Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  " 'Have you any of these papers?' asked Mr. Utterson.

  "Poole felt in his pocket and handed out a crumpled note, which the lawyer, bending nearer to the candle, carefully examined. Its contents ran thus: 'Dr. Jekyll presents his compliments to Messrs. Maw. He assures them that their last sample is impure and quite useless for his present purpose. In the year 18—, Dr. J. purchased a somewhat large quantity from Messrs. M. He now begs them to search with most sedulous care, and should any of the same quality be left, to forward it to him at once. Expense is no consideration. The importance of this to Dr. J. can hardly be exaggerated.' So far the letter had run composedly enough, but here with a sudden splutter of the pen, the writer's emotion had broken loose. 'For God's sake,' he added, find me some of the old.'

  " This is a strange note,' said Mr. Utterson; and then sharply, 'How do you come to have it open?'

  " 'The man at Maw's was main angry, sir, and he threw it back to me like so much dirt,' returned Poole."

  Convinced at last that his first supply was impure, that it was the unknown impurity which gave efficacy to the draught, and that he can never renew his supply, Jekyll begins to write the confession and a week later is finishing it under the influence of the last of the old powders. "This, then, is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass." He hastens to conclude lest Hyde suddenly take over and tear the papers to shreds. "Half an hour from now, when I shall again and forever reindue that hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or continue, with the most strained and fearstruck ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly refuge) and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as i lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end."

  I would like to say a few words about Stevenson's last moments. As you know by now, I am not one to go heavily for the human interest stuff when speaking of books. Human interest is not in my line, as Vronski used to say. But books have their destiny, according to the Latin tag, and sometimes the destinies of authors follow those of their books. There is old Tolstoy in 1910 abandoning his family to wander away and die in a station master's room to the rumble of passing trains that had killed Anna Karenin. And there is something in Stevenson's death in 1894 on Samoa, imitating in a curious way the wine theme and the transformation theme of his fantasy. He went down to the cellar to fetch a bottle of his favorite burgundy, uncorked it in the kitchen, and suddenly cried out to his wife: what's the matter with me, what is this strangeness, has my face changed?—and fell on the floor. A blood vessel had burst in his brain and it was all over in a couple of hours.

  What, has my face changed? There is a curious thematical link between this last episode in Stevenson's life and the fateful transformations in his most wonderful book.

  Notes on lepidoptera omitted from Nabokov's lecture on "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"

  MARCEL PROUST (1871-1922)

  The Walk by Swann's Place

  (1913)

  The opening page from Nabokov's lecture notes on The Walk by Swann's Place

  The seven parts of Proust's great novel In Search of Lost Time (translated by Moncrieff as Remembrance of Things Past) are as follows, the Moncrieff titles in parentheses:

  The Walk by Swann's Place (Swann's Way)

  In the Shade of Blooming Young Girls (Within a Budding Grove)

  The Guermantes Walk (The Guermantes Way)

  Sodom and Gomorrah (Cities of the Plain)

  The Captive Girl (The Captive)

  Vanished Albertine (The Sweet Cheat Gone)

  Time Found Again (The Past Recaptured)

  Moncrieff died while translating the work, which is no wonder, and the last volume was translated by a man called Blossom who did quite well. These seven parts, published in French in fifteen volumes between 1913 and 1927, make 4,000 pages in English or about a million and a half words. In scope the work covers more than half a century from 1840 to 1915, into the First World War, and it has a cast of over two hundred characters. Generally speaking, the society Proust invents belongs to the early 1890s.

  Proust began the work in the autumn of 1906 in Paris and completed the first draft in 1912; then he rewrote most of it and kept rewriting and correcting until his very death in 1922. The whole is a treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding place the past: this is the inner meaning of the title In Search of Lost Time. The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb and tide of memory, waves of emotions such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria—this is the material of the enormous and yet singularly light and translucid work.

  Nabokov's notes on the plan for In Search of Lost Time

  In his youth Proust had studied the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Proust's fundamental ideas regarding the flow of time concern the constant evolution of personality in terms of duration, the unsuspected riches of our subliminal minds which we can retrieve only by an act of intuition, of memory, of involuntary associations; also the subordination of mere reason to the genius of inner inspiration and the consideration of art as the only reality in the world; these Proustian ideas are colored editions of the Bergsonian thought. Jean Cocteau has called the work "A giant miniature, full of mirages, of superimposed gardens, of games conducted between space and time."

