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Within and Without Cincinnatus's Cell: Reference Gauges in Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Gennady Barabtarlo
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Extract

Recurrent motifs in Nabokov's fiction not only point in the creator's direction and thus to the realm beyond specific fiction, but they sometimes serve to set and mark local temporal and spatial conditions within the created universe. Invitation to a Beheading is probably the most convincing case in point. The novel's dimensions are defined almost exclusively through a thematic network, and even much of its plot is propelled by periodic devices, of which many are interlinked, and perhaps all are retroactive, if only because each serial occurrence must refer to its antecedent in order to keep the thematic circuit closed.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , Fall 1990 , pp. 390 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1990

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References

1. Page references in parentheses here and elsewhere are to the first United States edition of the novel, G. P. Putnam's Sons (New York, 1959).

2. Similar ideas have been illustrated by ample evidence from Ada (and from some other of Nabokov's works) in Brian Boyd's ADA: The Place of Consciousness (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985). Slavic Review 49, no. 3 (Fall 1990)

3. I subjoin here an incomplete list of the works on Invitation to a Beheading, besides Boyd's ADA, that are relevant to this subject or to its treatment in this article: P. M. Bitsilli, a 1936 review of “Invitation to a Beheading,” translated from Russian by Johnson, D. Barton in A Book of Things about Vladimir Nabokov (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1974), 63–69 Google Scholar; Margaret Byrd Boegeman, “Invitation to a Beheading and the Many Shades of Kafka” in Nabokov's Fifth Arc, ed. J. E. Rivers and Charles Nicol (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); Robert P. Hughes, “Notes on the Translation of Invitation to a Beheading” in Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations, and Tributes, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr., and Charles Newman (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 284-292; Hyman, Stanley Edgar, “The Handle: Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister” mNabokov , ed. Appel, and Newman, , 60–71 Google Scholar; Ellen, Pifer, “Breaking the Law of Averages: Invitation to a Beheading ,” a chapter in her book Nabokov and the Novel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 49–67 Google Scholar; Dabney Stuart, “All the Mind's a Stage. A Reading of Invitation to a Beheading by Nabokov, Vladimir,” The University of Windsor Review 4, no. 2 (1969): 1–24Google Scholar; Pekka, Tammi, Problems of Nabokov's Poetics (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedakatemia, 1985 Google Scholar, passim, but especially 196-197.

4. Margaret Byrd Boegeman registers the theme's origination point and its phase in chapter 8—see “Invitation to a Beheading and the Many Shades of Kafka,” 115.

5. Perhaps nowhere in the world's vast literature on decapitation does the obvious and jejune pun on the Latin for “chapter” (caput) present itself so naturally and in such meaningful fashion as in Invitation to a Beheading. Cincinnatus's last days are literally numbered by the chapters's increments, a day per capita, and his confinement in the novel ends when, in the final chapter, he climbs the block to be beheaded. The hero and the book are “decapitated” simultaneously (the original Russian, of course, preserves the pun in obezglavit’).

6. Similar timepieces are strategically positioned in Ulysses. Odd, by the way, that no one should have mentioned a striking affinity between certain middlemost themes in Invitation to a Beheading and Joyce's novel, especially its chapter in Barney Kiernan's tavern, with its mockery, a hangman's letter of selfrecommendation, and the farcical cooperative execution on the block (in the course of which the widow-tobe becomes enamored of the muscular executioner). For more on the clock theme in Invitation to a Beheading see Pifer, Ellen's “Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading: The Parody of a Tradition.” Pacific Coast Philology, no. 5 (1970): 46–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Compare in Pnin: “he screwed onto the side of the desk a pencil sharpener—that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must” (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), 69.

8. It used to be fashionable to sharpen this point adfinem by implying that the whole novel might be written by Cincinnatus, a “failed artist.” Field, Andrew's Nabokov: His Life in Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967)Google Scholar, which enlarges upon the latter thesis, has spawned a streak of Ph.D. dissertations on the subject. See, for example, Terry P. Anderson's “A Formal Analysis of the Theme of Art in Nabokov's Russian Novels (Ph.D. diss., McGill University, 1973) or Philip R. Hughes's “The Knight Moves of the Mind: Nabokov's Use of Illusion to Transcend the Limits of Life and Art” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1974). The possibility, however, is indeed tempting, especially because so many of Nabokov's books conveniently yield data to support it. To give a seldom discussed yet glaring example: “The notes you found were fragments of a novel,” Humbert assures the desperately furious Charlotte, (The Annotated Lolita, ed. Appel, Alfred, Jr. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), 98 Google Scholar, and what appears to be a hobbling excuse, couched in an iambic pentameter, is really a profound truth.

