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Frontières, marges et confins

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Corinne Alexandre-Garner

Voix des confins, marges de l’écriture

Vladimir Nabokov : Cosmic Synchronization and the Crossing of Artistic Borders

Paul D. Morris

Texte intégral

1The richly evocative title and subject matter of the conference which initiated this brief article was “Borderlines and Borderlands.” And as an opening claim, I will invoke direct reference to this theme baldly to state that there are few writers whose artistic identity was more defined, whose career more marked, by literal and figurative border-crossing than that of Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov was certainly one of the most transgressive writers of the twentieth-century. As an exile, he crossed various national and political borders, moving from pre-revolutionary Russia to Germany, thence, briefly, to France before proceeding to the United States and finally to Switzerland. Linguistically, Nabokov undertook in his artistry the exceptionally difficult passage from Russian to English, with a brief interlude in French, to achieve artistic brilliance in two language traditions. As a writer, Nabokov crossed generic borders to practice all of the major fictional forms within the tripartite division of poetry, drama and prose. More than excel in genres extending from the verse drama to the novel, however, Nabokov also exercised further possibilities of generic transgression in his frequent parodying of the conventions of genre. Furthermore, within the individual works of his oeuvre, in terms of form but especially content, Nabokov foregrounded themes and motifs suggestive of boundaries and their trangsgressions to tease out the rich implications of this thematic complex. And finally, for many, Nabokov crossed boundaries governing the conventions of the representable – not to mention good taste – most famously in his depiction of the love affair between Humbert Humbert and the twelve year-old Lolita of the eponymously titled novel.

  • 1 . The metaphysical quality of Nabokov’s writing is frequently the topic of – at times controversial (...)

2In the following brief discussion, however, I do not intend to focus on these forms of border-crossing which are, it seems to me, external manifestations of Nabokov’s life and works, rather than expressive of its essence. Instead, I wish to concentrate on a form of metaphysical border-crossing which I would claim is fundamental to Nabokov’s artistic identity, but which is very rarely acknowledged, much less commented upon, in Nabokov criticism.1 For much criticism, the cosmopolitan author Nabokov first canonized in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the Anglo-American literary institution was, above all, an innovator, a manipulator of language, in short the postmodernist saviour of an otherwise exhausted form of literature. Criticism intent on keen, at times almost exclusive, observations of Nabokov’s formal pyrotechnics was, and has been, astoundingly blind to a formative concept in Nabokov’s aesthetics which does not seem so easily to contribute to a reading of Nabokov as postmodern innovator. As a result, the phenomenon of “cosmic synchronicity,” as Nabokov termed it, has not duly been recognized for its formative role in constituting Nabokov’s distinctive oeuvre. I would like briefly to return to Nabokov’s central discursive account of “cosmic synchronization” and then argue for what I propose as the inter-related metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic implications of this concept within his writing. Cosmic synchronization and the crossing of an essential ontological border is, I wish to suggest, key to the understanding of Nabokov’s identity and achievement as an artist.

  • 2 . Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory : An Autobiography Revisited (New York : Vintage International, (...)

3Cosmic synchronization, the epiphanic experience of the transcendent, of the erasure of physical limitations of time and space is a frequent occurrence within the poems, drama and prose of Nabokov’s fictional universe. The wonder of consciousness is a central theme in Nabokov’s writing and most of Nabokov’s many artist-protagonists undergo an experience of cosmic synchronization in illustration of their mysterious awakening into artistic consciousness. Nabokov’s fullest account of the phenomenon, however, comes not in his fiction but in the discursive context of his autobiography Speak, Memory. 22 In chapter eleven, Nabokov recounts his own awakening into artistic creativity as an adolescent boy in his stylised portrayal of the inspiration for, and composition of, his first poem. Within Speak, Memory, the writing of this poem serves as paradigmatic illustration of a subsequent life-time of artistic creation. In the throes of inspiration, the fifteen year-old Nabokov is described experiencing for the first time cosmic synchronization, the wondrous feeling when the fabric of time is rent and the individual is dispersed throughout time and space during a mysterious moment of altered, expanded consciousness. During such moments, consciousness slips the confines of time and space as conventionally known to cross into a realm where temporal chronology and physical proximity are no longer of defining relevance. In such a state, simultaneity, rather than contiguity, governs the relationships between time and space ; the individual undergoing such an experience is strangely aware of dissolving out of one contained realm and expanding into the infinite expanses of another. This new realm of being is characterized by the ability of consciousness, now expanded, to experience all time and space simultaneously in a single instant. As befits an autobiography, Nabokov narrates this formative experience of cosmic synchronization in the first-person. Significantly, however, Nabokov does not himself codify the experience with a name and an empirical, rationalizing description, but instead turns for this elucidating function to a fictional character, Vivian Bloodmark, (an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov):

Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and a the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur – all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N. Y.) is the nucleus. (SM 218)

4Nabokov’s recourse to a fictional personage in attempting to describe what is ultimately an ineffable experience is undoubtedly indirect acknowledgement of the profound mystery of the phenomenon and his hesitancy to normalize it in fixed conceptual terms. Despite his distancing of himself from the rationalizing explanation of cosmic synchronization, Nabokov proceeds with his description of it during the process of mental composition. Struck by inspiration, the young poet Nabokov is launched into a trancelike state where another quality of consciousness on a transcendent plane is experienced. Lost in a liminal, borderline state of consciousness described as a “private mist”(SM 223), Nabokov recounts how awareness of his surroundings ceased during the writing of his poem :

When I was irrevocably committed to finish my poem or die, there came the most trancelike state of all. With hardly a twinge of surprise, I found myself, of all places, on a leathern couch in the cold, musty, little-used room that had been my grandfather’s study. On that couch I lay prone, in a kind of reptilian freeze, one arm dangling, so that my knuckles loosely touched the floral figures of the carpet. When next I came out of that trance, the greenish flora was still there, my arm was still dangling, but now I was prostrate on the edge of a rickety wharf, and the water lilies I touched were real, [...] So little did ordinary measures of existence mean in that state that I would not have been surprised to come out of its tunnel right into the park of Versailles, or the Tiergarten, or Sequoia National Forest ; [...]. (SM 223)

5The culmination of Nabokov’s initiatory experience of cosmic synchronicity and seeming proof of its physical effect on his being comes in the recitation of his poem. The final lines from this pivotal chapter from Speak, Memory recount Nabokov’s reading of his poem to his mother, who is deeply moved. More relevant to the experience of cosmic synchronization than the emotion of his mother, however, is the recognition that his essence, his ego, his identity has been momentarily altered through the exercise of the creative consciousness. After reading the poem Nabokov’s mother offers him a mirror to help him locate a smudge to be washed from his face. Looking into his eyes as reflected in the mirror, Nabokov sees not the smudge, but evidence that his being had been dispersed :

Presently I finished reciting and looked up at her. She was smiling ecstatically through the tears that streamed down her face. “How wonderful, how beautiful,” she said, and with the tenderness in her smile still growing, she passed me a hand mirror so that I might see the smear of blood on my cheek-bone where at some indeterminable time I had crushed a gorged mosquito by the unconscious act of propping my cheek on my fist. But I saw more than that. Looking into my own eyes, I had the shocking sensation of finding the mere dregs of my usual self, odds and ends of an evaporated identity which it took my reason quite an effort to gather again in the glass. (SM 227 ; emphasis added)

  • 3 . James, William. The Varieties of Religions Experience (New York : Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004), (...)
  • 4 . Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism : Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (London : (...)

6What the mature Nabokov termed cosmic synchronization immediately recalls the phenomenon “cosmic consciousness” discussed in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.3 As a creative artist, Nabokov’s reference to cosmic synchronization in his autobiography seems to place him in the company of a long line of poets, though especially the Romantics, who recorded experience of what Abrams termed a “revelatory and luminous Moment.”4 Although the “Moment” of cosmic synchronization is essential to Nabokov’s poetics, this revelatory experience is not of central importance in and of itself, but for what it assumes, what intuited, irrational assumptions it entails for the poet-author and his art. Cosmic synchronization has – I would claim – obvious ramifications for understanding of the metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic dimension of Nabokov’s writing.

