A Surface Reading of Vladimir Nabokov

Within Vladimir Nabokov's repertory of elaborate trickery, Transparent Things1 stands out as an unusually slim, schematic volume, in the words of the New York Times Book Review 'a small mock replica' of a grander, life-long architectural enterprise2. Nabokov first published the 104-page novella in 1972, to little critical consensus. If some described it as the work of an author 'at the height of his style, and the full complexity of his artistic understanding'3, others received it as 'a mere fragment', 'black humour its only attraction'4. Among those who read it favourably enough to hazard an interpretation, attention was as likely to be paid to Nabokov's construction of a schematic 'X-ray of a novel'5, as to the 'grotesque comic' of a 'hero', who is, 'like Lolita's Humbert Humbert, entranced by a creature preposterously inadequate to the adoration'6 — an interpretation less likely to offer insight into Transparent Things than evidence a tradition of readings of Lolita for which the novel itself has often been panned7. Nabokov's own diary entry from 1972 documents 'Reviews oscillating between hopeless adoration and helpless hatred. Very amusing'8. It may be this which prompted him to uncharacteristically offer an interpretation, if with tongue held firmly in cheek: in an interview with an unnamed New York newspaper stylised on the pages of 1973's Strong Opinions, Nabokov frames Transparent Things' as 'merely a beyond-the-cypress inquiry into a tangle of random destinies', creating a 'structural knot'9. As Eric Jarosinski would later remark, this in fact also functions as a 'structural not'10: a skein of briefly glimpsed, tangled and matted moments presented out of order, precluding the easy extraction of any central thread teased by the author. Of course, Nabokov's fictions have always been prone to inviting a measure of detective work on the part of his readers. It has become customary to read his novels as structurally indebted to games, riddles and puzzles, especially following the publication of his Lectures on Literature in the 1980s11. Extending the logic of Nabokov's earlier Poems and Problems, which placed literary texts alongside invented chess scenarios with a presumed single solution12, Nabokov's lectures posit an even more general affinity between textual and tactical games by reading authors from Dostoevsky to Austen as grandmasters of strategy games of their own invention13. What distinguishes Transparent Things, published five years before the author's death in 1977 and well into his repertoire of play, however, is that it from the first frames its activities as the matter of a game played between the literal figures of author and reader. That is, the text is unfailingly 'transparent' about its existence as text, the sort of thing which has been invented and written by an author in order to be read, interpreted, and perhaps, in the manner of a chess problem, 'solved' by the reader. Indeed, Transparent Things begins at the precise moment when an unidentified narrating author first calls to a character ('Here's the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn't hear me'), bickers with the implied reader's assumed objections ('Hullo, person! What's the matter, don't pull me. I'm not bothering him. Oh, all right. Hullo person … (last time, in a very small voice)'), and proceeds to draw the character, a person conveniently also named 'Person', into a fiction peppered with ambiguous remarks seemingly intended for the reader's interpretive benefit ('I shall explain', the narrator announces, proceeding to instead only draw the reader's attention to the 'thin veneer of immediate reality … spread over natural and artificial matter')14. The instructions adopt the disorienting yet languid tone of a good-natured master introducing a novice to the rules of a game the two are about to play for the first time. After all, it would hardly be fair or, perhaps more importantly, fun for Nabokov to present the reader with a riddle the latter does not understand as one. A game is always partly structured by its constraints, whether one expertly navigates them or artfully inverts and extends their topologies, and so one must be aware of the existence of the board in order to take up the invitation to play. As Thomas Karshan observes, 'the more rules there are, the more those rules generate possibilities of improvisation and play which make for the pleasure of the game'15. By the same token, Nabokov's literary game must bring out its underlying structure as a literary text if it is to be taken up as a game. As its title promises, it will be nothing but transparent about the sort of thing it is. At the same time, if Nabokov promises that Things will be transparent, this does not mean that they will necessarily be apparent or precisely delineated. After all, transparency is not only the realm of the candid and clear, but also of the diffuse and vaporous. This