1Nabokov’s fondness for the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson is a matter of record: in an interview conducted in 1964 he called Bergson one of his “top favorites” during his period of European exile, and a continued source of interest (Strong Opinions, 43). Perhaps as a consequence of this confession, several critics have attempted to establish influence and/or trace correspondences between the two writers.1 Most of these links have been based on Bergson’s theories concerning time, consciousness, and evolution, but a few critics have also studied Nabokov’s fiction in relation to Bergson’s famous essay on the comic, Le Rire [Laughter] (1900), despite the fact that Nabokov, to my knowledge, made no mention, publically or privately, of having read this essay.2 Almost all of these critics find an ideological kinship with respect to Bergson’s and Nabokov’s views on laughter. I’ve also drawn parallels between the two writers in my published and unpublished work on Nabokov’s humour,3 and I’ll be discussing some of them here; nevertheless, as the title of my essay suggests, I’ll be laying much more stress on the differences that exist in their approach to this subject, differences that haven’t been emphasized enough and that mark a definite division of thought.4

2Most readers will be familiar with the basic theories set out in Bergson’s essay; still, it may be useful to summarize his main points. Bergson locates the source of laughter in “[s]omething mechanical encrusted on the living”: “the attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine” (84, 79). As to the purpose of laughter: in Bergson’s opinion it is “first and foremost a means of correction” (185), a way of humiliating these errant, mechanically-minded individuals into returning to the supposedly more fluid and flexible social fold: “it is the business of laughter to repress any separatist tendency. Its function is to convert rigidity into plasticity, to readapt the individual to the whole” (174). Bergson also posits the idea that in order to find someone or something funny we must be free of any emotional attachment and cultivate what he calls “a momentary anesthesia of the heart” (64). I’m going to return to this idea later in relation to Nabokov’s approach; for now, let’s take Bergson’s two basic theories and apply them to Nabokov’s fiction.

3When we do, we find many parallels. Nabokov’s fiction contains several characters who invite laughter in the way Bergson describes. As an obvious example, we have Franz, the most notable of many mannequins (fabricated and fleshy) in Nabokov’s second novel, King, Queen, Knave.5 By Chapter 10 of this book, Franz’s affair with Martha has begun to pale, and as a result he’s come to resemble the dummies in the department store where he works, in the sense that his life has become nothing but a series of robotic routines and repetitions. This is made clear in the following passage, where Nabokov allows us to follow Franz’s thoughts (such as they are) in a Joycean stream-of-consciousness style as Franz moves from kitchen to toilet to bedroom to train, where he takes in an ad for a brand of toothpaste:

His day ran its course automatically [...]. His thoughts were characterized by the same monotony as his actions, and their order corresponded to the order of his day. Why has he stopped the coffee? Can’t flush if the chain comes off every time. Dull blade. Piffke shaves with his collar on in the public washroom. These white shorts are not practical. Today is the ninth—no, the tenth—no, the eleventh of June. [...] Train more crowded every morning. Clean your teeth with Dentophile, every minute you will smile. They are fools who give their seats to big strong women. Clean your teeth with Dentophile, clean your minute with your smile. Out we file.
(King, Queen, Knave, 200-201)

4Franz’s stream of consciousness has turned decidedly muddy: on the evidence of this passage it’s no wonder that Hyde describes King, Queen, Knave as “heartlessly extending the possibilities of Bergson’s analysis of automatism as the basis of comedy” (44). The sense of heartlessness that Hyde highlights here (a nod, no doubt, to Bergson’s “anesthesia of the heart”) isn’t always present when Nabokov is being humorous—his humour can be as warm and as embracing as Dickens’s humour at times—but in this instance it’s entirely justified; it’s there because Nabokov feels zero compassion for Franz, and expects us to share his contempt.

