Introduction: "House Rules"—Reading with Authorial Instructions

Abstract

Introduction:"House Rules"—Reading with Authorial Instructions Tatyana Gershkovich (bio) "The novels we know best have an architecture," writes Zadie Smith in an essay on reading (43). "Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, etcetera. It's a fortunate rereader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime" (42). Despite having their "own ideas of the floor plan," however, Smith reminds readers that they are only tenants, not landlords, let alone architects. Readers fashion a "wonderful way of living in" a novel, but they must still abide by "the house rules […] the author's peculiar terms" (Smith 43, 57). This was not always Smith's view; she describes her way of reading as evolving over time. Like many modern readers, Smith has tried to navigate two contradictory impulses. The first is to embrace linguistic skepticism and to accept—even to revel in—the multiple meanings it is possible to find in texts when they are unmoored from an authorial anchor. The second is to grieve that loss of a shared textual center and to search for ways to restore it. For Smith, the first impulse is personified by Roland Barthes, the second by Vladimir Nabokov. As a college student she thrilled to Barthes' brash disregard for the supposedly dubious project of pinning down the meaning of a text. Barthes declared that the "unity of the text is not in its origin, but its destination"—not in the writer, but in the reader (Barthes 129). And Smith relished her readerly prerogative to "inscribe dusty old novels into [her] own interests and [End Page 111] concerns" (Smith 51). In hindsight, though, she realizes that reading this way made her "feel lonely," for it meant abandoning one's faith in writing "as an intentional, directional act, an expression of an individual consciousness" (57, 44). This faith is something she feels the need to retain. Barthes's suspicion of the text—of its monopoly on its own meaning—was intended to enrich our reading. But it took something away, too: it robbed us of the pleasurable sense that in reading we come to know the mind of another person. Perhaps it stands to reason that as Smith became a writer herself, she turned from Barthes to Nabokov. Few authors have felt as keenly as Nabokov the pathos of our shattered faith in the communicative function of language; fewer still have tried so hard to restore that faith for readers. Charles Kinbote, the mad commentator of Nabokov's Pale Fire, wonders with horror: "What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?" (289). In a way, that is just what happens to him: he loses faith in a writer's capacity to make himself known to a reader. But Nabokov himself never loses that faith, nor does he relegate his readers to a world without it. By haunting his texts, never letting the reader forget his presence, he insists on the communicative capacity of literature—and on his ownership rights to the meaning of his work. He is always reminding us (as Smith puts it) that "the only perfect tenant of the house that Nabokov built is Nabokov" (Smith 53). Barthes pronounced the death of the author, but "Nabokov refused to lie down and die" (46). Many readers experience his authorial presence as overbearing, even tyrannical. But Smith delights in it, in trying to replicate Nabokov's way of dwelling in his works. Though the modern reader knows she can never truly grasp the mind of the author, Nabokov's fictions convince her that if she reads according to his rules, she can approximate this knowledge "by degrees" (48). Nabokov's authorial instructions enable Smith to "make a connection with a consciousness other than my own" (57). Of course, not all authors are intent on dictating the rules of the house. Some are long-absent proprietors, happy to give us the run of the place. Others are tyrants and despots, meddlers and micromanagers, who like Kinbote's landlord have "taken stupendous pains to write out on slips of paper recommendations...