11. I want to think about an impossibility: Guy Debord’s influence, especially through his theoretical meditation on the confluence of advanced capitalism and mass media, The Society of the Spectacle, published in France in 1967, on Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, published in the U. S. two weeks after Pearl Harbor.

22. Of course, I should begin by flagging the fact that Debord—he was seven at the time—didn’t influence, couldn’t have influenced, Nabokov’s The Real Life, which was composed in Paris between late 1938 and early 1939 in the bathroom of Nabokov’s apartment, where the Russian émigré retreated to write (his desk improvised from his valise balanced over the bidet) while his son Dmitri slept and/or played in the one main room Nabokov and his wife Vera rented.

33. Such anachronous involvement between Debord and Nabokov is unimaginable.

44. And yet not completely unimaginable.

55. And yet not not completely unimaginable.

66. What I mean to say is that when talking about influence I am talking about a particular mode of it—the sort Jorge Luis Borges discusses in his essay, “Kafka and His Precursors.”

7Looking back on texts by six disparate authors (Zeno, Han Yu, Kierkegaard, Browning, Léon Bloy, and Lord Dunsany) written before the existentially helpless Praguian invented 20^th century literature, Borges notes:

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. The second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist.
(Borges, 201)

8Borges concludes: “Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future” (Borges, 201).

97. Another way of putting this: I am talking about, not an historically based exploration of one writer’s impact on another, but rather about a certain mode of reading, which is to say a certain mode of rereading and misreading, which is to say a continuous writing and rewriting.1

108. A mode we cannot escape in our post-historical moment that isn’t one where, as Roland Barthes argued from a Paris that had erupted into a series of general strikes and occupations of factories and universities the year after Debord—he was 37—published Society of the Spectacle (theory always a deep form of spiritual autobiography): “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological meaning’ (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture” (Barthes, 146).

11Barthes incorporated the ideological thrust of the student protests against political hegemony into his own undoing of textual hegemony. In both cases, the authoritarian impulse is jammed and, as one of the slogans to appear in May 1968 had it: Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible. Be realistic, ask the impossible (Watzlawick, 83).

129. I can only read, which is to say write, as myself. We can only write/read ourselves and others as versions of ourselves and others. Each of us can only read/rewrite from the ahistorical (which is to say the historical) position which she or he discovers him or herself inhabiting—i. e., as if all texts existed simultaneously, as if all were in conversation with (or perhaps, to change metaphors mid-sentence, had already infected and been infected by) all others across space and time.

13In a sense, this is exactly what we mean when we say the word contemporary.

1410. Once, obviously, we already knew this. Yet somehow we seem to forget the fact—forget to make visible what constitutes the seemingly invisible event of reading—regularly (as if willfully); forget that that event is always a reading/rewriting that is both from and through.

1511. And so let me begin again: Nabokov and Debord couldn’t have had less in common. They couldn’t have evinced more opposed imaginations.

1612. Born in 1931, thirty-two years after Nabokov, Debord lost his father, a pharmacist, to tuberculosis the year following New Directions’ publication of The Real Life. Debord’s mother sent him to live with his grandmother in her family villa in Italy, which they were forced to flee during World War Two. Debord became politically active in a Cannes high school and, shortly thereafter, joined demonstrations in Paris against the French war in Algeria. During the 1960s, the self-proclaimed Doctor of Nothing led the Situationist International—that small but immensely influential radical group who had their finest hour with that near-revolution in Paris in 1968. While the mutiny may have in many respects failed (the Gaullist party came back stronger than before after the June elections), the Situationists’style and tactics have remained a blueprint for dissent against hegemony ever since, from punk rock to hacker culture and the anti-globalization movements.

1713. On the evening of November 30, 1994, in Champot, near Bellevue-la-Montagne, Haute-Loire, Debord executed his final act of resistance, what we might term his closing anti-spectacle, by shooting himself through the heart. It was, as anarchist blogger Dorian Cope comments, “a fittingly provocative end; a suicide deliberately designed to stun the masses out of their collective ennui, conveying at once a scathing denunciation of the 20^th century’s leftist hopes and a tactical political manoeuver in the form of the ultimate Situationist ‘action.’”

18“And so,” she continues, “the master agitator who in life remained resolutely in the shadows in order to avoid being ‘branded’ by the consumer capitalism he so despised became in death a celebrity” (Cope).

