Nabokov and the Question of Morality

Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction

Michael Rodgers, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Michael Rodgers, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137596666
• eBook ISBN: 9781137592217
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura general

The first collection to address the vexing issue of Nabokov's moral stances, this book argues that he designed his novels and stories as open-ended ethical problems for readers to confront. In a dozen new essays, international Nabokov scholars tackle those problems directly while addressing such questions as whether Nabokov was a bad reader, how he defined evil, if he believed in God, and how he constructed fictional works that led readers to become aware of their own moral positions. In order to elucidate his engagement with aesthetics, metaphysics, and ethics, Nabokov and the Question of Morality explores specific concepts in the volume's four sections: "Responsible Reading," "Good and Evil," "Agency and Altruism," and "The Ethics of Representation." By bringing together fresh insights from leading Nabokovians and emerging scholars, this book establishes new interdisciplinary contexts for Nabokov studies and generates lively readings of works from his entire career.

© The Author(s) 2016

Michael Rodgers and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (eds.)Nabokov and the Question of Morality10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Nabokov’s Morality Play

Michael Rodgers¹ and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney²

(1)

English Studies, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

(2)

English Department, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

End Abstract

“Morality play” may seem like an odd way to describe Nabokov’s oeuvre. It immediately evokes the kind of allegorical drama, popular in the late medieval period, in which assorted personifications of vice and virtue interact with a figure such as Everyman so as to teach a didactic lesson. Nabokov, of course, is neither allegorical nor didactic. He detested lessons and symbols and simplifications, anything that subordinates individual experience to general rules. Even so, this phrase strikes us as fitting because Nabokov’s writing is both profoundly playful and inherently moral.

Critics have long noted his delight in patterns, puzzles, and performances, while recent books such as Thomas Karshan’s Nabokov and the Art of Play (2011) or Siggy Frank’s Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination (2012) examine that affinity for plays and playing even more fully. Unfortunately, some of Nabokov’s readers have been slower to comprehend the moral aspects of his fiction. (By moral, we mean those aspects relating to ethical judgments about “right” or “wrong” behavior.) His novel Lolita, in particular, has been labeled as “amoral, moral, or immoral art,” in Eric Lemay’s phrase, ever since its 1955 publication; occasionally, it has been banned outright by public libraries or government ministries. In early 2013, a group of self-appointed censors in Russia, condemning it as “amoral,” first tried to suppress a stage adaptation with anonymous threats, then assaulted the producer, and finally vandalized St. Petersburg’s Nabokov Museum in order to express their outrage against the author.¹ And yet, despite occasional controversy over Lolita’s moral import, and despite lingering impressions of Nabokov as interested only in art for art’s sake, many scholars have explored the ethical and spiritual dimensions of not only this novel but his entire body of work.

Nabokov and the Question of Morality is the first collection to gather, evaluate, and compare these attempts to establish what Leland de la Durantaye calls “the moral art of Vladimir Nabokov.”² It was inspired by a symposium on “Nabokov and Morality,” organized by Michael Rodgers at the University of Strathclyde in 2011, that featured seven of the scholars whose work is represented here. The volume’s title sums up our sense that Nabokov’s fiction continually poses difficult, mischievous, serious, and lively questions about both morality and ethical behavior. Its subtitle—Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction—focuses more narrowly on issues relating to his definition of art; his speculations about other realms of being; and the implications of his characters’ choices and fates. Admittedly, these three categories are interconnected. Vladimir Alexandrov points out that Nabokov’s “metaphysics are inseparable from his ethics and his aesthetics; indeed, all three are best understood as names for a single continuum of beliefs” (“Otherworld” 568). The artistic credo expressed in Nabokov’s well-known essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita”—that literary works only exist for him to the extent that they provide “a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” (314–315)—clearly reflects such interdependence.³

Even though the three concepts remain closely linked, this volume establishes subtle distinctions among them.⁴ Nabokov and the Question of Morality includes detailed investigations of matters such as just or unjust reading; religious imagery; monomania; ethical dilemmas; love and sacrifice; crime and punishment; and representations of sex, violence, or moral emptiness in his work. In exploring these topics, the collection offers previously unpublished chapters by some of the world’s leading Nabokov scholars on the full scope of his literary career—from his earliest short stories, plays, and poems to his most important novels in Russian and English (with some chapters focused solely on The Gift, Lolita, or Pale Fire), as well as his other books. It also examines Nabokov’s writing in the context of other thinkers—Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Shklovsky, Wittgenstein, Lacan, and Derrida—as well as other disciplines such as anthropology, neuroscience, jurisprudence, religion, and philosophy (including, within this last category, moral sense theory, poststructuralism, and action theory).

These widely different approaches offer new insights into Nabokov’s fiction, suggesting that morality itself is perpetually “in play,” allowing for a range of movement as well as a number of options. Each story or novel juggles a series of philosophical, ethical, and spiritual possibilities. We might even say that Nabokov’s fiction does indeed stage a kind of morality play, if by that we mean a highly stylized performance which provokes profound moral questions. He is always careful, however, to leave such questions unanswered.