is, in fact, precisely the paradox Nabokov relies on to propel the game past its introduction as one: while it quickly becomes apparent to the reader that Transparent Things' narratorial 'I' is also authorial, its precise identity and vantage point remain airy and elusive throughout most if not all of the novella, so that the challenge to the reader instead becomes one of figuring out the precise who, where, when and why of authorship — literally of drawing a 'figure out' from the text. Five years on the tails of Roland Barthes' 1967 essay on 'The Death of the Author', which provided an explicit framework for an approach to reading already in the process of articulation through modernist writing, Nabokov wittingly engages the reader in a fiction which explicitly relies on and demands reading for authorial presence16. In doing so, he adopts as a permeating idea that of 'transparency', critical to his prose, poems and problems since at least the 1920s, when spectral characters had already established themselves as prone to flickering into and out of view of narrators eager to draw attention to the artifice of their own narration17. But far from approaching transparency as the deceptive promise of disclosure, as have often his critics, Nabokov instead engages all of transparency's incongruities, attending to its ability to encode both the palpable and the diffuse, the evident and the nebulous, the frank and the elusive18. As a result, he produces a fiction which, as we will see, encourages incongruous practices of attending to text; complicates the roles of authors and readers; and metafictionally illuminates and resists some of cultural criticism's most embedded assumptions, most prominently that the work of interpreters is that of looking past 'surface' in order to engage with the 'depths' which a text 'really' encloses. But before attending to the play, or authorial ploy, of Transparent Things, let us first account for its pieces. If a plot is to be extracted from the novella, it is one which chronicles a number of episodes circling the life of one Hugh Person — to be confused with 'you person' — an inept and awkward North American literary editor and proofreader who repeatedly arrives at and departs the same small Swiss village from childhood until death. First, he does so with his father, the elder Person, who dies in a clothes-shop after trying on a pair of ill-fitting trousers. Next, it is to ingratiate himself to the famed and eccentric German-born novelist R., through the editing of whose English manuscripts Hugh comes to be acquainted with his future wife Armande. Finally, it is to reminisce after having strangled Armande in what Hugh claims to remember only as an oblivious, somnambulant fit — having since childhood been prone to episodes of sleepwalking prevented only by deliberate invocations of dream-tennis19. On this last occasion, a fire breaks out in the hotel Hugh has been staying in and kills him, too, albeit not before offering him the honour of a dance with the polite, cheerily humming flamelets. Thus, Hugh is at last left with the potential to complete that 'mental manoeuver needed to pass from one state of being into the other'20 and join the ranks of such beings as authors, whom Nabokov has been wont to nudge all his most insubstantial characters towards over the course of over 50 years of authorship. But where Invitation to a Beheading's diaphanous Cincinnatus or Bend Sinister's spinning Krug can easily slip through the flapping scenery and phase from one state to the next — death and authorship simply modes of being in the grand scheme of things21 — Nabokov's slow, graceless Person requires a little more authorial encouragement: 'Easy, you know, does it, son', reads Transparent Things' narrator's final line of instruction to its protagonist and, with it, the final line of Nabokov's text22. In figuring out the thing that has explicitly declared itself transparent, we find ourselves in a precarious position. After all, there is a latent paradoxical quality to transparency: in order to qualify for the designation, a thing must either be easily 'seen through' or else easily 'seen'. As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, the 'transparent' either has 'the property of transmitting light, so as to render bodies lying beyond completely visible' or else is itself easily 'recognised, understood or detected', forming the impression of that which is 'frank, open, candid' and 'manifest, obvious, clear'23. The two definitional clusters, understood approximately as perfect permeability on the one hand and palpability on the other, operate in inverse proportion to each other. The more easily a thing is seen through, the less easily it is seen as a thing in its own right: transparency obscures the thing it describes. At the same time, the more one attends to the thing as such, allowing it to attain discernibility and solidity in its own right, the less one has insight