingly separated himself. Because the hiring of a governess would interfere with his relationship with Bel, Vadim ignores the views of the Notebookes.

A third—and perhaps the best—example of Vadim's use of doubling occurs late in the novel, when Vadim repeatedly alludes to the man who shadows him on his trip to Leningrad. Vadim believes that he has known the man in Paris in the early thirties, and he suspects throughout the trip that the man is Russian at least by birth. When the mystery man turns out to be Oleg Orlov, all his earlier suspicions prove to be well founded. Some forty years ago, Oleg “joined the small number of littérateurs who decided to sell the bleak liberty of expatriation for the rosy mess of Soviet pottage,” but during this long association with the Soviets he has achieved little more than a “medley of publicity pieces, commercial translations, vicious denunciations” (p. 217). In the novel, therefore, he serves as a sharp contrast to Vadim himself. Once he has identified himself, Oleg may attack Vadim's “obscene novelette about little Lola or Lotte,” as if he—Oleg—were morally superior to Vadim and his work, but in the end the reader recognizes that it is Vadim who is superior—especially when Vadim deals Oleg a blow “with the back of my left fist … of quite presentable power” (p. 218). Vadim's reference to Oleg in the narrative certainly indicates that Vadim himself has realized that his decision to surrender to the difficulties of life as an émigré rather than to settle for “the rosy mess of Soviet [or, for that matter, American] pottage” has become the basis for a life of genuine moral distinction.

All three of these doubles, while hardly exhaustive of the technique, clearly point to the lack of textual stability within Vadim's own tenuous grasp on existence. Because of the possible combinations of level and attitude available to him, during his lifetime an almost continuous modulation of text has emerged that is once more evident in this—his final—narrative. This continuous modulation of imaginative consciousness has in the past served to goad Vadim through a succession of marriages and relationships—from Iris to Annette to Louise, with some additional attention to Dolly and even to Bel—and now, in the very face of his desire to assess his life, to give it a final shape by establishing the character of his relationship with “You,” he discovers that this process of modulation is as relentless as ever. In the past the complexity of Vadim's marital (and extramarital) experience has only served to corroborate his difficulty in accepting any one text as the final basis for his existence. The first two sentences, which focus on a doubling situation, say it as well as any other passage in the novel: “I met the first of my three or four successive wives in somewhat odd circumstances, the development of which resembled a clumsy conspiracy, with nonsensical details and a main plotter who not only knew nothing of its real object but insisted on making inept moves that seemed to preclude the slightest possibility of success. Yet out of those very mistakes he unwittingly wove a web, in which a set of reciprocal blunders on my part caused me to get involved and fulfill the destiny that was the only aim of the plot” (p. 3).

While somewhat enigmatic, and perhaps even deliberately ambiguous, this passage seems to extend the distinction between text and texture that underlies John Shade's artistry and probably serves as the principal key to Nabokov's fiction. First, in the terms of Look at the Harlequins!, it helps to explain why Vadim's relationship with “You” will remain tenuous even in this narrative of retrospective self-definition. For Vadim the web of this present relationship is simply not yet complete and, in the world of textual insufficiency, never will be complete. Second, and more generally, the passage alludes to a “main plotter,” who, as opposed to Vadim himself, initiates certain actions that resemble “a clumsy conspiracy,” of whose existence even the plotter himself is unaware. Despite all their complex posturing in full view of each other, apparently neither Vadim nor the “main plotter” possesses an authoritative text of experience to which he is committed. For both of them existence is problematic and elliptical. Third, because Vadim lacks a preconceived text that can organize his experience, he actually has no choice but to give over the ground of his being to that plotter who makes decisions at least in the sense that he initiates action. On the surface, such a transfer of authority may seem a desertion of moral responsibility, but finally it is this stance which ensures the continued vitality of Vadim's existence. Having avoided the rigorous observance of a specific text, Vadim is free—much like the narrator of Transparent Things—to suspend himself in the imaginative possibilities that have emerged, over the course of several decades, in the strange dialogue between the plotter's “inept moves” and Vadim's own “blunders.” On the surface, again, this suspension may not seem very promising, but to the extent that it separates Vadim from that sterile observance of a preconceived text which characterizes Hugh Person's existence, the suspension guarantees Vadim a life rich in realization and understanding. His life will never be predictable, but in light of his preference for imagination rather than stable text, there is little doubt that his life will be intense.

