Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of ‘The Real Life of Sebastian Knight‘ by Meyer Priscilla (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 565 study opens up a new area of Gulag research and adds considerably to our knowledge of the literature of the Soviet labour camps. UCL SSEES Sarah J. Young Meyer, Priscilla. Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of ‘The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2018. x + 188 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95 (paperback). When you think of indeterminacy and ambiguous authorship in Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, Pale Fire is usually the first title that comes to mind, but we also know that there are precedents. In Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of ‘The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’, Priscilla Meyer’s analysis spirals outward from Nabokov’s first novel in English to show how it can assist our interpretation of his later novels. The conventional response to the complexity of structure and narrative authorship in much of Nabokov’s work has been to undertake an exercise in solving riddles. Instead, as Meyer demonstrates, this complexity is carefully set to foreground the ‘unattainability of reality’ (p. 131). This is why Nabokov’s indeterminacy differs so much from the so-called postmodern notion with which, after Pale Fire, it has often been associated, for Nabokov’s personal take on indeterminacy is linked to his experience of loss as an exile. The writing of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Meyer argues, dramatizes this loss as Nabokov has to relinquish his language and culture and appropriate new canons and techniques to develop his own means of survival through art. The tripartite and progressive structure of Meyer’s book relies on what she identifies as ‘three pairs of parallel binaries’ that Nabokov incorporates into his texts only to subvert them: art and reality; Russian and English; life and death. In each section, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is discussed through the prism of Nabokov’s work — Despair, Lolita, Pale Fire, ‘The Vane Sisters’— or the work of other writers — Virginia Woolf, Tom Stoppard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James — which, relying on Kiril Taranovsky’s definition, Meyer calls ‘subtexts’ (p. 15). Meyer’s method relies on her ability to develop extremely rich dialogues between The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and his other works (most notably Despair, Lolita and Pale Fire) from which she retraces Nabokov’s maturing development of his favourite concerns: art and life, immortality and the possibility of an afterlife. The parallel analysis of Despair and Sebastian Knight is the subject of the first chapter, entitled ‘Mirrored Worlds’, in part one (‘Art/Reality’). Through a SEER, 98, 3, JULY 2020 566 detailed analysis of the motifs both novels share, Meyer contrasts the figure of the author and the narrators they develop. While Hermann’s materialism and flawed relation to art precipitate his failure, Sebastian’s idealism enables him to transcend loss and nostalgia. Meyer shows the novels as ‘paired’, Sebastian Knight reading as a positive variant of Despair on art and immortality and ‘the unknowability of what comes after this life’ (p. 35). A second section of this chapter examines Tom Stoppard’s dramatization of The Prismatic Bezel in The Real Inspector Hound to enlighten further the sense of indeterminacy in Nabokov’s novel as viewed from the perspective of this English playwright. Part two, ‘Russian/Anglophone’, focuses on the turning point in Nabokov’s career and the progressive creation of a new set of Anglo-American referents that would inform his later works. In line with Marijeta Bozovic’s contention that Nabokov invented a new literary canon (Nabokov’s Canon: From ‘Onegin’ to ‘Ada’, Evanston, IL, 2016), Meyer argues that Nabokov not only substituted Russian and European settings in his English fiction, but also alluded ‘by quotation and plot parallels to English and American writers to create his own English medium’ (p. 47). In chapter two, ‘British Subtexts’, she first draws a set of very precise connections between Sebastian Knight and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass that foreground the diverse ontological layers of authorial responsibility in Nabokov’s novel. With a leap forward to European modernism and a focus on Virginia Woolf, a writer rarely acknowledged as a subtext in...