Nabokov's short stories: themes and analysis

Nabokov and the Phantasm of Selfhood

Nabokov is, perhaps unjustly, best known to the general public as the author of Lolita. Not only is it his most infamous work, there is also a degree to which this sordidly poetic novel represents in microcosm much of the pathos and glory of all his work. Yet it is far from accurate to suggest that Nabokov should be generalized as an author who writes of perversion and the pollution of the poetic body and soul with lust and degradation. Insight on this matter may be found in the writings of Azar Nafisi, who lived for years under the veiling regime of Khomeini's revolutionary Iran. Upon her expatriation, she wrote a book called Reading Lolita in Tehran, in which she explored the ways in which Nabokov's classic spoke not only of the abuse of some young schoolgirl, but also its significance in the world of both the global and the personal politics of totalitarianism. She writes: "The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another." (Nafisi, 33) This insight unlocks the secret meaning of Lolita which allows it to be considered the pinnacle and key to Nabokov's writings - for it shows that Nabokov is a writer whose ultimate issue or theme is not that which settles uneasily across the surface of his books (whether that be child abuse, mistaken identity, or mishaps with train tickets), but one who writes of the meaning and loss of identity, and the moment where the soul is either subsumed into another or finds its grounds for resistance. Recognizing this pervasive issue in his work makes it easier to understand the importance of the style in which Nabokov writes. "there is a marked tendency towards self-conscious and artful forms of address amongst his narrators... In the later stories they address the reader directly, address their own characters, think aloud, pose questions, answer them, and muse reflectively in a manner which forces the reader to work hard keeping track of an often kaleidoscopic train of thought...[they are] unreliable narrators." (Mantex) This narrative style (which, not incidentally, is used in Lolita along with short stories such as "That in Aleppo Once...") serves to create a negotiation of identity between the reader, the narrator, and the characters addressed or described. In his work, Nabokov creates a grand insecurity of being, through words and through story, and forces his readers to confront the fact that they themselves are no more stable in their being than are the characters they peruse. If one were to grasp these universal themes of Nabokov and apply them in interpreting all his works, one would find that new meanings and potentials have a way of emerging. The application of this theme of negotiated identity is obvious enough in the short story "That in Aleppo Once," in which the narrator and his wife engage in an intense battle or dance over the way in which they will choose to understand their lives and relationship to one another. The same theme is slightly less obvious in "Conversation Piece," yet here its difficult application is far more necessary - some have critiqued this short story as being polemic or prejudiced, even claiming that here Nabokov defies his own values and creates propaganda - and yet if one interprets in another light, it is a complicated discussion of the power of naming and recognition in the creation of identity, and the ease with which a man and his shadow may become intertwined with one another. (Indeed, the possible allusions to Jekyll and Hyde are provocative, to say the least) So in re-assessing these two stories, the theme of negotiated and subsumed identity becomes a thread which can be followed into the weave of the story's meaning, unraveling or revealing the new life hidden in its cocoon.

In the short story "That in Aleppo Once...," Nabokov portrays a narrator who remembers his lost wife not as an individual, but as a phantasm. This powerful depersonalization quietly strips her of her identity and self-hood, leaving her nameless and faceless to the imagining audience as well as to the narrator himself. Here, as Nafisi suggests was done in Lolita as well, the male narrator has drawn a veil across the inner life and being of his female companion and reduces her to nothing but a cipher for his own fears, ambiguities, and desires. Yet at the same time, as readers we are aware that she is not person-less, and that her seemingly incomprehensible actions must surely spring from some reasoning and emotionally charged place. One calls to mind a line from Lolita, in which H.H. says "I simply don't know a thing about my darling's mind..." while somewhat dismissingly considering the fact that she might be concealing a depth of emotion he does not project for her. In the same way, the "Aleppo" narrator makes no claim to understand his wife's moods or mind, and in failing to understand or care what and who she really is, he engages her in a complicated and sometimes shakingly violent series of negotiations as to what he will allow to constitute her reality and her nature.

