Nabokov's Satire
Roger Boylen's essay in Boston Review, which, like one of Nabokov's "blues," must now flutter off to find a new branch of distribution, never really surpasses his marvelous opening paragraph. Not that it has to:
When I was a boy in Geneva, sometime in the 1960s, a schoolmate of mine belonged to a society of junior lepidopterists. A couple of times a year, under the guidance of mature butterfly experts, he and his fellow enthusiasts went off to capture papillons in the alpine meadows above Montreux, at the opposite end of Lake Geneva. On one such expedition the guide was a stout, bald Russian gentleman in shorts and a parka who, despite being in his mid-60s, bounded ahead of the pack, brandishing his net and firing off exhortations and butterfly lore in accented but fluent English and French. When the hunt was over, he abruptly took his leave with a cheery “Au revoir, tout le monde.” His name I heard for the first time as, approximately, Monsieur Nabucco. He was, said my friend, one of the world’s leading experts on butterflies. He was also, he added in awe, the author of a really dirty book.
The rest are gosh-wow reflections on the art of writing as practiced by a Russian genius, who may have thought his stuff was "pat-ball" to Joyce's "champion game," but was nevertheless more pleasurable to read than the Irish dean of modernism. If Finnegan's Wake is daunting for the quadruple entendres of its every sentence, then consider Nabokov's simple-packaged gifts, what I call his easter eggs, or sly puns and allusions buried throughout his novels. For these treats alone, which you rarely catch the first time, do Nabokov's books bear re-reading.
One example from Lolita: "Is it because there is always delight in the semi-translucent mystery, the flowing charshaf through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling." Here an otherwise facile play with adjectives is given great power by the fact that the narrator of this scandalous book is a monster in love. Humbert Humbert would have the words melt in his mouth to form rivulets leading back to his dolorous and hazy Dolores Haze.
Though Nabokov's humor, especially in Lolita, could be just as easily aimed at himself: "I deplored the Mann Act as heading itself to a dreadful pun, the revenge that the Gods of Semantics take against tight-zippered Philistines."
Boylen's major point is that the author's preferred style was parody, not satire; quoting the old man himself: “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” Maybe so. But just Nabokov's abiding hatred of Freud -- that "Viennese witchdoctor" -- led him to render some of the most thrilling couch-trips in 20th century fiction, his hot disdain of the social novel or "message" writing was also, on occasion, a protest too many. Look at how well Nabokov captures the paranoia and bigotry of the First World War in Speak Memory, his memoir:
I next recall our sitting on our mother's bed, holding those lumpy stockings and doing our best to give the performance she has wanted to see; but we had so messed up the wrappings, so amateurish were our renderings of enthusiastic surprise (I can see my brother casting his eyes upward and exclaiming, in imitation of our new French governess, 'Ah, que c'est beau!'), that after observing us for a moment, our audience burst into tears. A decade passed. World War One started. A crowd of patriots and my uncle Ruke stoned the German Embassy. Peterburg was sunk to Petrograd again all rules of nomenclatorial priority. Beethoven turned out to be Dutch. The newsreels showed photogenic explosions, the spam of a cannon, Poincare in his leathern leggins, bleak puddles, the poor little Tsarevich in Circassian uniform with dagger and cartridges, his tall sisters so dowdily dressed, long railway trains crammed with troops.
"Russians beat Prussians" was the saying in the trenches of Stalingrad. But Nabokov loathed the kind of petty-mindedness that led to war and historical crisis. In The Gift, his best native language novel, he does satirize (because parody is too light a word) great Russian chauvinism as it was directed against Germans:
The Russian conviction that the German is in small numbers vulgar and in large numbers -- unbearably vulgar was, he knew, a conviction unworthy of an artist; but nonetheless he was seized with a trembling, and only the gloomy conductor with hunted eyes and a plaster on his finger, eternally and painfully seeking equilibrium and room to pass amidst the convulsive jolts of the car and the cattle-like crowding of standing passengers, seemed outwardly, if not a human being, then at least a poor relation to a human being. At the second stop a lean man in a short coat with a fox-fur collar, wearing a green hat and frayed spats, sat down in front of Fyodor. In settling down he bumped him with his knee and with the corner of a fat briefcase with a leather handle, and this trivial thing turned his irritation into a kind of pure fury, so that, staring fixedly at the sitter, reading his features, he instantly concentrated on his all his sinful hatred (for this poor, pitiful, expiring nation) and knew precisely why he hated him: for that low forehead, for those pale eyes; for Vollmilch and Extrastark, implying the lawful existence of the diluted and the artificial; for the Punchinello-like system of gestures (threatening children not as we do--with an upright finger, a standing reminder of Divine Judgment--but with a horizontal digit imitation a waving stick); for a love of fences, rows, mediocrity; for the cult of the office; for the fact that if you listen to his inner voice (or to any conversation on the street) you will inevitably hear figures, money; for the lavatory humor and crude laughter; for the fatness of the backsides of both sexes, even if the rest of the subject is not fat; for the lack of fastidiousness; for the visibility of cleanliness--the gleam of saucepan bottoms in the kitchen and the barbaric filth of the bathrooms; for the weakness for dirty little tricks, for taking pains with dirty tricks, for the abominable object stuck carefully on the railings of the public gardens; for someone else's live cat, pierced through with wire as revenge on a neighbor, and the wire cleverly twisted at one end; for cruelty in everything, self-satisfied, taken from granted; for the unexpected, rapturous helpfulness with which five passersby help you to pick up some dropped farthings; for.... Thus he threaded the points of his biased indictment, looking at the man who sat opposite him--until the latter took a copy of Vasiliev's newspaper from his pocket and coughed unconcernedly with a Russian intonation.
If that doesn't teach you a "lesson," I don't know what does.
For a White emigre living in Berlin in the 1920's, Nabokov evidenced an acute ear for every clanging syllable of Russian anti-Semitism, which he had a personal stake in combating since his beloved wife Vera was Jewish. Here is Fyodor, again in The Gift, describing the fat and venomous stepfather of his girlfriend Zina:
[In] the realm of philosophy he had studied the protocols of the Sages of Zion. He could discuss these two books for hours and it seemed that he had read nothing else in his life. He was generous with stories of judicial practice in the provinces and with Jewish anecdotes. Instead of "we had some champagne and set out" he expressed himself as follows: "We cracked a bottle of fizz--and hup." ..."My better half," he said on another occasion, "was for twenty years the wife of a kike and got mixed up with a whole rabble of Jew in-laws. I had to expend quite a bit of effort to get rid of that stink. Zina [he alternately called his stepdaughter either this or Aida, depending on his mood], thank God, doesn't have anything specific--you should see her cousin, one of these fat little brunettes, you know, with a fuzzy upper lip. In fact, it has occurred to me that my Marianna, when she was Madam Mertz, might have had other interests--one can't help being drawn to on'e sown people, you know. Let her tell you herself how she suffocated in that atmosphere, what relatives she acquired--oh, my Gott--all gabbling at table and she puring out the tea. And to think that her mother was a lady-in-waiting of the Empress and that she herself had gone to the Smolny School for young ladies--and then she went and married a yid--to this very day she can't explain how it happened: he was right, she says, and she was stupid, they met in Nice, she eloped to Rome with him--in the open air, you know, it all looked different--well, but when afterwards the little clan closed upon her, she saw she was stuck."
