morality plays and leaves his readers to define morality individually so long as ... and Thus Spake Zarathustra has litt
ALH Online Review, Series XI 1
Nabokov and the Question of Morality: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction, ed. Michael Rodgers and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 241 pp. Reviewed by Zoran Kuzmanovich, Davidson College Dedicated to Sam Schuman (1924-2014), this engaging book collects the proceedings of a 2011 Strathclyde conference and reprints an excerpt from Leland de la Durantaye’s Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Like most conference volumes, Nabokov and the Question of Morality offers some rich suggestions: Elspeth Jajdelska’s superb essay on the difficulty of depicting sexual activity in fiction without dipping into pornography or parody should reassure readers, like Martin Amis, who are concerned that Nabokov’s work is disproportionally populated by prepubescent girls. Laurence Piercy’s action theory approach to Pale Fire delivers a novel and more sensitive moral assessment of Kinbote’s behavior after Shade is shot. (One wishes that Michael Wood’s complex but very accessible essay on the difference between meaning and reference would have been placed before Piercy’s to prepare the reader for evaluating Kinbote’s claims to heroism.) Samuel Schuman discerningly traces Nabokov’s use of Christianity in his early work and points to Nabokov’s finding solace in religion during the 1920s before professing to have abandoned it. Gennady Barabtarlo’s exploration of the way unchecked passion operates in Nabokov’s works concludes with the idea that in both early and late works, the morality “extricable” from Nabokov’s works is essentially Christian, closer to Tolstoy’s than to Nietzsche’s. Other essays bring light to some dark corners of Nabokov’s fiction and criticism: Julian Connolly’s fair and precise account of Nabokov’s misreading of Dostoevsky, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s encyclopedic tabulation of the jurisprudential and moral moments of Nabokov’s plots, David Rampton’s reliable explanation of Nabokov’s puzzlingly low opinion of his first two novels, and Jacqueline Hamrit’s theoretically nuanced essay on love. But like many conference volumes, this one suffers from the usual weaknesses: limited historical perspective, foggy unifying framework, repetition, underdefinition of key terms, and some unhappy editing. And while the weaknesses do detract, the book is still a welcome addition to any Nabokovian’s library. Editors Sweeney and Rodgers see the interest in Nabokov and morality as beginning in earnest only in the last two decades of the twentieth century. It is far safer to say that it began closer to the 1930s when Nabokov carried a decade-long feud with certain émigré critics over their conviction that his work lacked “religious insight” and “moral preoccupation.” Without that feud we would not have “Lips to Lips,” “Vassily Shishkov,“ and a large chunk of The Gift. Even though Georgy Adamovich declared in © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
[email protected]
2 ALH Online Review, Series XI
1934 that “a moral criterion is inapplicable” to Nabokov’s writing, there has been no shortage of attention to Nabokov and morality despite his public protest that he was not interested in moral bookkeeping. The editors neglect to take into account Nabokov own ex cathedra persona (that was neither quiet nor especially consistent on this topic) as well as the difference between Nabokov’s ex cathedra voice and his private correspondence. As a result, the essays in this volume not only risk repetition but also reflect some of that inconsistency and limited historical purview. Nabokov’s inconsistency may or may not have been staged. For example, in late 1940s he made pity a fundamental constituent of art: “Beauty plus pity . . . is the closest we can get to a definition of art.” Following the publication of Lolita, Nabokov kept the pity, added kindness, and stepped up the archness with public claims such as “Lolita has no moral in tow” and private ones that Lolita is a “moral book”/”highly moral affair.” In 1959, as if he had forgotten his definition of art, he would assert that literature of a high order “is of course not concerned with pitying the underdog or cursing the upperdog.” By 1962 he insisted that he had been roundly misread and was just “a mild old gentleman who loathes cruelty”; by 1971 Nabokov was predicting, and possibly asking for, a reappraiser who would reinterpret him as a “rigid moralist.” Although Barabtarlo, Brian Boyd, Galya Diment, Priscilla Meyer, Eric Naiman, Ellen Pifer, David Rampton, and Michael Wood among others have offered thought-provoking discussions of Nabokov and morality while treating other topics, de la