Nabokov and Nietzsche

Problems and Perspectives

Michael Rodgers

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501339585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Russian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Awarded the Jane Grayson Prize by the International Vladimir Nabokov Society
Shortlisted for The European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) Book Award Nabokov and Nietzsche: Problems and Perspectives addresses the many knotted issues in the work of Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita 's moral stance, Pnin 's relationship with memory, Pale Fire 's ambiguous internal authorship – that often frustrate interpretation. It does so by arguing that the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, as both a conceptual instrument and a largely unnoticed influence on Nabokov himself, can help to untie some of these knots. The study addresses the fundamental problems in Nabokov's writing that make his work perplexing, mysterious and frequently uneasy rather than simply focusing on the literary puzzles and games that, although inherent, do not necessarily define his body of work. Michael Rodgers shows that Nietzsche's philosophy provides new, but not always palatable, perspectives in order to negotiate interpretative impasses, and that the uneasy aspects of Nabokov's work offer the reader manifold rewards.

PART ONE

Nietzschean engagements

1

Eternal recurrence and Nabokov’s art of memory

A passing allusion tacitly recognized in the middle distance of an idea, an adventurous sail descried on the horizon. (Pnin 34)

In Theories of Memory: A Reader, Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead chronicle the extent to which memory has informed literary inquiry. From the ancient Greeks, to Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Georg Hegel, to twentieth-century figures such as Marcel Proust and Henri Bergson, they claim that there has been a consistent emphasis on a particular aspect of memory throughout literary history: that of recollection (2007: 4). Recollection, describing the involuntary passive experience of the past in the mental present, has often been at the expense of ‘retrospection’, something I define here as the active, willed survey of the past. Locke’s metaphor of memory being the ‘store-house of our Ideas’ ([1690] 2009: 87) serves as a popular example of how experiential aspects of active memory are downplayed, especially since it seems to interrelate three major modes of response to experience: remembering, forgetting and anticipating (Thompson 1991: 17). In The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory, Diane Thompson claims:

When we speak of literary art we are concerned not so much with the storage of information about reality, but with transformations of reality by the individual imagination in its potentially creative alliance with cultural memory [ . . . ] Memory is at once a highly conservative and a highly creative mechanism. Therein lies its great significance for art. As a conservative mechanism, memory, remarks Lotman, is not only ‘panchronic, but opposed to time’. (1991: 6)

Her conception of memory suggests that it can not only help us deal with certain situations experientially by connecting past, present and future through pattern, but also help us to better understand the topics of time and memory, the importance of pattern, and their relationship to human consciousness in Nabokov’s writing. As he declares in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, ‘I confess I do not believe in time’ (109).

Nabokov’s narrative memoir acts as a quasi-imperative summoning of the possibilities of ‘Mnemosyne’, and describes ‘the act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait’ (SM 60). In ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’, memory is listed alongside ‘imagination’, ‘a dictionary’ and ‘artistic sense’ as an integral criterion for what constitutes a ‘good reader’ (LL 3). Yet, scholars have tended to concentrate more on Nabokov’s relationship with figures such as Marcel Proust and Henri Bergson when looking at his depictions of both time and memory, something aided by Nabokov’s inclusion of the first half of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in what he ranked as the four twentieth-century masterpieces in prose (SM 57). John Burt Foster, for example, claims that Nabokov ‘strongly endorsed Bergson’s concern with the lived experience of time, the enriching effects of memory, and the importance of creativity’, arguing that he ‘saw Bergson as nearly identical to Proust’ in these areas (1993: 14). Although the focus on Proust and Bergson is certainly fertile, scholarship on Nabokov and these two figures fails to account for several aspects of Nabokov’s conception of memory: his belief that memory can look forward, that memories can be shared, his relationship with loss, his distinction between memory and nostalgia, and his willingness to remember pain, suffering and loss, as well as joy and happiness.¹ Interestingly, although Boyd claims that ‘Nabokov heartily approved Bergson’s cutting time off from space in order to emphasise the indeterminism of the world, and he accepted Bergson’s stress on time as a richer mode of being than space’,² he claims that ‘the insistence on the absurd contrast between a possible return in space and an impossible return in time is his own’ (VNRY 294, my emphasis). Such a suggestion can be interrogated fruitfully if we probe Nabokov’s engagement with the issue of recurrence in light of Nietzsche’s position.

Nabokov, circular time and recurrence

Just as questions of time and memory have traditionally led Nabokov critics to Proust and Bergson, discussions of coincidence and recurrence have tended to lead them to Hegel given Nabokov’s frequent references to spirals, and ideas of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.³ In Speak, Memory, for example, Nabokov claims that ‘the spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious, it has been set free. I thought this up when I was a schoolboy, and I also discovered that Hegel’s triadic series (so popular in old Russia) expressed the essential spirality of all things in their relation to time’ (211). In The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames, Marina Grishakova looks mainly at spatio-temporal models presented by Bergson, Proust and Lacan, but also discusses Nabokov’s ambivalence towards the circular form and the conflation of Hegelian and Nietzschean thought in his work:

One of the most obvious of Nabokov’s sources is the Symbolist idea of the spiral as a spiritualized circle (SM, 275) elaborated in the polemics against the Nietzschean ‘vicious’ circle of the ‘eternal return’. In Nabokov, however, the vicious circle of logical thinking or the negative meaning of the encirclement as pressure of the material world is counterweighted by the positive meaning of the circle (see e.g. a collection of Nabokov’s dictums on the topic ‘all good things are round’ in Hayles 1984: 124; cf. also: ‘Commonsense is square, whereas all the most essential visions and values of life are beautifully round, as round as the universe or the eyes of a child at its first circus show’, CW, 22). (2006: 81)⁴

