`A Web of Sense'

On July 2 we will observe the 30th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov’s death, a reality that remains unacceptable. I have never fallen so hard for a writer as I did for Nabokov in 1970, when I started reading all his available books, out of order, early self-translated Russian titles mingling promiscuously with the American and post-American masterpieces. One of the reasons I fell in love with Tristram Shandy was that I read an essay by Frank Kermode in which he likened Nabokov’s Bend Sinister to Sterne’s masterpiece. Nabokov was never a systematic critic of literature but his influence on my tastes was lasting. Dostoevsky remains “Dusty,” and Freud, more than ever, is the “Viennese quack.” The aim of reading and writing, he taught us, is “aesthetic bliss.”

I learned of his death on a warm summer night outside Youngstown, Ohio. I was the passenger in the front seat of a car. I was drunk and I froze up when I heard the news of his death on the radio. The next day I started re-reading Ada, specifically waiting for that passage about the shadows cast by leaves. Now I am re-reading the sad, funny, tricky Pnin. Early on, the narrator tells us:

“I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.”

Almost 20 years later, in his final novel, Look at the Harlequins! Nabokov’s hero writes “Death is silly, death is degrading,” -- a rhythmic and thematic echo of “Death is divestment, death is communion.”

Death and its vulgar finality were always an affront to Nabokov. He dabbled in the afterlife, especially in Pale Fire but at least as early as Invitation to a Beheading. After the death of his daughter, Hazel, John Shade writes in his poem “Pale Fire” that gives its title to the novel:

“Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link and bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, or something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found.”

Shade hints that consciousness survives after death, and finds evidence for it in blessed coincidence, “the correlated pattern in the game.” In Speak, Memory, Nabokov expresses his metaphysical chutzpah:

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness -- in a landscape selected at random -- is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern -- to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

If time does not exist, can death? Elsewhere in his memoir, Nabokov writes:

“I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.”

W.G. Sebald learned much from Nabokov, who is a ghostly presence in The Emigrants. In "Dream Textures: A Brief Note on Nabokov," collected in Campo Santo, Sebald writes:

"Nabokov also knew, better than most of his fellow writers, that the desire to suspend time can prove its worth only in the most precise re-evocation of things long overtaken by oblivion. The pattern on the bathroom floor at Vyra, the white steam rising above the tub at which the boy looks dreamily from his seat in the dimly lit lavatory, the curve of the doorframe on which he leans his forehead—suddenly, with a few well-chosen words, the whole cosmos of childhood is conjured up before our eyes."