into that which it lights, frames and encloses: transparency illuminates and reveals the thing, and in doing so obscures its contents. This polysemy has allowed the 'transparent' to serve as the metaphorical matter for a number of ontologically and metaphysically slippery experiences24. Perception is, for instance, often claimed to be experienced as 'transparent' in one sense, which in fact means it is often also 'transparent' in the other. Perhaps originating in the work of G.E. Moore25 but more famously articulated by Gilbert Harman, the argument is that when we perceive, we attend to the properties of the environment but not to the experience of perceiving itself, though it is the latter, which inevitably structures our experience of the former26. This is true even if the properties attended to, such as colour, do not actually exist outside of the experience of their perception: although a birch may have only 'phenomenally' white bark, the property of white is experienced as a property of the birch, not of the perception of the birch. As a result, the properties of interaction between the medium and the thing it encloses are intuitively transposed to the latter, so that the medium appears to attain one sort of transparency, that of being easily seen through, while the thing attains the other, that of being easily seen. But, of course, this is a precarious perspective: we know the birch has 'only' phenomenally white bark not because we experience its whiteness as phenomenal, but because we experience it changing colour under different light conditions, investigate the role wavelengths play in our perception of colour, and so forth. In these moments, we might instead come to think that in perceiving, properties of the medium are, effectively, all we can see, never being in a position to see through it the properties of the thing it encloses27. The enclosed thing and the medium thus alternate places as 'true' transparent matter of attention, and will continue to do so every time we remember that that which is seen through a transparent thing, such as glass, is in fact obscured behind the glass only to be observed in the glass, which is, in turn, never observed in and of itself. In attending to any one transparent thing — perception among them, and by extension also its particular modes of reading literature and viewing painting — we find that it is in fact prone to taking on several different, equally elusive modes of transparency, simultaneously too diffuse and indistinct to be seen in its own right and too solid and prone to producing interferences — not least of all the glare that results from sudden illumination — to allow much else to be seen outside of it. It is this quality of inevitable oscillation of modes of seeing which allows transparency to gain particular potential as a technique across texts which expose, articulate and question their own textual constraints, Nabokov's among them. At the core of Transparent Things is its invocation of the antinomy of transparency. Nabokov's reader is asked to oscillate between, on the one hand, what Peter Lamarque refers to as 'reading transparently', that is by approaching the characters and events presented in the text as if they were part of a possible world upon which the lens of the text is simply turned, and, on the other hand, 'reading opaquely', that is by recognising the contents of the text as constituted through and dependent on its existence as text28. However, where Lamarque's lexicon evokes the sense of a spectrum of textual densities, it does not quite capture the sense of incongruity and contradiction at play in a text like Nabokov's. Instead, it would be more apt to observe that the reader of Transparent Things is asked to alternate between 'reading transparently' through the text and 'reading transparently' that which is text. In invoking transparency as literary technique, Nabokov embeds into Transparent Things the seemingly incongruous activities of seeing through the medium into the imagined times, spaces and entities it encloses, from Person to conflagration, and seeing the medium in its own right, the appearance or dismissal of Person merely a matter of authorial caprice. In fact, as we will attend to in continuation, the challenge to the reader thus becomes one of comprehending the coexistence of these two seemingly disparate modes, which each appear to momentarily obscure the other in the manner of the popular optical illusion wherein a ballerina depicted only in silhouette alternatively spins clockwise and counterclockwise29. That is, the reader must reconcile these two apparently incompatible modes by discerning the set of structural premises which enable their propulsion in both directions at once, in the case of the ballerina's as well as Nabokov's spinning — of bodies and of yarns, that is — indebted to careful shading which eludes the articulation of a precise viewpoint. The task is complicated by the novella's own advice about how it ought to be read. 