This relationship between Vadim and the main plotter possesses a double-edged character. Given the presence of the main plotter, Vadim must remain conscious—even to the very end of his life—that there is no means of achieving absolute control over the field of his experience. He may over the years have become an accomplished writer, with many texts written under his name, but despite the long accumulation of success he remains prey to the notion that his life is “the non-identical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man's life, somewhere on this or another earth” (p. 89). While this notion obviously alludes to the shadow of Nabokov himself stalking his narrator, the notion also recovers, it seems to me, that profound sense of self-doubt which must accompany the artist's suspension of self in the textures, rather than the texts, of human experience. Try as they may to establish the character of their own art, all true artists are in the end conscious only of the insufficiency of their achievement. Vadim himself is such an artist, and thus it is not surprising that he remarks late in the novel, “The hideous suspicion that even Ardis, my most private book, soaked in reality, saturated with sun flecks, might be an unconscious imitation of another's unearthly art, that suspicion might come later” (p. 234), but come it must. In this instance, too, what the urbane Vadim finally recognizes is that he will never possess a text that fully recovers the character of his deepest (his most private) imaginative experience and that must, therefore, be associated only with his name. The artist craves identity, specifically the identity that emerges in his best art, but in view of the ultimate insufficiency of all texts he is—as Vadim here realizes—forever disappointed. Late in the novel, following a stroke, Vadim actually loses all sense of his own identity. At that point Nabokov's shadow almost completely overwhelms him: “Poor Vivian, poor Vadim Vadimovich, was but a figment of somebody's—not even my own—imagination” (p. 249). When he suggests on the same page that “in rapid Russian speech … ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich’ becomes colloquially similar to ‘Vadim Vadimych,’” there may exist no further reason for maintaining the distinction between this narrator and Nabokov himself. Even then, nevertheless, the reader must realize that Vadim's difficulty is not so much with Nabokov (although that is a significant problem) as it is with the limited character of texts in general. Vadim, like any determined artist, wants the authority of text that is finally available to no one. When he loses his bearings, his sense of identity, it is because the struggle for what is impossible has finally overwhelmed him.

The Vadim who has heeded the advice of his grand-aunt to “look at the harlequins!” (p. 8) and who has chosen for himself the “essential, hysterical, genuine [muse]” rather than “her apprentice, her palette girl and stand-in, a little logician” (p. 44) is an artist who has reached for the heights. Aware, in fact, of a fundamental inability to “cope with the abstraction of direction in space,” he has turned the peculiarities of his own perceptions into the foundation for a very idiosyncratic art: “My battle with factual, respectable life … consisted of sudden delusions, sudden reshufflings—kaleidoscopic, stained-glass reshufflings!—of fragmented space” (p. 85). Reshuffling is, of course, the key term. Just as Joan Clements in Pnin characterizes the texts of a particular novelist as the attempt “to express the fantastic recurrence of certain situations,”⁶ so Vadim has allied himself with that openness of text which allows for continuous modulation of one's experience, past or present. Indeed, lacking the concrete text that organizes, say, Hugh Person's life, he actually has found that he must rely upon the process of reshuffling in order to retain his sanity. As he himself acknowledges, “only the writing of fiction, the endless re-creation of my fluid self could keep me more or less sane” (p. 97). An even better self-assessment, however, probably appears a few pages later when he remarks that his “average age has been thirteen” all his life (p. 103). Vadim has become the artist adroit at turning his dreamlike reshufflings into the texture of art and thereby has discovered Nabokov's fountain of youth.

Nabokov's last two novels, then, while very different, serve as a summation for his art. Together, the novels establish the precise character of that relationship to text (whether of the past or the present) whereby Nabokov's best artists gain and sustain their brilliance and intensity. Nabokov's fiction is always complicated, always a contest between author and reader, but if its complexity is regarded as a function of the textual difficulties that confront all people, not merely the old writer who has become sensitive to the slightest textual nuance, then that fiction can also serve as a basis for sustaining the reader's own vitality. Nabokov would have it no other way.

Notes

1. Jonathan Raban, “Transparent Likenesses,” Encounter 41 (September 1973), 75.

2. Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things, p. 74. Hereafter cited in text.

3. Raban, “Transparent Likenesses,” p. 74.

4. Richard Patteson, in “Nabokov's Look at the Harlequins!: Endless Recreation of the Self,” RLT 14 (1976), 84-98, has begun to establish some of the more significant parallels between the two careers.

5. Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!, p. 15. Hereafter cited in text.

6. Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, p. 159.