1914. And so let me begin again: Born in 1899—thirty-two years before Debord—to a wealthy, prominent St. Petersburg family that boasted fifty servants, Vladimir Nabokov was the eldest of five children of a liberal lawyer, statesman, and journalist. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, his family was forced to flee the city, then the country. In March 1922—Nabokov was now 21—a Russian monarchist assassinated his father in Berlin. Nabokov remained in that city fifteen more years, until a climate of growing anti-Semitism (Vera was Jewish) forced him on the run again, this time to Paris. He settled among the 400,000 Russian émigrés living there from 1937 until May 1940, when he and his family narrowly escaped the advancing German troops and once again fled, this time to the U. S., where, after the publication of his literary hurricane a decade and a half later, Vladimir Nabokov became Vladimir Nabokov.

2015. Shortly after his arrival in the 16^th arrondissement, Nabokov—in addition to translating his novel Despair from Russian into English (feeling he possessed greater control over that language than French), finishing The Gift, and undertaking a number of other smaller projects—began his first novel in English, The Real Life, through whose pages floats the vague double of Irina Guadanini, a divorced Russian poet who worked as poodle trimmer and with whom Nabokov entered a brief affair while living in what Humbert Humbert refers to in his Lolita screenplay as Gray Paree (11). Gray because, far from his childhood situation back in St. Petersburg, Nabokov now found himself in difficult straits financially. When in 1939 his mother died in Prague, he was unable to attend her funeral, as much because of lack of savings and regular income as because of the political climate. For The Real Life, James Laughlin at New Directions—Harry Levin and Delmore Schwartz had recommended he consider the manuscript—paid him a $ 150 advance.

2116. Two emblematic stories concerning Nabokov’s conspicuous politics:

1. While the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in October 1917, Nabokov, recently having inherited a 2000-acre estate and the equivalent of several million dollars, sat at home several blocks away, composing poetry and listening to the gunfire.

2. In 1965, when President Johnson underwent a gallbladder operation, Nabokov wired him, wishing him a speedy recovery and continued success in what Nabokov referred to as LBJ’s “admirable work” in Vietnam (Boyd, 503).

2217. Which is to say the man who once said he was raised “a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library” (Strong Opinions, 43) was the sort who vociferously disapproved of the student demonstrations in the 1960s—except, he wrote, “in countries with real and grim dictatorships” (Boyd, 553).

23The sort who claimed he ardently believed in democracy, yet never voted.

2418. Despite his avowed apoliticism, Nabokov couldn’t help being part of that real, grim, and highly politicized decade and a half in Europe running through the 1930s and 1940s. And despite his protestations to the contrary, he engaged fully with those politics in his own quintessentially contradictory way. He wrote a biography critical of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, for instance, in reaction to the Soviet Union’s enforced implementation of socialist realism as the state anesthetic aesthetic, and launched several attacks on the Nazis, including one in the form of The Waltz Invention, a tragicomedy in three acts published during his Paris years about an infantile madman unleashed on history. Yet unlike Debord, Nabokov detested being part of any group, being labeled, endorsing abstractions like those espoused by Situationism. He rejected the very kind of spontaneous, aleatoric, openly political creation Debord championed because such work, Nabokov believed, flew in the face of the meticulous observation, care, and craftsmanship that were the hallmarks of serious—that is to say Nabokovian—art.

2519. And so let me begin again one last time: Nabokov’s books worked behind his back, believed things he didn’t—or didn’t quite. In part this is because texts by their nature continuously accomplish more than their authors wish them to accomplish, remain by their very disposition over-determined. And in part this is because the act of reading is always-already a variety of writing, as I say, and therefore a variety of rewriting, and therefore a continual exploration of texts’ recursive character, a reminder that every author, when done with a work, is simply one more critic of it among many.

2620. Reading/writing/rewriting The Real Life of Sebastian Knight here, now, I find it difficult not to detect the Doctor of Nothing’s voice speaking through its textual inflections.

2721. In Society of the Spectacle, Debord traces the development of a mediascape where social life, a sense of felt community, human interaction, has been replaced—by means of the engines of advanced capitalism—with representation (the core concept—speaking of influences—without which Baudrillard could not have become Baudrillard): with, that is, spectacles projected by the government and culture industry to distract us from the awareness that being has declined into having, “having to appearing” (Debord, 16). This condition, according to Debord, is the historical juncture at which we find “the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience” (Debord, 26).