5Gradus, the bungling assassin of Pale Fire, is also described in machine-like terms, and with even more contempt. Kinbote likens the killer to a “dummy” and an “automatic man” (278-279): “Mere springs and coils produced the inward movements of our clockwork man he tells us gleefully (152), in language that invites a Bergsonian reading. Gradus’s meeting with Bretwit provides a good example of this lack of flexibility. The Shadows believe that Bretwit has information on the whereabouts of King Charles, and as a pretence for meeting him they inform him that they want to pass on some letters that were written by his dead relatives. This plan is occasioned in part by the Shadows’ lack of faith in their emissary: “Suspecting that Gradus lacked the mental equipment and mimic gifts necessary for the impersonation of an enthusiastic Royalist, they suggested he had better pose as a completely apolitical commissioner” (Pale Fire, 175). Kinbote thinks that there’s little of interest in the ensuing scene because it lacks the incongruity necessary for humour: “If two secret agents belonging to rival factions meet in a battle of wits, and if one has none, the effect may be droll; it is dull if both are dolts. I defy anybody to find in the annals of plot and counterplot anything more inept and boring than the scene that occupies the rest of this conscientious note” (177). This is a perfect example of Nabokov’s habitual misdirection, because it’s one of the funniest scenes in the novel. It transpires that the letters are worthless, but Bretwit feels indebted to Gradus for bringing them and offers some form of payment. Gradus seizes his chance and asks Bretwit for the King’s whereabouts. Before divulging this information, Bretwit asks Gradus for the secret sign:

Gradus, deciding to risk it, glanced at the hand in Bretwit’s lap: unperceived by its owner, it seemed to be prompting Gradus in a manual whisper. He tried to copy what it was doing its best to convey—mere rudiments of the required sign.
“No, no,” said Bretwit with an indulgent smile for the awkward novice. “The other hand, my friend. His Majesty is left-handed, you know.”
Gradus tried again—but, like an expelled puppet, the wild little prompter had disappeared. Sheepishly contemplating his five stubby strangers, Gradus went through the motions of an incompetent and half-paralyzed shadowgrapher and finally made an uncertain V-for-Victory sign. Bretwit’s smile began to fade.
(Pale Fire, 179-180)

6One of Bergson’s remarks seems appropriate in the context of this passage: here, laughter results from “some rigidity or other applied to the mobility of life, in an awkward attempt to follow its lines and counterfeit its suppleness” (Bergson, 85). Gradus can’t counterfeit anything but a “half-paralyzed shadowgrapher”; the Shadows’ reservations were justified: their agent’s “mimic gifts” are not up to the job.

7Although in one important sense Franz and Gradus fit the Bergsonian model, being little more than “mere machine[s]” in their “attitudes, gestures, and movements”, the laughter directed towards them by Nabokov isn’t intended to bring them back to the fold: on the contrary, they are both beyond redemption because they represent not the errant individual, but the social group itself: the herd/mass/mob that Nabokov abhorred. This points to an important ideological parting of the ways between Bergson and Nabokov; it also highlights what many have seen as a fundamental flaw in Bergson’s theory of laughter. As T.G.A. Nelson points out: “There is no a priori reason for concluding, when a group and an individual are in conflict, that it is the group which is flexible, innovative, and the dissenter who is rigid” (185). Certainly, in Nabokov’s fiction it is almost always the dissenting individual who is flexible and innovative, and the group that is narrow-mindedly rigid, and Nabokov was fundamentally opposed to the idea of the group having precedence over the individual. This idea is illustrated time and again in his work, but most clearly in his political fiction—that is to say, the fiction that deals with politics in its narrower sense—and especially in his two dystopian novels, Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister. In Bend Sinister Nabokov reverses the terms of Bergson’s theory: it is the lone, dissenting individual, Krug, who contains the vital life force, Bergson’s “élan vital,” and the social group, in the form of Paduk’s Party of the Average Man, which represents rigid conformism; as Krug muses with chagrin, “[d] own here we have too much of homo civis and too little of sapiens” (Bend Sinister, 156). If, according to Bergson, society demands “an increasingly delicate adjustment of wills which will fit more and more perfectly into one another” (Bergson, 72)—a frightening thought for someone of Nabokov’s disposition—then Paduk’s political philosophy of Ekwilism, based on a deranged policy of consciousness-leveling, is the perfect fictional equivalent. This concept is typical of totalitarian comedy, as Daniel Gerould observes:

Tyranny systematically transforms its subjects into automatons; the tyrant himself is an immense puppet. Here Henri Bergson’s basic postulate—that laughter results when the mechanical is encrusted on the living—finds a perfect illustration, but the process of mechanization is carried out on such a vast scale as to be both ludicrous and terrifying. Instead of one rigid eccentric quarantined by laughter in the midst of a healthy, living society, as envisaged by the French philosopher, the comedy of tyranny presents a single, all-powerful maniac who forces the entire world to conform to his monstrous notions. The Bergsonian “transformation of a person into a thing” applies to everyone in the realm, for the dictator regards human beings solely as objects.
(Gerould, 5-7)

8This is certainly the case in Bend Sinister. Like Cincinnatus, Krug exists in a world populated by “uniformed waxworks” and “dummies” (Bend Sinister, viii). Unsurprisingly, Party leader Paduk is described in puppet-like terms: as a child he resembles “the wax schoolboys in the shop windows of tailors” (68), and he retains these terrifying traits into adulthood—terrifying because of the lifeless quality that they denote. It’s worth noting, too, lest we harbour doubts as to Nabokov’s true targets in this novel, that Paduk is modeled in part on Stalin, whom Nabokov described in the same terms in a letter to Edmund Wilson, referring to the Soviet tyrant as “tussaudesque” (Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 127).

9In the face of such soulless automatons Nabokov champions lone eccentrics like Krug and Cincinnatus; indeed, he believes that one can distinguish authentic from counterfeit art by the way in which the former concerns itself with unconventional, deviant characters: “true art deals not with the genus, and not even with the species, but with an aberrant individual of the species” (Strong Opinions, 155). Leaving aside the tricky business of “authenticity” (how precisely can one define it? Surely aberrancy isn’t a necessary constituent?), we should note that an important aspect of Nabokov’s theory is that such individuals, by virtue of their very strangeness, are in danger, and in most cases doomed for destruction, by an inhospitable, hostile social group. This notion manifests itself to varying degrees and in various contexts in Nabokov’s other novels (e.g., The Defense, The Eye, Pnin, Pale Fire), but it’s treated most memorably in his essay on “The Art of Literature and Commonsense”:

The color of one’s creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in time or space with a fatal objection from a mob that hates that particular tone. And the more brilliant, the more unusual the man, the nearer he is to the stake. Stranger always rhymes with danger. The meek prophet, the enchanter in his cave, the indignant artist, the nonconforming little schoolboy, all share in the same sacred danger. And this being so, let us bless them, let us bless the freak; for in the natural evolution of things, the ape would perhaps never have become man had not a freak appeared in the family.
(Lectures on Literature, 372)

10Nabokov’s fiction is full of such freaks, and although he’s not averse to laughing at their mishaps and inviting us to do the same, his laughter, with respect to these characters, is laced with pathos. This appeal for pity highlights another crucial difference between Nabokov and Bergson with respect to their approach to laughter. As mentioned earlier, Bergson believes that for laughter to be possible we must put our sympathies aside and assume “a momentary anesthesia of the heart. [Laughter’s] appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple” (Bergson, 64). Accordingly, Bergson highlights “the absence of feeling which usually accompanies laughter. […] Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion” (63). For some critics, this typifies Nabokov’s approach to his characters and readers: they regard him as a cold, callous author whose black humour signals an indifference to suffering. It’s true that with respect to his characters, Nabokov can be cold and callous, but only when those characters deserve that treatment, as is the case with Franz, Gradus, and Paduk; not so with others like Luzhin, Smurov, Pnin and Kinbote. As for his readers: Nabokov may chloroform an overly emotional response and advise us against identifying too closely with his characters, but he’s no foe of emotion: he wants to move us, wants us to feel as well as to think. As he often said, the pleasure to be had from literature “is both sensual and intellectual” (Lectures on Literature, 6):

a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind […]. What should be established, I think, is an artistic harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy—passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece.
(Lectures on Literature, 3-4)

Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. … If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week.
(Lectures on Literature, 64)