  One thing should be firmly impressed upon your minds: the work is not an autobiography; the narrator is not Proust the person, and the characters never existed except in the author's mind. Let us not, therefore, go into the author's life. It is of no importance in the present case and would only cloud the issue, especially as the narrator and the author do resemble each other in various ways and move in much the same environment.

  Proust is a prism. His, or its, sole object is to refract, and by refracting to recreate a world in retrospect. The world itself, the inhabitants of that world, are of no social or historical importance whatever. They happen to be what the gazettes call society people, men and ladies of leisure, the wealthy unemployed. The only professions we are shown in action, or in result, are artistic and scholarly ones. Proust's prismatic people have no jobs: their job is to amuse the author. They are as free to indulge in conversation and pleasure as those legendary ancients that we see so clearly reclining around fruit-laden tables or walking in high discourse over painted floors, but whom we never see in the countinghouse or the shipyard.

  In Search of Lost Time is an evocation, not a description of the past, as Arnaud Dandieu, a French critic, has remarked. This evocation of the past, he continues, is made possible by bringing to light a number of exquisitely chosen moments which are a sequence of illustrations, of images. Indeed, the whole enormous work, he concludes, is but an extended comparison revolving on the words as if— .[*] The key to the problem of reestablishing the past turns out to be the key of art. The treasure hunt comes to a happy end in a cave full of music, in a temple rich with stained glass. The gods of standard religions are absent, or, perhaps more correctly, they are dissolved in art.

  To a superficial reader of Proust's work—rather a contradiction in terms since a superficial reader will get so bored, so engulfed in his own yawns, that he will never finish the book—to an inexperienced reader, let us say, it might seem that one of the narrator's main concerns is to explore the ramifications and alliances which link together various houses of the nobility, and that he finds a strange delight when he discovers that a person whom he has been considering as a modest businessman revolves in the grand monde, or when he discovers some important marriage that has connected two families in a manner such as he had never dreamed possible. The matter-of-fact reader will probably conclude that the main action of the book consists of a series of parties; for example, a din
ner occupies a hundred and fifty pages, a soiree half a volume. In the first part of the work, one encounters Mme. Verdurin's philistine salon in the days when it was frequented by Swann and the evening party at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's when Swann first realizes the hopelessness of his passion for Odette; then in the next books there are other drawing rooms, other receptions, a dinner party at Mme. de Guermantes', a concert at Mme. Verdurin's, and the final afternoon party at the same house of the same lady who has now become a Princesse de Guermantes by marriage—that final party in the last volume, Time Found Again, during which the narrator becomes aware of the changes that time has wrought upon all his friends and he receives a shock of inspiration—or rather a series of shocks—causing him to decide to set to work without delay upon his book, the reconstruction of the past.

  At this late point, then, one might be tempted to say that Proust is the narrator, that he is the eyes and ears of the book. But the answer is still no. The book that the narrator in Proust's book is supposed to write is still a book-within-the-book and is not quite In Search of Lost Time—just as the narrator is not quite Proust. There is a focal shift here which produces a rainbow edge: this is the special Proustian crystal through which we read the book. It is not a mirror of manners, not an autobiography, not a historical account. It is pure fantasy on Proust's part, just as Anna Karenin is a fantasy, just as Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" is fantasy—just as Cornell University will be a fantasy if I ever happen to write about it some day in retrospect. The narrator in the work is one of its characters, who is called Marcel. In other words, there is Marcel the eavesdropper and there is Proust the author. Within the novel the narrator Marcel contemplates, in the last volume, the ideal novel he will write. Proust's work is only a copy of that ideal novel—but what a copy!

  The Walk by Swann's Place (Swann's Way) must be viewed from the correct angle; it must be seen in relation to the completed work as Proust meant it to be seen. In order to understand in full the initial volume we must first accompany the narrator to the party in the last volume. This will be taken up in greater detail later, but for the moment one must listen to what Marcel says there as he is beginning to understand the shocks that he has experienced. "What we call reality is a certain relationship between sensations and memories which surround us at the same time, the only true relationship, which the writer must recapture so that he may for ever link together in his phrase its two distinct elements. One may list in an interminable description the objects that figured in the place described, but truth will begin only when the writer takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, and encloses them in the necessary rings of his style (art), or even when, like life itself, comparing similar qualities in two sensations, he makes their essential nature stand out clearly by joining them in a metaphor in order to remove them from the contingencies (the accidents) of time, and links them together by means of timeless words. From this point of view regarding the true way of art [Marcel asks himself], was not nature herself a beginning of art, she who had often allowed me to know the beauty of something only a long time afterwards and only through something else—midday at Combray through the remembered sound of its bells and the tastes of its flowers."