28Relationships among commodities have come to supplant relationships among human beings.

2922. Passivity before the spectacle manifests as existential numbness, a condition consonant with Heidegger’s notion of Alltäglichkeit, or everydayness (Heidegger, 41), in which the subject exists in a state of ceaseless overlooking, habitualness, deep-structure boredom—in which, that is, existence has grayed into indifference. For Debord, such existential numbness is expressed as political numbness, a ceaseless overlooking of the subject’s position with respect to a hegemony that has become so ubiquitous as to become unseen. Hegemony is the air we think through.

3023. Another way of saying this: the difference between art and entertainment involves the speed of perception. Art deliberately slows and complicates reading, hearing, and/or viewing in a variety of ways so that we can re-think and re-feel form and experience. Entertainment deliberately accelerates and simplifies them so we don’t have to think about or feel very much of anything at all.

3124. Debord’s perceptual revolution: short-circuit that passive relationship between human and spectacle over and over again, even if only for brief moments; disorder the spectacular by devising instants that reorder life, give rise to sudden rushes of self-consciousness about one’s being-in-the-world. Through the act of détournement— the creation of a new work inimical to the assumptions of an original (and usually commercial) one familiar to the target audience—Situationism appropriates and perverts the grammar of the distractive habitual in an attempt to interrupt it, making us aware both of the dynamics of spectacle and the possibility of alternative modes of existence.

3225. The Situationist project—Barbara Kruger’s jamming of found consumer images with bitingly ironic text that reveal those images’ connection to power, individual autonomy, and the body; Carlos Latuff’s juxtaposition of Coke’s logo with iconic imagery of weapons and murder that brings attention to The Coca-Cola Company’s human rights abuses in Guatemala and contamination/over-exploitation of limited water resources in India—the Situationist project exists in order to remind us that the text of the text, the text of the world, and the text of our lives can always be other than they are.

3326. While clearly The Real Life of Sebastian Knight doesn’t deploy such blatant, politically charged derailment, Nabokov’s novel does deploy (at least when read through the lens of a certain Debordian [non-] influence) a more nuanced mode of turnabout that in some measure harmonizes with Debord’s and his intellectual/aesthetic offspring’s.

34I. e., Nabokov’s aesthetics form a politics other than the one promoted by the biological version of the author.

3527. Plot I. In The Real Life, a narrator known only as V. (a vaguely metafictional standin for another, less sadly absurd Vladimir) has written the nominal biography we are reading (his first literary work) of his half-brother, the Russian-born English novelist Sebastian Knight, who died at 36 of the same heart ailments that took his mother—and will, years later, take heartless Humbert Humbert on a different fictional planet. At the time of his death Knight, with whom V. has had at best a distant relationship, had already gained a great deal of literary notoriety for his five books.

3628. Plot II. V.’s quasi-biography is comprised of his efforts at tracking down and interviewing various friends and acquaintances of Knight, as well as of V.’s readings of his half-brother’s books, in an attempt, at least in part, to refute a previous biography produced by Knight’s former secretary, one dubious Mr. Goodman, who “paints in a few ill-chosen sentences a ridiculously wrong picture of Sebastian Knight’s childhood”(15), among other alleged deliberate factual failures, in pursuit of a goal (“simple,” V. avers, “as his philosophy”) to prove Knight “a product and victim of what [Goodman] calls ‘our time’” (62). Goodman, in other words, according to V., conceptualizes writers as symptoms of history.

3729. Thematics I. Yet by the second page of The Real Life we find accuracy about earlier life-events bracketed:

Nor is it exact, as suggested in the British press after Sebastian’s decease, that his father was killed in the duel he fought in 1913; as a matter of fact he was steadily recovering from the bullet-wound in his chest, when—a full month later—he contracted a cold with which his half-healed lung could not cope.
(6-7)

38If the British press’s account is not exact, it is inaccurate, which is to flag the idea that yesterday’s events, rendered, go up for grabs. If the re-presentation of an event is troubled, then recollection itself is. If one teller’s reliability is questioned, so it is with the reliability of all.

39Including, of course, V.’s.

4030. Thematics II. The more V. tries to discover who his half-brother was, the less he learns—or, more precisely and importantly: what V. learns is precisely what he doesn’t learn.