9. Joann Karges identifies this as the hind wing of the Large Tortoiseshell (Nymphalis polychloros Linnaeus) and suggests that, since this species “occurs primarily in southern and central Europe” and since “the wing is in the southwest corner of the web,” this bit of entomological description locates the novel somewhere in the area (the Pyrenees?)” (Nabokov's Lepidoptera: Genres and Genera [Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985], 30). Somehow I do not find this reasoning convincing. Besides, in an interview with Lee Belser of the Los Angeles Evening Mirror News (31 July 1959), Nabokov said of the book (the English version of which had just appeared) that it was a “story about Russia in the year 3000. “

10. Not only do insects often appear at critical turns of Nabokov's fiction (as does, for example, a race of mosquitoes in Ada or a swallowtail in Glory), but sometimes they accompany the main character as he exits the stage. A Red Admirable butterfly flutters around Shade moments before his death; a green ephemeral trichopteron describes trapezoids over Pnin's bald head at the very end of the synoptic chapters of the book; a hawkmoth convoys Krug out of the novel: “And as Olga's soul, emblemized already in an earlier chapter [Nine], bombinates in the damp dark at the bright window of my room, comfortably Krug returns unto the bosom of his maker” (introduction, Bend Sinister [New York: Time, 1964], xviii).

11. To quote from a poem by another desperate father—see “Pale Fire,” line 978.

12. “Then, going back to my friends who had come to visit, Kapterev and Florenski, the naturalist and the priest, I asked them: ‘Gentlemen, which of the three contains the “I “—the caterpillar, the pupa, or the butterfly?’ I meant, the T as one letter, so to speak, one radiance, one ray. T as both a ‘dot’ and a ‘naught.’ Kapterev kept silent, but Florenski said, upon reflection: ‘Surely, a butterfly is the entelechy of the caterpillar and the pupa.'” (Vasilii Rozanov, hbrannoe [Munich: Neimanis, 1970), 503. See also 506-507 and 469 et seq. Some of the concepts in this and the immediately adjacent paragraphs of my essay (the Russian semantics of image-mask, for instance) issue from Florenski's ideas put forward in his discourses on icons, especially in “The Iconostasis” (1922), the best edition of which is in Florenski, 's Collected Works (Paris: YMCA, 1985) 1: 193–316 Google Scholar.

13. In the Russian original, he calls his Petrushka doll his namesake, “Nu, sidi priamo, tezka” (Paris: Editions Victor, 1966), 139. His Russian name is Piotr Petrovich.

14. The original Latin word probably lacked this nuance, “larva” meaning “specter” but also “mask” as late as in the first century A.D. , for example, in Horace (in the latter sense): “Pastorem saltaret uti Cyclopa rogabat: nil illi larva aut tragicis opus esse cothurnis” (Satires I, v, 63-64; “he begged him to dance the Cyclops shepherd-dance: he would need neither mask nor tragic buskin,” trans. H. Rushton Fairclough).

15. See my note in The Vladmir Nabokov Research Newsletter, no. 9 (1982): 34-35.

16. Poems and Problems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 102-112. The author of an old Ph.D. dissertation complains, apparently in earnest, that in Invitation to a Beheading “life beyond death is NOT CONVINCINGLY PRESENTED.” (I borrow this gem from Samuel Schuman's annotation no. 1966.6, in his Vladimir Nabokov: A Reference Guide [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979], 68.)

17. Appel, ed., Annotated LOUTA, 227.

18. By my observation, of all those who have written on Invitation to a Beheading none has neglected to quote the mysterious final sentence. While not presuming to enter here the famous controversy of whether or not Cincinnatus is beheaded on page 222 (which I think is ill-sorted), I should like to quote a little known report by a close friend of Swedenborg's, casting, perhaps, a curious sidelight on one of the debate's best ontological arguments: “One day a prisoner was publicly executed; Mr. Robsahm [the memoirist] went in the evening to visit Swedenborg, and asked him, how a malefactor, in the moment of execution, finds himself on entering the world of spirits? He answered; when he lays his head on the block, he loses his senses, and that, after the beheading, when the spirit enters the world of spirits, the prisoner finds himself alive, tries to make his escape, is in expectation of death, and in a great fright, as thinking either on the happiness of heaven, or the miseries of hell in that moment. At last, such a one is associated with the good spirits, who discover to him, that he is really departed from the natural world.” Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg, collected by Dr. J. F. I. Tafel, ed. the Rev. I. H. Smithson. (Manchester: Joseph Hay ward, 1841), 77.

19. “And I shan't write it now, I'll be a long time preparing it, years perhaps… . In any case I'll do something else first—I want to translate something in my own manner from an old French sage—in order to reach a final dictatorship over words,” The Gift (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1963), 376. To my knowledge, Barton Johnson was the first to point out that the sage “is almost certainly Pierre Delalande “—see his Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985), 99. He fails to see, however, that Invitation to a Beheading is most probably the very book the hero of The Gift means to adapt in his own manner, from the author of the Tract on Shadows.

20. “Ultima Thule” in the collection A Russian Beauty (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 149-150.