7In metaphysical terms, what Nabokov described as “cosmic synchronization” is predicated upon the existence of another transcendent sphere of being which is crossed-over into during liminal moments of consciousness. Within Nabokov criticism, scholarship has identified fictional manifestation of this transcendent realm in Nabokov’s repeated return to the theme of “potustoronnost’” or “the otherworld.” The theme of the “otherworld” was first identified by Véra Nabokov as “Nabokov’s main theme” in an often quoted passage from the preface to her husband’s final, posthumously published volume of poetry :

  • 5 . Nabokov, Vladimir. Sitiki (Ann Arbor : Ardis, 1979), 3.

[...] I would like to direct the reader’s attention to Nabokov’s main theme. It has never, it appears to me, been remarked upon by anyone, although, incidentally, it pervades everything that he wrote ; like a water mark, it symbolizes his entire oeuvre. I am speaking of the “otherworld” as he himself called it in his final poem : “Being in Love.”5

8In the wake of Véra Nabokov’s revelations, scholarship, led by figures such as Don Barton Johnson and Vladimir Alexandrov, has since undertaken a significant re-assessment of Nabokov’s writing identifying, above-all, a two-world cosmology in Nabokov’s writing which is evidenced by such formal and thematic features as “mirroring,” “doubling,” “inversion,” “self-reflectiveness,” “pattern,” “coincidence,” “involution,” as well as the complex play of references between tut and tam, or, in English, “here” and “there” and, finally, fiction which seems to imply the extension of consciousness after death.

9Implicated in the metaphysics of Nabokov’s discussion of cosmic synchronization is also an ethical dimension. For Nabokov, in terms of metaphysics and ethics, the “otherworld” represented an infinite realm of order and meaning which could not easily be accessed or apprehended from the profane world but which nonetheless existed and which offered humans the assurance of a transcendent, beneficent order of meaning. Nabokov’s confidence in the essential “goodness” of the world, as he expressed in his article “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” arose out of the radical alterity and seeming irrationality of a mysterious, transcendent sphere. Tangible physical, albeit non-rational, testimony to the beneficence and perfection of the otherworld is witnessed in the feeling of bliss which attends experience of the aesthetic. The achievement of artistic perfection, a perfection which approximates the wholeness and completion of the otherworld, occasions a sensation of rapture or, what Nabokov called in Russian, vostorg. More explicit expression of the ethical dimensions of cosmic synchronization is found, however, in Nabokov’s representation of love. Like participation in the perfection of artistic creation, the expression of love occasions a crossing-over of consciousness which is registered as an intense feeling of bliss. In the concluding chapter of Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes the intensity of his feeling of love in terms of a stretching and expansion of his consciousness against, and out of, the usual confines of space and time in precisely the conceptual vocabulary used to describe cosmic synchronization :

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love – from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter – to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpretations of time and space. [...] I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence. (SM 296-97)

10Such a feeling of love is more than an emotion ; it is a swelling of consciousness and simultaneously an indication of, and participation in, something vaster than the mortal realm of time and space. Thus, love, and the intensity of emotion attending it, can effect a crossing-over into another realm of experience beyond the physical world.

11The correspondence between cosmic synchronization and the aesthetic dimensions of Nabokov’s writing are most immediately apparent in his various descriptions of inspiration. For the ultimate experience of consciousness – the breaking out of time and space – is associated with artistry, in the paradigmatic instance from Speak, Memory with the composition of a poem. Indeed, the pinnacle of consciousness this side of death is to be registered in the feeling of love or, significantly, in the rapture of artistic inspiration. In discussing the process of writing, Nabokov suggested that his works came to him from another realm where they existed in an ideal form :

  • 6 . Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions (New York : Vintage International, 1990), 69.

I am afraid to get mixed up with Plato, whom I do not care for, but I do think that in my case it is true that the entire book, before it is written, seems to be ready ideally in some other, now transparent, now dimming, dimension, and my job is to take down as much of it as I can make out and as precisely as I am humanly able to.6

  • 7 . Nabokov, Vladimir. “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” in ed. Fredson Bowers Lectures on Lit (...)
  • 8 . Nabokov, Vladimir. “Fyodor Dostoevski,” in ed. Freson Bowers Lectures on Russian Literature (New (...)