11For Nabokov, comics, videos (by which one assumes he means movies), and books-of-the-week rely on clichés and quick fixes, emotional shorthand that vulgarizes what’s precious and sullies what’s sacred. In Nabokov’s own fiction there are no easy shortcuts to deeply-felt emotions: we have to earn them, and we arrive at them indirectly, obliquely, by circuitous, contradictory, sometimes bitterly cold routes. Often, the most tender, most moving moments are cocooned in irony or juxtaposed with broad slapstick—and they’re all the more potent precisely because of that. Nabokov is no bleeding heart: sentimentality was anathema to him, as it is to all worthwhile writers, and there is as much malicious humour in his writing as there is in all of us, despite our better instincts (Bergson draws attention to this “spark of spitefulness” in human nature at the end of Laughter, 188). Nabokov recognizes these nastier impulses in himself and in others, and he indulges them—indeed, he’s an expert in satirical venom and sometimes Swiftian in his ferocity—but ultimately, he appeals to those better instincts. His real concern lies with the residue of remorse that’s left when the anesthesia wears off and his readers come round to the realization of what they’ve been laughing at.

12There are many instances in Nabokov’s fiction that illustrate this intention, but it’s perhaps most apparent in Pnin. Pnin is a kind of Bergsonian automaton who invites laughter, but there are important aspects of Nabokov’s portrait and approach that qualify the comparison. Bergson cites absentmindedness as a form of inelasticity: “Absentmindedness […] is not perhaps the actual fountain-head of the comic, but surely it is contiguous to a certain stream of facts and fancies which flows straight from the fountain-head” (68). Pnin doesn’t suffer from this problem:

Pnin, it should be particularly stressed, was anything but the type of that good-natured German platitude of last century, der zerstreute Professor. On the contrary, he was perhaps too wary, too persistently on the lookout for diabolical pitfalls, too painfully on the alert lest his erratic surroundings (unpredictable America) inveigle him into some bit of preposterous oversight. It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin whose business it was to set it straight. His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.
(Pnin, 13)

13Chance has robbed Pnin of his homeland, his family, and his childhood sweetheart, so he overcompensates by taking special care with details, relying on the logic of “timetables, maps, catalogues” (Pnin, 9). He leaves nothing to chance, but chance dogs him. Wrong trains and missed buses become “catastrophs” because they remind him of how erratic and unreliable the world is, and how helpless he is in the face of it. This only adds to the humour of the situation. As Bergson writes:

take the case of a person who attends to the petty occupations of his everyday life with mathematical precision. The objects around him, however, have all been tampered with by a mischievous wag, the result being that when he dips his pen into the inkstand he draws it out all covered with mud, when he fancies he is sitting down on a solid chair he finds himself sprawling on the floor, in a word his actions are all topsy-turvy or mere beating the air, while in every case the effect is invariably one of momentum. Habit has given the impulse: what was wanted was to check the movement or deflect it. He did nothing of the sort, but continued like a machine in the same straight line.
(66)

14Pnin’s mathematical approach to life makes for many comic moments, but his inelasticity ultimately proves endearing. Initially, he seems to embody Bergson’s image of a mechanically-minded individual who, via the laughter of the group, will be ushered back to the fold; that he escapes such a fate and retains his independence (the novel ends with Pnin leaving Waindell, bruised but unbowed) reveals where Nabokov’s sympathies lie: it’s not the individual, but the social group—in this case, Pnin’s fellow academics at Waindell, especially campus comic and Pnin mimic, Jack Cockerell—who deserve condemnation. This is made clear in the oft-quoted scene in which Cockerell entertains the narrator with a tiresome “floor show”:

He went on for at least two hours… Oh, the impersonation was deliciously funny, and although Gwen Cockerell must have heard the program many times before, she laughed so loud that their old dog, Sobakevich, a brown cocker with a tearstained face, began to fidget and sniff at me. The performance, I repeat, was magnificent, but it was too long. By midnight the fun began to thin; the smile I was keeping afloat began to develop, I felt, symptoms of labial cramp. Finally the whole thing grew to be such a bore that I fell wondering if by some poetical vengeance this Pnin business had not become with Cockerell the kind of fatal obsession which substitutes its own victim for that of the initial ridicule.
(Pnin, 187-189)6