Durantaye’s Style is Matter (2007) is concerned primarily with style as morality, and the editors are to be thanked for including an excerpt from it. Four other discussions not anchored in Nabokov’s self-descriptions or authorized solely by Nabokov’s proffered readings of his own works have become milestones of Nabokov studies, and one wishes they were reprinted here as well once the editors decided to include previously published work. The first is Nabokov’s late 40s lecture on Ana Karenin—informing both Barabtarlo’s and de la Durantaye’s contributions—in which he demonstrates the impossibility of separating Tolstoy the moralist from Tolstoy the artist. Indeed, Tolstoy is no relativist of the bland agree-to-disagree variety but someone interested in “the eternal demands of morality” whose “real moral point” is that “love cannot be exclusively carnal because then it is egotistic, and being egotistic it destroys instead of creating.” Nabokov, moreover, makes it clear that Tolstoy’s “real moral point” cannot be made except through the artistic clarity and extraordinary imagery of his style. Also, for Nabokov, the eternal demands of morality point to some self-evident first principles regarding moral treatment of others. Morality, it turns out, is always about others. Though he does not bother to list those principles, he seems to have put them to good use in devising Lolita as a “highly moral affair.”
ALH Online Review, Series XI 3
The other three essays include Lionel Trilling’s 1958 provocatively confessional piece on the ways aesthetic pleasure distracts Lolita’s readers into condoning the violation of a child, Richard Rorty’s 1989 discussion of cruelty in Nabokov’s fiction, and Leona Toker’s splendid 1994 response to Rorty’s political appropriation of Nabokov. Because these essays are very clear in their terminology, method, and conclusions, and because many contributors refer to them without really coming to terms with them, they are sorely missed especially were one to ask “What exactly is the question mentioned in this book’s title?” The editors advance the case that Nabokov stages his fictions as if they were morality plays and leaves his readers to define morality individually so long as those definitions begin in one’s awareness of one’s own moral position. Here the editors’ case is considerably weakened by Nabokov’s frequent public resistance to having his works read as allegories and by the lack of open-endedness among the extant morality plays. Furthermore, the editors hinted-at Nietzschean alternative requires, as does Nietzsche in Daybreak, that moral truths be illusions and “fantasies based on physiological process unknown to us.” Awareness of one’s moral position as an illusion seems singularly inapplicable to Nabokov’s work. Since the warrant for recommended moral readings of Nabokov seems to originate in Nietzsche, we should turn to Rodgers’s invocation of a Nietzschean subtext for “The Vane Sisters.” Rodgers reads the story as Nabokov’s confrontation with his resisting readers in a will-to-power move securing for him mastery in the master-slave dialectic. What Rodgers sees as will to power, Tom Whalen sees as Nabokov’s “immense generosity” and Barabtarlo as a partnership, and one cannot help feeling that here an opportunity for productive dialogue within the volume has been missed. I should add that any Nietzschean reading of “The Vane Sisters” loses sight of two important points. His behavior around abused horses notwithstanding, Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spake Zarathustra has little patience with pity, while pity forms one of the planks of the platform on which Nabokov most frequently judged his own art and that of others. One easy response to this objection is to treat Nabokovian pity as a form of selfglorification at the expense of the pitied, but there is no such effort in this volume for any of the 14 times pity is discussed. It would also have been good to point out that the reader on whom Nabokov sought to exercise his will to power, New Yorker editor Katharine White, refused to get caught in the web of the story’s style or to see style as matter. In rejecting the story, she suggestively dismissed its plot, characterization, and narrative point of view while giving Nabokov some credit for style: “we did not think these Vane girls worthy of their web.” Nabokov not only had to confess privately his disappointment over feeling unloved but also, first with resentment and then with resignation, had to confirm her judgment by explaining the “trick” of the story each time it was published. Despite the incompatibility of
4 ALH Online Review, Series XI
Nabokov’s and Nietzsche’s notions of pity and will to power, Rodgers and Sweeney deserve praise for a valiant first try at this recalcitrant and complex subject.