4131. The Real Life, put another way, is an inverted detective novel where clues add up to less and less. By V.’s lights, Goodman’s narrativization of pastness, like the British press’s claims concerning Sebastian’s father’s death, is drastically deficient, if not purposefully—even, V. would like to argue, maliciously—inaccurate, his portrait of Knight (whose name suggests night, along with its connotations ofdarkness, obscurity, and ignorance) a series of slights and slips around an entity if not absent, exactly, then surely illegibly present. Yet Goodman is far from alone in his be(k) nightedness. Sebastian’s governess’s memories of him as a boy are so “hopelessly distorted,” “the past in her mind… so blurred and displaced,” that V. doubts their reality altogether (22), and even Sebastian’s mother feels the real life of her son has “escaped” her, “that he will always remain an enigma” (31).

4232. Emblems I. V. visits the pension in the town of Roquebrune where he believed his mother died thirteen years before, only to discover after the fact that it was a different place with the same name (19-20). In the midst of V.’s interview with him, Knight’s tutor at Cambridge confesses “my memory has shrunk in the washing” (51). V’s task of forming “a coherent picture” of his half-brother’s life continually “eludes” him: “I could perhaps describe the way he walked,” he admits, “or laughed, or sneezed, but all this would be no more than sundry bits of cinema-film cut away by scissors and having nothing in common with the essential drama” (18).

43The “essential drama” for V. entails discovering a way to narrate coherence, yet his real life turns out to be something painfully more inconclusive and unintelligible than that.

4433. Nassim Nicholas Taleb coins the term narrative fallacy in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable to refer to the common intellectual blunder of forcing chaos into cosmos in an attempt to account for what eventuates around us (62-84). We are by nature story generators, pattern recognition machines, designed to recount what the world has done to us, whether what the world has done to us makes sense or not. Give us an incident, no matter how enigmatic, indeterminate, or tenuous its origins, and we will tell in order to generate the impression of continuity, consistency, and unity. We strong-arm links, invent causal chains, despite their lack.

4534. Emblems II: As his quest for information about Knight’s life lumbers on, V. comes to wonder: “Why was the past so rebellious?”—even as he comes to understand the best he will ever be able to write is “a book with a blind spot,” “an unfinished picture” of his half-brother (125). As if to drive home the point, The Real Life, which the reader learns early on can never be real, which is to say can never be anything more than an approximation of a truth (like reality, one assumes Nabokov believed the word should only appear between quotation marks [Strong Opinions, 154]), concludes with a scene—bookend to the one in which V. visits the town where he believes his mother died—in which V. is convinced he is visiting his dying half-brother in the hospital, only to discover after the fact he has actually been sitting at the bedside of a stranger, that Knight changed tenses the day before.

4635. His half-brother, V. learns, had planned to write a fictitious biography (40). Is that, I find myself wondering, what we’re reading when we read The Real Life— not V.’s biography of Sebastian at all, but Sebastian’s mischievous biography of a version of himself whose narrator is a version of his estranged, his absent, brother?

4736. Typing that last line, I am reminded of the focal absences that impel so many of Nabokov’s novels. Wondering once with my graduate seminar on narrative theory and practice if anyone gets out of Pale Fire unscathed, un-satirized, un-ironized, it occurred to several of us the answer might just be humble and bright Hazel, Shade’s daughter, who, despite her homely suburban existence, is never lampooned as Kinbote and Shade himself are, never compared to anything but herself, provides the gravitational force around which all the other characters circle, even though she only exists as a trace in Shade’s poem, and ends up leaving this world, not because of any baroque shenanigans as with the poet, but because it simply and achingly wasn’t the one she had expected.

4837. If so, Hazel becomes the distant fictional cousin of Dolores (a being also wholly silenced in the text she inhabits; we only hear her speak as that speech is rendered through Humbert’s gorgeously ghastly mouth), also the sad ghost that drives a literary machine, the absence that makes a Nabokovian text present, the sole paper being in that novel with whom we are made to feel genuine and lasting empathy.

4938. Or, with all the slant-rhyme parallels to Nabokov’s own past, from his almost-birthdate and exile from Russia to his affair with Guadanini, are we to imagine we are reading some Borgesian rendition of Nabokov’s own autobiography in The Real Life? Is that perhaps what V. means, at least in a metafictional—if not a metaphysical—sense when he observes that “the only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition” (The Real Life, 105)? The only real number is the number that announces the self-enclosed subjectivity of what J. M. Coetzee names autre-biography (394).