'When we concentrate on a material object', the narrator of Transparent Things counsels us on its first page, 'the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object': this is why 'Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want to stay at the exact level of the moment'30. If the sentiment appears familiar, it is remarkably like Nabokov's own advice to his readers, especially across Strong Opinions, where the author writes that his 'Reviewers … made the lighthearted mistake of assuming that seeing through things is the professional function of a novelist. Actually, … a novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past'31. The nostalgic temptation to dive 'through' the present 'into' carefully cataloguing this or that detail originating in the past would interfere with the momentum and precision of Nabokov's spin — both in the sense in which Nabokov's craft is that of spinning yarns and in which it relies on his ability to serve unexpected twists and turns mid-game32. Charles Lock has observed that 'Paying attention to and in Nabokov often entails abnormal reading practices: the reader must focus on characters, letters and sounds instead of on the ideas that ought to be excited in her by them'33, and it is true that across Nabokov's fictions, the uppermost and outermost layers of text, not least among them phonology and orthography, become critical to maintaining spin even as personal histories stutter, stall, and come to dead ends. Or, as the narrator of Transparent Things puts it, one must keep to the 'surface' of the matter at hand, 'otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish'34. If the resemblance between the words of the text's narrator-author and its author, Nabokov, is to be credited, as readers, we know we are to approach Transparent Things by prioritising the apparent surface upon which its miracles appear at the expense of the depths it promises to enclose, lest we get mired in molasses. Of course, this is a decidedly ambiguous piece of advice. It is too immediately and candidly given for its incredible transparency not to seem patently incredible, especially appearing as it does in a text formulated around the identity and sincerity of its narrating consciousness. As diligent readers of institutionally ordained texts, even the most cursory instruction would have inclined us to be suspicious of any advice to 'skim', as Nabokov's narrator is wont to phrase it, or affect the self-sabotaging feat of a 'surface reading', least of all when instructed to do so from a position of specious authority. Surely, we may think, no author would seriously instruct us to avoid reading 'too deeply' into text? Yet if we do not take Things' narrator-author's advice as sincere, it is difficult to know what else to do with it. Would a text truly anticipate resistance, appear to reverse tracks, and tell us to read it for its surface only to instead induce us to read it, as we already expect, 'in depth'? The purpose to such a deception is too elusive not to leave us open to falling prey to it regardless, unsure of which of the author's sly stratagems to look out for — which is, we might begin to suspect, precisely the point. Nabokov has characterised some of his writing as producing 'clear, but weirdly misleading sentences'35, to which the critic William W. Rowe has added a penchant for 'deceptive, but weirdly honest' ones too36. No matter how we read Transparent Things' instructions, the text draws out its own textuality in order to evade established practices of reading and place itself outside of categories of either sincerity, perhaps insincerely offered, or insincerity, even sincerely disclosed. If transparency is often understood as an offer, or articulation of an offer, of candidness and disclosure37, whatever one may ultimately conclude about its reliability, then Transparent Things' insistence on evading these categories entirely functions to destabilise the idea of a shared, stable set of presumptions between reader and writer — and to invite the reader to consider an approach 'forgetful of the rules' in the manner Karshan describes of the player who 'fantasises the completely unrestricted play which would lift him entirely out of the world of rules', including presumably those of established textual practice38. At the same time as the text draws attention to and confuses processes of reading, it also exposes and dilates those of writing. The novella's authorial-narratorial consciousness' first act is to write, and in doing so conjure into existence, a person of interest: 'Here's the person I want. Hullo, person!', the text tells us, and after the requisite number of calls, a 'Person' obligingly appears. If the person in question is also named Person, all the better to slot him into place as a generalisable third-person protagonist. The result is that of a conspicuously schematic, diffuse fiction, particularly