12Elsewhere, Nabokov was still more specific in his formulation of a description of inspiration which draws on the imagery of a timeless expanse of limitless space : “[...] it is the past and the present and the future [...] that come together in a sudden flash” causing a sensation which is like “having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you”.7 In formal terms, Nabokov’s care in the composition of his works is most certainly born out of a desire to have his fictional constructs offer metonymic representation of the transcendent realm from which they stem. John Shade, the poet from Pale Fire and poet closest to Nabokov in terms of his artistic identity, explicitly suggests a relatedness of form to content which extends beyond the literary text to assume cosmic dimensions. The intricately patterned symmetry of Shade’s poem “Pale Fire,” for instance, is an example from Nabokov’s fiction of how artistic form recapitulates the cosmic harmony and order of an otherworldly realm. Nabokov himself suggested that “man comes nearest to God through becoming a true creator in his own right”8 and Shade’s apprehension of the correlation between the universe of his art and life and the cosmic universe confirms the legitimacy of his metaphysical intimations. Shade’s art bears out his faith in the “fantastically planned,/Richly rhymed” nature of being :

  • 9 . Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire (New York : Vintage International, 1989), 68-69.

I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight ;
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line. (II. 970-76)9

13Whereas the formal perfection of the artistic text captures and replicates the perfection of the transcendent sphere from which art emerges, the aesthetic dimensions of Nabokov’s intimations of another realm are also to be registered in thematic terms. Nabokov’s perhaps most dominant theme is that of consciousness, and in particular artistic consciousness. In the fictional staging of this theme within his writing, Nabokov repeatedly returns to the mysteries of an ineffable crossing-over of the boundary separating the empirical world of shared reality and an ineffable beyond glimpsed in the experience of cosmic synchronicity, inspiration and love. Variations of this experience are repeatedly emphasized in Nabokov’s fiction through recourse to themes and motifs which depict both liminal psychological states – fever, delirium, dreams, passion etc. – and markers of both temporally and spatially delimited borders – dawn and dusk, sea-shores, national borders, stairways, windows, doorways etc. In either instance, whether dealing with motifs of physical transition or those concerning entrance into a modified state of consciousness, Nabokov’s imagery foregrounds the notion that the physical world inhabited by humans is but an earthly copy of still another realm of infinite, poetry-like perfection which ever surrounds us and which is to be discovered but fleetingly in art and privileged states of altered consciousness.

14As a novelist most frequently perceived as a postmodernist, Nabokov demands a reading which critically acknowledges more than his by now conventional transgressions of a postmodern aesthetic. This critical reappraisal need not contradict recognition of Nabokov’s demonstrable importance as model for the development of a postwar postmodern aesthetic, though it will complicate understanding of his writing, shifting attention from generalizing categories of classification to the specific quality of his writing itself. Nabokov’s fictional and discursive accounts of the crossing of a fundamental divide by consciousness – as illustrated in cosmic synchronization – with its implications for the metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic dimensions of his oeuvre require a more focused reading. The dimensions, the borderlines and borderlands of Nabokov’s writing have yet to be adequately explored.

Notes

1 . The metaphysical quality of Nabokov’s writing is frequently the topic of – at times controversially disputed – criticism, though the more localized subject of cosmic synchronization is more infrequently treated. The fullest discussion of cosmic synchronization is to be found in Jonathan Borden Sisson’s unpublished dissertation “Cosmic Synchronization and Other Worlds in the Work of Vladimir Nabokov,” University of Minnesota, 1979.

2 . Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory : An Autobiography Revisited (New York : Vintage International, 1989).

3 . James, William. The Varieties of Religions Experience (New York : Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004), 344-346.

4 . Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism : Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (London : Oxford University Press, 1971), 387.

5 . Nabokov, Vladimir. Sitiki (Ann Arbor : Ardis, 1979), 3.

6 . Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions (New York : Vintage International, 1990), 69.

7 . Nabokov, Vladimir. “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” in ed. Fredson Bowers Lectures on Literature (London : George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), 378.

8 . Nabokov, Vladimir. “Fyodor Dostoevski,” in ed. Freson Bowers Lectures on Russian Literature (New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1981), 106.

9 . Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire (New York : Vintage International, 1989), 68-69.

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