50If so, then we may take the last line of the novel literally: “I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows” (205).

5139. The pronoun/noun blur in that final sentence leads the reader in several productive directions. First, it enacts a metaleptic blip—an unsettling violation of narrative levels that serves to remind the reader the world of the told has been contaminated by the world of the telling, that the one is always in some sense the other. The tactic is deployed throughout The Real Life. V. discovers, for instance, that it is impossible to recount Knight’s childhood “with anything like the methodical continuity which I would have normally achieved had Sebastian been a character of fiction” (20); he “yearns for the easy swing of a well-oiled novel” (52); the reader navigates plot after plot of Knight’s novels which don’t, in reality, exist. Such metalepses call the reader’s attention to his or her engagement in the event of reading, and hence to his or her engagement in the event of [re] writing in a manner analogous to those V. encounters during his own search for the truth about his half-brother. By its very nature, reading/rewriting will remain contrary to fact. The fact is that there are only bothered facts and fraudulent performances.

5240. Second, that pronoun/noun blur derails—and here Debord reenters our conversation—conventional concepts of stable selfhood, prompts the reader to recall that identity happens only as Heraclitean construction and construction-by-others, that identity remains contradictory, partial, and strategic, that we are always-already being spoken through by the systems of which we are part and from which we wish to escape—which is to say The Real Life (echoing Wittgenstein’s news in Tractatus) performs a difficulty: our rules of grammar have been repeatedly misunderstood by Western culture as a metaphysics.

5341. Third, that pronoun/noun blur derails, not a dominant politics, but two dominant and inherently naïve genres, which is to say ideologies: biography and memoir. Both professed investigations into fixed pastness and selfhood, The Real Life contends through its very technē, are subsets of fiction that seek to un-complicate yesterday and I by their illusion of causality, authenticity, and cohesion, and will always fail again and fail better.

5442. The Real Life is ultimately a text, like so many by Nabokov, about epistemology—or, more exactly, about the limits of epistemology.

5543. The Real Life is ultimately a text about Not-Knowing.

5644. The Real Life is ultimately a text about a particular kind of Not-Knowing, the one Linda Hutcheon refers to as historiographic metafiction: self-conscious narrative aware of the myriad obstacles, if not the sheer impossibility, in talking about either personal or cultural history; of how events and subjectivites are continuously being written, rewritten, erased, reformatted, retold, edited. That is, historiographic metafiction is about, not the past (no writing can be about such a vagueness), but about the problematization of historical knowledge, and, by implication, the problematization of knowledge itself.2

57Or, as V. soon comes to understand about Goodman (and the reader soon comes to understand about V.): he “never quotes anything that may clash with the main idea of his fallacious work” (65).

5845. To derail historical knowledge and its various claims to causality, authenticity, and cohesion is to begin to derail the concept of temporality—and, in The Real Life, a special case of it: late-stage capitalism’s, where time is money and so is quantified, categorized, mechanized, stabilized, made to run in a beeline that disavows disorder, ambiguity, contradiction, and mystery.

5946. With that, a radical politics reenters the pages of the essay you are reading.

6047. Exemplary of Debord’s influence on Nabokov, which is both no influence at all and a powerful instance of it, is the carnivalesque line with which I should like to conclude. V. quotes from a sample work-in-progress sentence by his half-brother that disarranges, fractures the habitual at a syntactic level, wakes us up to our own reading practices, our own meaning-making ones, and thereby suggests by its very presence in the universe that there are always other ways of constituting reality, the narrative of our lives, instants that allow us to abandon (however fleetingly) the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of examined consciousness:

6148. As he a heavy A heavy sleeper, Roger Rogerson, old Rogerson bought old Rogers bought, so afraid Being a heavy sleeper, old Rogers was so afraid of missing to-morrows. He was a heavy sleeper. He was mortally afraid of missing to-morrow’s event glory early train glory so what he did was to buy and bring home in a to buy that evening and bring home not one but eight alarm clocks of different sizes and vigour of ticking nine eight eleven alarm clocks of different sizes ticking which alarm clocks nine alarm clocks as a cat has nine which he placed which made his bedroom look rather like a
(39-40)