15Fuelled by scotch, the two men decide to telephone Pnin in the early hours, which is nothing but a further form of torment. After several calls go unanswered, Pnin finally picks up and gives a less successful impersonation of his own, claiming that he’s already left town. It’s an awful moment, and we feel Pnin’s pain palpably; the narrator does, too, because he tells us that the evening’s events leave him with “the mental counterpart of a bad taste in the mouth” (Pnin, 189). This sense of remorse and self-reproach (however fleeting it may prove to be) is precisely what Nabokov wants to elicit in his readers, who, by virtue of their own laughter, have been complicit in the narrator’s victimization of Pnin. In pitching the novel to Pascal Covici at Viking, Nabokov stated his intention explicitly:

When I began writing PNIN, I had before me a definite artistic purpose: to create a character, comic, physically inattractive [sic]— grotesque, if you like—but then have him emerge, in juxtaposition to so-called “normal” individuals, as by far the more human, the more important, and, on a moral plane, the more attractive one. Whatever Pnin is, he certainly is least of all a clown. What I am offering you is… a character important and intensely pathetic.
(Selected Letters, 178)

16Nabokov accomplishes what he set out to do: by the close of the novel, Pnin, who began as a figure of fun, has gained not only our sympathy, but our respect. As Leona Toker notes, Pnin thus “qualifies Bergson’s view of laughter as incompatible with sympathetic emotion towards its object” (Toker, 1995, 372).

17As a further example of a freakish character who serves simultaneously as a laughing stock and as an object of sympathy, we have Kinbote: an egocentric, pedantic, pompous personality, unquestionably; horrific as a neighbour, undoubtedly; but, like Pnin, intensely pathetic, in the truest sense of that word. Kinbote is as much a victim of laughter as Pnin, and his persecution comes from the same quarter: academic peers. “I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type”, he says (Pale Fire, 21); Nabokov, being a long-time professor of literature, was, and on the evidence of these two novels it seems that he was particularly sensitive to academic hazing. Although in many respects the characters couldn’t be more different, Nabokov’s approach to Kinbote resembles the one that he took with Pnin as outlined in his letter to Covici, a kind of illumination by comparison: he paints Kinbote in all of his grotesque glory, then has him emerge “in juxtaposition to so-called ‘normal’ individuals” as by far the more human, morally-aware character. As a consequence, no one who has read Pale Fire can possibly miss the tragic pathos of Kinbote, despite the repugnance he initially inspires. “Pity is the password,” Shade tells Kinbote (Pale Fire, 225); indeed it is, in this and in many other Nabokov novels, and those who fail to recognize this, who persist in seeing Nabokov as an inhumane author who administers liberal—even lethal—doses of anesthesia to the hearts of his readers with no concern for maintaining that all-important pulse of pity, are simply not reading him sensitively enough. Pity for the pain of others—even pain that we ourselves may have inflicted through malicious mockery—is the password to our better, ideal selves, and this, in turn, may be the password to a realm beyond the one we know, a realm where curiosity, tenderness, and kindness are watchwords (“On a Book Entitled Lolita,” 315).

18Let us bless the freak. Given his self-professed status as a non-believer, it’s intriguing how often Nabokov, when at his most impassioned, finds recourse in words drawn from a religious lexicon (in this respect, it’s worth noting that the “meek prophet” that Nabokov refers to in the previously quoted passage from “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” the one whose strangeness puts him in “sacred danger”, is Jesus Christ). To bless is to bestow divine favor on someone, to consecrate them, to protect them from danger—or to be more specific, to appeal to some higher power to protect them from danger. Although it’s associated with religious rites, the word need not have a religious colouring—indeed, Nabokov wouldn’t condone such a colouring. By suggesting that we bless the freak, he is advocating protection for outcasts of all kinds. The appeal is ultimately to our humanity, which is based, according to Nabokov, on our own status as genetic outcasts: as he says, in the natural evolution of things the ape would never have become human had not a freak appeared in the family. Evolution allowed us to escape the fate of Lolita’s ape, charcoal in paw, drawing the bars in front of its face, but by creating freakish characters like Pnin and Kinbote, Nabokov, even while eliciting laughter at their expense, never allows us to forget how it feels to be caged.