  This mention of Combray introduces the important theme of the two walks. The flow of the novel in all its seven parts (seven parts like the seven days of an initial creative week with no rest on Sunday)—through all those volumes the narrator keeps in his field of vision those two walks that he used to take as a child in the tiny town of Combray: the walk in the direction of Méséglise by way of Swann's place, Tansonville, and the walk in the direction of the Guermantes' country place. The whole story through all its fifteen volumes in the French edition is an investigation of the people related in oi _* way or another to the two walks of his young life. Particularly, the narrator's distress about his mother's kiss is a foreglimpse of Swann's distress and love, just as the child's love for Gilberte and then the main love affair with a girl called Albertine are amplifications of the affair that Swann has with Odette. But the two walks have a further significance. As Derrick Leon writes in his Introduction to Proust (1940): "Marcel does not realize until he sees the two walks of his childhood united in Swann's granddaughter (Gilberte's child) that the segments into which we splice life are purely arbitrary, and correspond not to any aspect of life itself, but only to the deficient vision through which we perceive it. The separate worlds of Madame Verdurin, Madame Swann, and Madame de Guermantes are essentially the same world, and it is only snobbery or some accident of social custom that has ever separated them. They are the same world not because Madame Verdurin finally marries the Prince de Guermantes, not because Swann's daughter eventually marries Madame de Guermantes' nephew, and not because Odette herself crowns her career by becoming Monsieur de Guermantes' mistress, but because each of them revolves in an orbit which is formed by similar elements—and this is the automatic, superficial, mechanical quality of existence" that we already know from Tolstoy's works.[*]

  Nabokov's notes on imagery from his lecture on The Way by Swann's Place

  Style, I remind you, is the manner of an author, the particular manner that sets him apart from any other author. If I select for you three passages from three different authors whose works you know—if I select them in such a way that nothing in their subject matter affords any clue, and if then you cry out with delightful assurance: "That's Gogol, that's Stevenson, and by golly that's Proust"—you are basing your choice on striking differences in style. The style of Proust contains, three especially distinctive elements:

  1. A wealth of metaphorical imagery, layer upon layer of comparisons. It is through this prism that we view the beauty of Proust's work. For Proust the term metaphor is often used in a loose sense, as a synonym for the hybrid form,[*] or for comparison in general, because for him the simile constantly grades into the metaphor, and vice versa, with the metaphorical moment predominating.

  2. A tendency to fill in and stretch out a sentence to its utmost breadth and length, to cram into the stocking of the sentence a miraculous number of clauses, parenthetic phrases, subordinate clauses, sub-subordinate clauses. Indeed, in verbal generosity he is a veritable Santa.

  3. With older novelists there used to be a very definite distinction between the descriptive passage and the dialogue part: a passage of descriptive matter and then the conversation taking over, and so on. This of course is a method still used today in conventional literature, B-grade and C-grade literature that comes in bottles, and an ungraded literature that comes in pails. But Proust's conversations and his descriptions merge into one another, creating a new unity where flower and leaf and insect belong to one and the same blossoming tree.

  "For a long time I used to go to bed early." This opening sentence of the work is the key to the theme, with its center in a sensitive boy's bedroom. The boy tries to sleep. "I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, underscoring the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, unfolded for me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed forever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again home." The whistling of the train underscores the distance like the note of a bird in a wind, an additional simile, an inner comparison, which is a typical Proustian device to add all possible color and force to a picture. Then follows the logical development of the train idea, the description of a traveler and of his sensations. This unfolding of an image is a typical Proustian device. It differs from Gogol's rambling comparisons by its logic and by its poetry. Gogol's comparison is always grotesque, a parody of Homer, and his metaphors are nightmares, whereas Proust's are dreams.

  A little later we have the metap
horical creation of a woman in the boy's sleep. "Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my thigh.... My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake. The rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman whose company I had left but a moment ago: my cheek was still warm with her kiss, my body bent beneath the weight of hers. If, as would sometimes happen, she had the appearance of some woman whom I had known in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her, like people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what has charmed their fancy. Gradually, the memory of her would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten the daughter of my dream." Again we have the unfolding device: the quest of the woman likened to people who journey to places, and so forth. Incidental quests and visitations and disappointments will form one of the main themes of the whole work.

  The unfolding may cover years in a single passage. From the boy dreaming, waking, and falling asleep again, we pass imperceptibly to his habits of sleeping and waking as a man, in the present time of his narration. "When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the order of years and worlds. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers.... But for me [as a man] it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of things than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped myself...."