Enactments of Nabokov and Morality

Up until the last two decades of the twentieth century, the terms Nabokov and morality seemed anathema to one another. From the very beginning of his career as a Russian émigré writer in Europe, Nabokov was seen as abandoning the “moralizing and didacticism” of his predecessors (Perelshin, qtd. in Dolinin 56), while instead emphasizing aesthetic splendor, displaying an apparently indifferent (some might even say cruel) attitude toward his characters’ fates, and utterly refusing to engage with social or political themes. For many years, it seemed a matter of simple commonsense—which was one of his least favorite words, we should remember (LL 372)—that Vladimir Nabokov was uninterested in moral questions. Even after he started a second career as a writer in English, immigrated to the USA, published Lolita, and attained a wide audience, commercial success, and international acclaim, the first books about his work still stressed its artfulness, as their very titles indicate: Escape into Aesthetics; Nabokov: His Life in Art; Nabokov’s Deceptive World; and Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov’s English Novels.⁵ One early review of his fiction even proclaimed that “as for the moral and humane dimensions—‘profundities,’ compassions, inner developments—it simply does not have them” (Adams 423).

With the publication of Ellen Pifer’s Nabokov and the Novel in 1980, however, his work was for the first time explicitly considered in a moral context, rather than condemned for its apparent indifference to such matters. Questioning the calcifying view of Nabokov as a mere aesthete, Pifer established that his fiction reveals an “abiding interest in human beings, not only as artists and dreamers, but as ethical beings subject to moral law and sanction” (iii–iv). Since then, a number of other scholars have explored his humanism as well as his representation of ethical issues. In a critical study of the Russian and English fiction, David Rampton proposed in 1984 that Nabokov’s works emphasize content as much as form, invoking the figure of “the moral Nabokov” for the first time (30). In one of the earliest books devoted to a single work, Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness, Brian Boyd argued in 1985 that this novel, which some readers considered self-indulgent, offered “a demanding critique of the moral responsibilities of consciousness” (12). A few years later, in Nabokov and the Mystery of Literary Structure (1989), Leona Toker traced the distinctive “combination of formal refinement and poignant humanism” in many of his books (ix). The author’s attitude toward the terrible suffering endured by his characters, in particular, has been a subject of debate ever since philosopher Richard Rorty published, also in 1989, a chapter on Nabokov and cruelty in his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.⁶

During this same period, the notion of a spiritual Nabokov began to appear. In 1979, two years after Nabokov’s death, his widow remarked in her introduction to a slender posthumous edition of his Russian poems that “potustoronnost’,” or the hereafter, was a pervasive theme in his work which had been little noticed by critics (3–4). Over the next few decades, several scholars—particularly Vladimir Alexandrov, in Nabokov’s Otherworld (1991)—took Véra Nabokov’s hint and investigated this theme in detail.⁷ Consideration of the supernatural in Nabokov has led to new readings of familiar works, proposing that they embed cryptic messages from deceased characters to living ones in the form of dreams, weather, inanimate objects, or wordplay.⁸ Critics have also investigated Nabokov’s allusions to Judaism and Christianity as well as his use of various religious motifs, including demons, angels, saints, and the Garden of Eden. Such scholarship suggests that his works often contain hidden references to a transcendent moral realm.

A related strain of Nabokov criticism explores his novels’ concern with ontological and teleological mysteries, especially in terms of narrative structure. D. Barton Johnson’s Worlds in Regression (1985) offered an important early overview of Nabokov’s imaginary worlds, while Pekka Tammi’s Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics, published the same year, showed how his self-reflexive narrative devices model his cosmology. More recently, David S. Rutledge has argued, in Nabokov’s Permanent Mystery: The Expression of Metaphysics in His Work (2011), that his narrative designs evoke the ineffable and unknowable. Clearly, then, to consider Nabokov within a moral context involves joining him on a quest for things not “dreamt of in [our] philosophy” (Hamlet 1.5.166–167).

With regard to philosophy, in fact, Nabokov once asserted, in his foreword to the English translation of Invitation to a Beheading, that the only author who had influenced him was Pierre Delalande—a nineteenth-century French philosopher whom he himself invented (6–7). But even if Nabokov were sui generis, as he claimed, he must still have encountered similarities between his insights and those of other minds. Toker suggests that his fiction evokes various schools of thought without subscribing to any particular system: “Gnostical imagination, Christian symbolism, Romantic search for wholeness, Schopenhauer’s poesy, and Bergson’s vision were alternative takes on experience—visions with which Nabokov’s own intuitions had various affinities” (“Nabokov’s Worldview” 238–239). Some critics have argued that this or that philosopher did influence his thinking, if only in a negative way. During the 1980s, for example, several scholars—including Phyllis Roth in “The Man behind the Mystification” (1982) and Geoffrey Green in Nabokov and Freud (1988)—considered his vexed relationship with “the Viennese witch doctor” (Invitation 9).⁹ More recently, critics have examined his explicit or implicit dialogues with other important philosophers, including Kant, Bergson, and Sartre.

Interest in the humanist, otherworldly, metaphysical, and philosophical aspects of Nabokov’s work leads, in turn, to another topic: his political beliefs. Robert Alter published an important essay on the author and “the art of politics” as early as 1970. In 1992, Charles Nicol observed that Nabokov “had a deep political philosophy, on which he rarely acted; when he did act, it was in a highly personal manner. It was woven from two strands that seem antithetical: a profound acceptance of the views of his articulate and politically active father, and an equally profound individualism that prevented Nabokov from joining any group—especially one of a political nature” (625). Since then, several critics have explored the connections between Nabokov’s political beliefs and personal relationships,¹⁰ while others discuss his fiction in the context of its resistance to totalitarianism.¹¹

Today, some thirty years after Pifer published Nabokov and the Novel, it may no longer seem startling to mention such moral problems in connection with his fiction. Indeed, two subsequent books—Michael Wood’s The Magician...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Nabokov’s Morality Play
• 1. Responsible Reading
• 2. Good and Evil
• 3. Agency and Altruism
• 4. The Ethics of Representation
• Backmatter