This becomes evident almost immediately, when he claims that "Although I can produce documentary proofs of matrimony, I am positive now that my wife never existed... her name... does not matter: it is the name of an illusion...of a character in a story (one of your stories, to be precise)." (Nabokov, "That in Aleppo Once") in this moment, the narrator openly proves his unawareness of his wife's true nature, so much so that he not only considers her to be confusing or phantasmagorical to him, but also suggests that she had no name or identity to others either - that he, or his friend, had created her whole. The idea that she is a "character" shows the degree to which her actions were, to his mind, controlled and orchestrated by someone other than herself, as she could not possible have self-will. The narrator goes so far as to strip her not only of her name, but of her face and most of her body. The word "veiling" is again brought to mind as the narrator linguistically reduces her to an invisible body and unimportant soul: "I cannot discern her. She remains... nebulous...[except for]... A tiny brown birthmark on her downy forearm...Perhaps, had she used a greater amount of make-up or used it more constantly, I might have visualized her face today." (Nabokov, "That in Aleppo Once") the narrator strips her of her name and face in his mind, even as he strips her of her version of reality and events. His wife, like many "invisible" people through-out time, attempts to create a world in which she is visible and matters. This alternate world is bound up with her story of the dog they left behind. For the record, it is difficult to say whether or not the couple ever had a dog. There is no more reason to trust the narrator's version of events than to trust his wife's in this matter. Regardless of the physical reality of the dog, however, it was evidently an important element of his wife's personal world, and a metaphor for the domestic (one might add maternal) aspect of the home they fled. She mourns the dog at first, and then is corrected as he insists, "we had never had any dog." To this she assents reluctantly, "I tried to imagine we had actually bought that setter." Yet again he correct her, and claims to even know what she had considered doing in their past: "There had never been any talk of buying a setter." (Nabokov, "That in Aleppo Once") by denying any emotional validity or physical reality to this metaphorical/imaginary dog, he is in essence killing it by removing it from their shared reality. This charge is brought up to him in the end as part of the reason he is losing her. "But one thing I shall never forgive you - her dog, that poor beast which you hanged with your own hands before leaving Paris," (Nabokov, "That in Aleppo Once") cries out the older female acquaintance who has broken the news to him that his wife has run away with a noble man who loves her. Of course, her affairs with these overwhelming (but in certain versions deeply devoted or even considerate) fantasy men is related to her experience with the dog. Whether they are real or not is immaterial - she believes in them because they can see her, and they become a part of her experiential reality. Nafisi speaks of the way in which women who are forced to veil themselves and who become thus invisible to the world end in making up fantasy realities in which they are not defined by the men around them but are allowed to define themselves. In many ways, this woman does the same thing. She does not accept a world in which their native land has fallen and they have no emotional reaction to leaving it. So she negotiates an identity which has lost something. When her husband cannot accept this identity, and then apparently abandons her at the train station, she negotiates the idea of an identity that is strong enough to survive and find love and gratification and recognition without him. When her husband cannot accept that identity and cries out that it is unbearable, she is forced (again) to recant it... In that moment, her husband kills her salesman-brute-lover as surely as he killed her dog. Is it any wonder that when she creates a noble, good lover in her mind, she conceals it from him for fear he will kill it... Or kill them both, by forcing her to again deny her dream self? When she tells him "Perhaps I live several lives at once. Perhaps I wanted to test you. Perhaps this bench is a dream and we are in Saratov or on some star," (Nabokov, "That in Aleppo Once") she is inviting him to understand and share in her identity which is so mutable and internal. His inability to do that is in the end what crushes and murders her identity and reality. When his vision of her - as hips and hair and skin and blind devotion to his poetry and happy jaunty days on the beach while their country burns - is not sustainable, and she tries to negotiate her own identity, the conflict becomes deadly.

The conflict in Nabokov's "Conversation Piece" is somewhat less tragic and more amusing, though none-the-less important. In it, one finds a man who is becoming consistently defined by outsides against his will based on the fact that apparently, "I happen to have a disreputable namesake, complete from nickname to surname, a man whom I have never seen in the flesh but whose vulgar personality I have been able to deduce from his chance intrusions into the castle of my life." (Nabokov, "Conversation Piece")

The question becomes, to what degree does the perception of strangers regarding one's self have the ability to create that self?

The two, according to the narration, have only one point in common, their shared tendency to travel. Yet as the story progresses, more and more points in common are discovered. One must even ask (though the question cannot be answered from the text) if they are the same person in different guises. Is this a tribute to Jekyll and Hyde - the confused narrative of the "good" side of a flipping coin? For his namesake apparently practices in excess the vices which he hides in lesser degrees, and has had most of the same experiences that he himself has had. At first glance, the similarities may not be so obvious. To begin with, however, they each keep the same sort of friends. The narrator has "my acquaintance Mrs. Sharp, who had for some reason always resented my contempt for the Party line and for the Communist and his Master's Voice" and whom he suspects of setting him up to speak with "some old fool who had had caviar in the Kremlin." (Nabokov, "Conversation Piece") Then, he appears shocked that this "Mrs. Sybil Hall, a close friend of Mrs. Sharp..." would set him up to speak with a distinguished professor who had an equal sort of passion for the German people? (One ought not forget that Russia had also had its pogroms and mass graves, albeit not to the degree that Germany did!) He seems to judge those whose conversation he joins very harshly for their prejudices - and yet with one glance he claims to know that the women he has joined are all "cheerfully sterile" and that "All, one could be certain, belonged to book clubs, bridge clubs, babble clubs, and to the great, cold sorority of inevitable death..." He even seems certain he knows what they are thinking as they sit there, "Something in the middle of the table, she was thinking. I need something that would make people gasp - perhaps a great big huge bowl of artificial fruit." (Nabokov, "Conversation Piece") the small vice of judging people harshly by their accents or weights is, in a small way, what the vice of hating people for their race or religion is ina major way. There are, of course, other striking similarities between himself and his double. He complains of his namesake's public drunkenness in Zurich - and his double writes him a letter complaining that he ought not to have appeared "in a drunken condition at the house of a highly respected person." (Nabokov, "Conversation Piece") Both have been arrested in the name of the other, as well. Indeed, their experiences have an eery echo of each other, and it seems they consistently are experience a unique sort of prejudice - that of having others assume they know them (even intimately) based only on a name. They both experience having prejudices attempting to define them, and yet neither is able to escape committing prejudice himself. Additionally, the narrator is not even able to sufficiently define himself that when he speaks of his outrage he is able to be coherent or to take credit for his own thoughts: "I tried to tell him as neatly as I could that the police, the authorities, would explain [my remark] to her." (Nabokov, "Conversation Piece")