when Nabokov allows his narrator to detail the rote proceedings of Person's life, offering such clipped observations befitting of an assembly-line manual as 'Person pays alert driver', 'Person remained alone', 'Person followed his chance girl' and 'Person felt the pull of gravity'39. As these imperatives continue, we are invited into ever-increasing implied collusion between author and reader, that omnipresent 'we' who calls into existence, observes and directs 'our poor' and 'little friend', whether Person or incidental pencil, even if 'Direct interference … does not enter our scope of activity; … the most we can do … is to act as a breath of wind and to apply the lightest, the most indirect pressure'40. Of course, reader and author are never true equals in this endeavour: it is only one of us who invents the game, while the other can only be inventive in our play. We are implicated in writing largely in the manner of Nabokov's unnamed New York interviewer in Strong Opinions: an entity whose participation drives the exchange, as written, only when and where Nabokov wants it to, even if the interviewer's participation is neither entirely scripted nor incapable of introducing novel interpretation into the author's texts41. Throughout, 'we' are motioned to attend to, focus on, and occupy the same plains as all of the past, present and future 'Persons' across Things: 'Now comes the act of attention' the text instructs early on, establishing an approach which will sporadically provide such explicit spatio-temporal directions as 'Now we have to bring into focus the main street of Witt as it was on Thursday' or else 'We are back in New York and this is their last evening together'42. In magic, summoning often operates by incantation: repeat the name 'Bloody Mary' three times in front of a looking-glass, and the spirit will appear before you, pulled through the mirrored surface which connects all immaterial things. In the equally arcane art of writing, conjuring a person requires inventing an appellation to bind the effigy to the idea and thus propel the ritual: it is only when the narrator has begun to sketch the details of our protagonist's life, in Chapter 2, that Person sprouts the first name of 'Hugh'43. At times, characters other than Person, too, enter the tale for longer than a turn of phrase and earn a more personal 'Person', if not always a name: 'This Henry Emery Person, our Person's father', opens Chapter 6, 'might be described as a well-meaning, earnest, dear little man, or as a wretched fraud, depending on the angle of light and the position of the observer'44, at the same time alerting us to the play of light on the transparent matter of text. Similarly, in Chapter 9, the narrator drolly observes that 'Hugh and the new, irresistible Person', his future wife Armande, whom he will turn out to find largely incomprehensible, 'had by now switched to French, which he spoke at least as well as she did English'45. If in English, Person connotes 'anybody', its French analogue, personne, in the absence of a particle also connotes 'nobody', which is what Hugh and Armande will largely turn out to be to one another throughout their liaison. In fact, it is through Armande's French-tinged mispronunciation of his name that Hugh will also become a particular sort of nobody who also serves as an anybody, phonetically transfigured into 'you', leaving only the silent, residual orthographic trace of a 'he'. As we flip through the pages, we thus also find increasing instructions, directives and invitations to occupy the spatiotemporal realm of the 'Person' before us in a manner which encourages grammatical amalgamation not only with a third-person 'he' or analogue but instead with the second-person 'you': 'As the person, Hugh Person', that is 'you person', begins Chapter 2 46. By Chapter 3, the text is already providing instruction pertaining to the reader's gender and finical predilections: 'Hugh Person, a tidy man', that is 'you person, a tidy man', 'noticed that the middle drawer of an old desk relegated to a dark corner of the room, and supporting there a bulbless and shadeless lamp resembling the carcass of a broken umbrella, had not been reinserted properly'47. This shift permeates from the implied phonographic to the explicit orthographic by Chapter 13, when the 'He' who 'decided it was time for some more refreshments — and saw her sitting at a sidewalk café' seamlessly transitions into a 'You' who 'swerved towards her, thinking she was alone; then noticed, too late, a second handbag on the opposite chair'48. That is, Transparent Things petitions the reader to pass back and forth from looking over the author's shoulder, somewhere between an apprentice and an audience, as the latter motions and shouts to the 'Person' in the distance; to occupying the same time and space, perhaps 'in Witt' or 'on a Thursday', as the 'Person' of interest; to finally being absorbed into 'you person' and sharing in