Nabokovs Language of Despair and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - Literature Essay Samples

Vladimir Nabokov manipulates languages ambiguous properties in Despair and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. By toying with words sounds and meanings he creates an atmosphere of duplicitous layers that resonates with the novels thematic overtones. Nabokov also peppers the two novels with what appear to be superfluous data and obscure allusions, then cohesively ties that information into an important plot point. Despair and Sebastian Knight should be read as a riddles one must decode; as Nabokov himself admits, The attractively shaped Wiener-schnitzel dream that the eager Freudian may think he distinguishes in the remoteness of my wastes will turn out to be on closer inspection a derisive mirage organized by my agents (xii). Nabokov clouds his clues with language and allusion so the reader, the hound, is forever thrown on and off the scent.The evidence that later incriminates the protagonist of Despair, Herrman, a stick, is introduced to the reader as a curious verbal tic of his wife. She is little educated and observant. We discovered one day that to her the term mystic was somehow dimly connected with mist and mistake and stick, but that she had not the least idea what a mystic really was (23). Subtext and foreshadowing abound in this seemingly innocuous sentence, disclosed long before any intention of murder has been confessed. First, Herrman has somewhat mystical powers; he has powers of bodily displacement: The next phase came when I realized that the greater the interval between my two selves the more I was ecstasied; therefore I used to sit every night a few inches farther from the bed, and soon the back legs of my chair reaches the threshold of the open door. Eventually I found myself sitting in the parlor‹while making love in the bedroom (28).More important to Herrman is that a missed stick later becomes his fatal mistake. As the exiled Herrman rereads his writing of the pre-murders scene, his narrative voice cuts in:With his stick, reade r, with his stick. S-T-I-C-K, gentle reader. A roughly hewn stick branded with the owners name: Felix Wohlfahrt from Zwickau. With his stick he pointed, gentle or lowly reader, with his stick!the thought that the whole of my masterpiece, which I had devised and worked out with such minute care, was now destroyed intrinsically, was turned into a little heap of mold, by reason of the mistake I had committed (203).Nabokov repeats the quasi-portmanteau mistake here to tie in his wifes language quirk to his error. Finally, the stick alludes to Robert Louis Stevensons Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which Jekyll is implicated in the murder of a respected gentleman. The weapon that Hyde, the murderer, uses is a stick once given to Jekyll as a gift. The duality (or the quartet of qualities) of the word reveals much about Herrmans character: his superior attitude towards his wife; his imperfect crime; his desire for a detached body that manifests itself in the literary allusion and in swit ching identities with Felix the happy; and appropriately leads to the title of his book on examining his mistake: Despair; no need to look for a better title (204). To complement Despair, the mystic motif is brought up again in Sebastian Knight by way of another portmanteau, optimystics (175). As the novel ends on a somewhat up and spiritual tone, the optimistic and mystic segments shine through.In Sebastian Knight, Nabokov pushes the limits of wordplay even further. In his synopsis of his half-brothers novel, The Prismatic Bezel, a parodic roman policier, as Nabokovs narrators, who frequently turn to French to complicate and duplicate matters might say, the astute reader notices a name-shift:One of the lodgers, a certain G. Abeson, art-dealer, is found murdered in his roomIn the meantime the inhabitants of the boarding house plus a chance passer-by, old Nosebag, who happened to be in the lobby when the crime was discovered, are examinedIt gradually transpires that all the lodgers are in various ways connected with one anotherI think, said old Nosebag quietly, that I can explain. Slowly and very carefully he removes his beard, his gray wig, his dark spectacles, and the face of G. Abeson is disclosed (90-2).The Prismatic Bezel is itself a title that serves to parody; its prism absorbs the spectrum of art, then the bezel cuts and refracts the light with its many pointed sides. Though Knights novel parodies many a detective novel, Agatha Christies And Then There Were None comes to mind. Both are novels which allow the reader to think of himself as always on top of things only to reverse course at the last moment. Sebastian Knight is similarly parodic, teasing the reader with at times obvious clues, only to have them later detonate in his face. G. Abeson, a man whose life is to acquire art, never to produce it, like V., is Nosebag backwards (also backwords, another Nabokovian wordplay implication). The name Sebastian, in native Russian, is spelled with a v instead of a b. Perhaps V. has been Nosebagging through the whole book. But Nabokov, unlike Knight, leaves his conclusion in doubt: Thus‹I am Sebastian Knight. I feel as if I were impersonating him on a lighted stageSebastians mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows (203). Though Nabokov sums up his story on a rather sentimental, even moral, note, the previous doubling of G. Abeson leaves some room for ambiguity in the final pages.To cloud matters even more, Nabokov inserts several coincidental numbers throughout Sebastian Knight. The first is Knights date of birth, the thirty-first of December, 1899, or, in other words, the dawn of the new century. The woman who told V. this information is called Olga Olegovna Orlova‹an egg-like alliteration which it would have been a pity to withhold (3). Her initials‹O.O.O.‹also coincide with Sebastians historic al birth. The number 36 recurs often in the text: In Mr. Goodmans Tragedy of Sebastian Knight (which appeared in 1936 an to which I shall have occasion to refer more fully) (4); So I was not at all sure of finding her still alive, in 1936 (19); In his last published book, The Doubtful Asphodel (1936) (23); Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936‹it was always year 1 (63); In March, 1936, after a months stay in England, I consulted a tourist office and set out for Blauberg (119); I got a list of some forty-two names among which Sebastians (S. Knight, 36 Oak Parks Gdns., London S.W.) seemed strangely lovely and lost (129); In the middle of January, 1936, I got a letter from Sebastian (183); ah, there it was: Jasmin 61-93 (194) [turned upside down and read from right dash to left dash, 61-93 is 19-36]; No, he growled, the English Monsieur is not deadK, n, K, gnIm not an idiot, you know. Number thirty-six (199). Thirty-six is a perfect square of six, which contributes t o the doubling theme. It is also a number that can be turned upside down to reveal another number, as evidence by the 61-93 reversal. V. strings together these dates with a theory of the occult:He died in the very beginning of 1936, and as I look at this figure I cannot help thinking that there is an occult resemblance between a man and the date of his death. Sebastian Knight d. 1936This date to me seems the reflection of that name in a pool of rippling water. There is something about the curves of the last three numerals that recalls the sinuous outlines of Sebastians personality (181).The reflective qualities of the number contribute to the theme of doubling and Sebastians narcissism. More importantly, the frequency of the number in Sebastians life lends itself to an occult fate he has been prescribed. Nabokov employs numbers as fate in Lolita as well, using 342 throughout to denote a series of checkpoints in Humberts life through which he must pass.Nabokov had an intimate k nowledge of both Russian and English (and French), and that translated into a preoccupation with wordplay that recognized the inherent boundlessness of language. His dissection of words such as mystic are inserted not only for cleverness but to play a major role in plot and theme. V. writes that what annoyed Sebastian invariably was the second rate, not the third or N-th rate, because here, at the readable stage, the shamming began, and this was, in an artistic sense, immoralit is not a parody of the Sherlock Holmes vogue but a parody of the modern reaction from it (90, 92). Nabokov parodied the parody, and the idiosyncrasies he planted in his works leave the reader wondering whether they are real clues or deceptive ones. The reader must always question if Nabokov is feeding the double theme or in fact parodying the readers preconceived notion of doubling. That final ambiguity is the ultimate doubling: not the doubling of character, but the doubling of the reader.