Vladimir Nabokov: The Structure of Literary Desire by David Packman (review)

Abstract

Studies in American Fiction113 various narrators in the telling of the tale, meaning hinges upon somehow coming to the "fact" of Bon's being "Negro," when ironically he is the one character the farthest removed (by all narrative accounts) from "Negro" and "nigger" as the novel and society have presented them (p. 218). In addition to the new perspectives this study brings to Faulkner's fiction, it also frees that fiction from the pervasive harangue about Faulkner and race relations. Its emphasis is on "the artistic weight Faulkner places on the Negro in his fictional world" (p. 247), and its achievement is considerable. Michigan State UniversityLinda W. Wagner Packman, David. Vladimir Nabokov: The Structure ofLiterary Desire. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1982. 122 pp. Cloth: $16.00. In the late sixties and early seventies, Nabokov criticism was dominated by gameplayers, critics who delighted in Nabokov's artifice. In the late seventies and early eighties, it has been dominatedby humanists, critics who delight in Nabokov's humanity. The time is now ripe for a synthesis, something that David Packman could have provided, something that I hoped for afterseeingtheconjunction of"structure" and "desire" in his subtitle. But unfortunately Packman does not provide this synthesis. He builds on the work of the earliest Nabokov critics, embellishing it with insights afforded by fashionable French structuralists and others, but he ignores the work ofthe most recent critics (indeed, his bibliography includes only three works published after 1977). Packman admirably extends the work of the early critics, in this slim volume devoted toLolita, Pale Fire, andAda, yet I must confess—to use some ofhis terminology —to a desire for what is absent. Packman extends the work ofcritics likeJulia Bader, in Crystal Land (1972), by pointing out how, despite her proclaimed allegiance to art over "realism," she has been trapped by "realistic" expectations. He points out that attempts to find a primary author in Pale Fire— Shade or Kinbote—imply that character inheres in "reality"; stress on an internal framing effacesthe book'sexternal frame. Packman is useful too in sometimes offering a strikinginsight. He argues thatHumbert'sprogress from lustto loveisreflectedin a progress from snapshots to filmic fantasies, for "love demands not the fetish object, the fragmented, frozen image, but rather the narrative of the body, the classical trajectory Humbert evokes"(p. 50). In general, Packman wants the reader to see how Nabokov acknowledges the fictiveness offiction, how Nabokovuses fictiontoexplorereality. ThusPackmancitesTzvetanTodorov, who finds two worlds in a literary text: "The world of the characters and the world of the narrator-reader couple" (p. 46). Packman is instructing the naive reader how to read Nabokov , the reader who prefers being swept up by the story, by "the world of the characters," a reader who perhaps fosters Packman's sometimes simplistic, sometimes repetitious style. He urgesinsteadreceptiveness tothe second world: to the textitselfand theway itinvitesreading. He points out how the reader constructs the author from the text, how the text exists in an intertextual network, how Humbert's cryptogrammic paper chase displaces his quest for the nymphet and reproduces the reader's own desire for meaning, how the index oíPale Fire subvertslinearitybyinvokingsimultaneity , howtheincestthemeinAdareflectsthe book'sliterary narcissism. 114Reviews But Packman himself fails to follow Todorov, for Packman ignores the first of Todorov's worlds: the world of the characters. Packman glories in pacmanship; he implies that Nabokov 's works are only games (serious though thosegames may be), that the works are only selfreflexive . He ignores the humanity ofthe characters and their moral vision, so well delineated by Ellen Pifer in Nabokov and the Novel ( 1980). His discussion of Pale Fire, for instance, focuses on Gradus' gradual approach and materialization and Nabokov's play with frames— there, certainly, and important—but he ignores Kinbote's anguished loneliness and Shade's robust earthiness. He misses too Lohta's humanity. He treats Lolita's body as only a literary text, as only an object of literary desire. Yet even Humbert progresses beyond the reification of Lolita, eventually acknowledging his own monstrosity in ignoring her needs, eventually acknowledging her humanity. Packman, however, does not. He is right to point out that Nabokov is self-reflexive but wrong to imply that that is all there is...