Indeed, although Nabokov mentions the ‘vicious’ character of the circle, Alexandrov draws attention to the idea of the ‘charmed circles of Nabokov’s fiction’ (1995: 6). For example, despite Fyodor’s ‘urge to break out of the circle’ (312) in The Gift, he makes reference to the positive effect of recurring incidences and circular motions (84, 188). Karshan, similarly, focuses on the phrase ‘All, all turns’ in Nabokov’s unpublished 1921 poem ‘Olympicum’, claiming that Nabokov presents the circle as ‘the essential form of existence’ (2011a: 65). Talking about Nabokov’s short story ‘The Circle’, Foster claims that ‘it justifies its title by having the story curl back to its beginning, thereby creating an impressively vivid sense of eternal return’ (1993: 86). Although Foster downplays the Nietzschean element, Nabokov himself evokes the Nietzschean idea of ‘ouroboros’ when describing the story as belonging ‘to the same serpent-biting-its-tail type as the circular structure of the fourth chapter in Dar (or, for that matter, Finnegans Wake, which it preceded)’ (Collected 653).

In her essay ‘Memory and Dream in Nabokov’s Short Fiction’, Barbara Wyllie claims that ‘Nabokov’s self-imposed “problem” was how to overcome the regressive, destructive forces of time’ (in Kellman and Malin 2000: 5). She continues:

The potential for memory and dream to negate the linear, regressive passage of time suggests a notion of ceaseless return. An echo of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return, for Nabokov this is not a retrograde process, but a liberating one. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov refers to his life as a ‘coloured spiral in a small ball of glass’. The spiral, rather than the circle, suggests a continual movement forward through time, whilst maintaining the proximity of the past and future to the present. (In Kellman and Malin 2000: 19)

Like most critics, Wyllie privileges the spiral form over the circular; the Hegelian method over the Nietzschean. This, however, underplays Nabokov’s comment about spirals later becoming vicious circles again (231) in Speak, Memory – the inability for continual movement forward through time – as well as his comment that ‘I have journeyed back in thought [ . . . ] to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits’ (18). It is intriguing, in this respect, that the theory of the world repeating itself ‘an infinite number of times’ ([1880] 2003: 823) is spoken by the Devil in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and that Bely, in a 1912 article titled ‘Circular Movement (Forty-Two Arabesques)’, equates circular movement with death, claiming that Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence is a falsehood which humanity has accepted.⁵ Yet, this connection between circularity and negativity is curiously counterpoised by Nabokov’s description of ‘the supreme achievement of memory’ at the end of chapter eight of Speak, Memory: ‘the [ . . . ] faculty of impassioned commemoration, of ceaseless return, that makes me always approach that banquet table from the outside, from the depth of the park – not from the house – as if the mind, in order to go back thither, had to do so with the silent step of a prodigal, faint with excitement’ (134). Similarly, in ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’, Nabokov writes that, although memory can create the ‘perfect fusion of past and present’, it is ‘the inspiration of genius’ that adds a third ingredient: ‘it is the past and the present and the future (your book) that come together in a sudden flash; thus the entire circle of time is perceived, which is another way of saying that time ceases to exist. It is a combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you’ (LL 378).⁶ Such references to circular time, the frisson that entertaining the idea can induce and the potential dissolution of self leads us to Nietzsche, specifically his notion of ‘eternal recurrence’.

Eternal recurrence

Despite Heidegger’s assertion that eternal recurrence is the ‘fundamental doctrine of Nietzsche’s philosophy’ (1991: 6), there is no single, monolithic account – the ‘doctrine’ or ‘theory’ of eternal recurrence is spread across a range of his works. In The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, where the ‘death of God’ is first mentioned, Nietzsche introduces the concept of eternal recurrence:

The Greatest Weight [ . . . ] This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again, and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence. (194)

Eternal recurrence then appears in his next work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, in a chapter called ‘The Intoxicated Song’ in Part IV, where Zarathustra asks:

Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love; if ever you wanted one moment twice, if ever you said: ‘You please me, happiness, instant, moment!’ then you wanted everything to return! you wanted everything anew, everything eternal, everything chained, entwined together, everything in love, O that is how you loved the world, you everlasting men, loved it eternally and for all time: and you say even to woe: ‘Go, but return!’ For all joy wants – eternity! (331–32)

Here, Zarathustra associates eternal recurrence with the notion of oneness, the affirmation of both joy and woe, and its apparently paradoxical nature. Referring to Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, Nietzsche writes that ‘the basic conception of the work, the idea of eternal recurrence, [is] the highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained’ (69). In order for eternal recurrence to occur, then, Nietzsche argues that it has to function alongside what he calls amor fati or ‘a love of one’s fate’ – that is, we must want our lives to repeat endlessly with the utmost fervour in order for eternal recurrence to enact itself. In a chapter in Ecce Homo titled ‘Why I Am So Clever’, Nietzsche claims that ‘my formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity’ (37). The notion of amor fati is present in the earlier quotation both in content (‘Yes to all woe’) and form (the us...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART ONE: Nietzschean engagements
• PART TWO: Nietzschean readings
• PART THREE: Beyond Nietzsche
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright Page