Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,20

the Author as the very principle of individualized Western freedom, Barthes saw precisely the same thing, but didn’t like it:The Author is a modern figure, a product of our society in so far as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the “human person.” It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the “person” of the Author.

Nabokov, having fled the Communist revolution, was not sympathetic to ideologies that made light of Western freedoms and individual privilege, up to and including the individuality of the author. But in a deeper sense, the disjunction between Nabokov and la nouvelle critique is philosophical. It has to do with how Nabokov thought about reality:Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information, and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless.

But this is a different kind of interpretive hopelessness. For Barthes, hermeneutics and epistemology have been subjected to a twin crisis: there is no there there. With the Author dead, no longer the past of his own text, nor its source of nourishment or final meaning, the scriptor merely “traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.” And this crisis in authorship, for Barthes, has consequences far beyond the little world of novels and their readers:In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing ), by refusing to assign a “secret,” an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.

Just as we must give up the urge to know the reality of the text, we must also give up the hope of knowing the world in its ultimate reality. There can be no more “deciphering,” we must settle for “disentangling.” Power is relinquished. Not so in Nabokov’s world. In Nabokov’s portrait of subjectivity you can still decipher by degrees. The lily can be more or less real, and there exists an ultimate reality even if we can never know it. Still, we can come close. To approach the reality of a novel, as readers, Nabokov asked that we bring biographical,24 historical, cultural, entomological, and linguistic knowledge to the task, not to mention attentive care, empathy, synesthetic acuity, and a keen visual sense. There can be ever more accurate readings of the lily. And there can be, consequently, philistine misreadings, a fact Barthes’s portrait of the prepotent reader (blissed out, picking her way through a riot of potential meanings, constructing a text playfully, without limits) refuses to acknowledge.

But Nabokov was no cold-blooded empiricist and he was not blind to the indeterminacy of writing. For him, too, there existed a blissful, unfettered, nonhierarchical experience of meaning—but it came earlier in the process. Not while the reader reads, but before the writer writes, in a moment that precedes composition: “Inspiration.” Nabokov split this old-fashioned word into two Russian parts. The first half of inspiration, for him, is vorstog (initial rapture). Vorstog describes that moment in which the book as a whole is conceived:A combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you. It is the prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away and the non-ego rushing in from the outside to save the prisoner—who is already dancing in the open.

Here the author dies, momentarily; here meaning is indeterminate and free flowing. Vorstorg “has no conscious