the 'I's' experience of attending to interiors, implements and even atomic debris: as Hugh notes the 'improperly reinserted' drawer, the narration adopts a ludicrous preoccupation with the pencil which 'shoots out' from the conspicuous compartment and, attending to ever-finer levels of detail, invites the reader to consider 'the complicated fate of its shavings', delving even into 'atoms of dust', and thus become ensconced in all of the historical, philosophical and psychological detritus of Transparent Things. Of course, the invitation for the reader to 'sink into' the depths of, as a later chapter explicates, all the 'transparent people and processes' present in the text with an 'author's delight', albeit while frequently 'singling out for this report … only one Person'49, is an elegant bit of legerdemain. Transparent Things' self-aware narration, wherein an authorial consciousness regularly appears to comment on the progression of the narrative, in fact prevents readers from being able to submerge into the experience and look through the text into the 'depths' it purports to enclose: As you/Hugh begin/s to attend to the remnants of the room inside which the eminent pencil resides, presumably left over 'by the lodger or servant', the text parenthetically disrupts immersion with a terse omniscient '(actually neither)'. Immediately after, the enigma of 'who had been last to check if the drawer was empty' is quickly dispensed with by the author-narrator's bracketed '(nobody had)'50. In a particularly striking example of authorial-narratorial intrusion, Nabokov details Hugh's observation of an item inside a souvenir shop: 'He found rather fetching the green figurine of a female skier made of a substance he could not identify through the show glass', immediately parenthetically disclosing that '(it was "alabasterette", imitation aragonite, carved and coloured in the Grumbel jail by a homosexual convict, rugged Armand Rave, who had strangled his boyfriend's incestuous sister)'51. What at first appears to be a droll non-sequitur which elaborates the artifice of authorial omniscience in fact reveals the trajectory of the text: the 'green figurine of the girl skier' is glimpsed once again later, inside the hotel room in which Hugh attempts to trace the steps of his honeymoon with Armande after having strangled her in his sleep52. If Armand's last name, 'Reve', is one accent off from the French 'rêve' ('dream'), the state during which Hugh will strangle Armande; and if Armande's own French birth name, 'Chamar', is not far off from 'cauchemar' ('nightmare'), all the more conspicuous. The apparently inconsequential thing which in its first instantiation draws attention away from the spatiotemporal realm of the text's persons, towards Transparent Things' existence as text, thus at the same time covertly intimates further details about the relationships and eventual trajectories of its 'Persons': Armand the homosexual strangler stands retrospectively as a funhouse mirror image of the heterosexually strangled Armande. Even while inviting us to 'sink in', the text thus abounds with artfully placed smudges on glass. Nabokov ensures, for example, that we are aware that Hugh's fellow lodger while at university, 'Jack Moore' is parenthetically '(no relation)' in advance of ever presenting us with another character by the name of Moore of whom we might assume he is a relation53, and who we will later find intimately connects Hugh to his author. There is a sense of ubiquity to such recurring figurines, appellations and other coincidences which Nabokov scatters across the surface of Transparent Things, where they appear to interfere while revealing. Late in the text, when we are told that a magazine in a waiting room 'had actually been left there by Hugh eight years ago, but this line nobody followed up'54, this is drawn out even more completely, the implication being that this coincidence, in fact any coincidence, whether pencil, Moore, figurine, magazine or indeed the realisation that Hugh and Armande's mothers had both been 'a country veterinary's daughter', could have been followed up, written and read as a means of accessing and exposing the novella's machinations had the author desired to do so, or the trailing reader known to. It pays, Transparent Things tells us, to 'skim' and 'slide' from one non-sequitur, reduplication, tautology, quip, pun, and phonological or orthographic loop to the other in order to reveal and delight in the intricate architectures which turn out to scaffold the text and all of its Persons. It pays, in other words, to attend to what is, or appears to be, 'surface'. In fact, as we will see, one solution to the 'problem' of authorial presence posed by the text is, as both of its authors have intimated, on its surface — even if the game turns out to in fact be one of extending its own topologies past notions of both 'problem' and 'solution'. Nabokov described a novella he was working on