Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,22

aesthetic. For his ideal reader, the text is a highly particular thing, and the job is to appreciate and note its particularities. If nothing else, in these lectures we find a mirror image of how Nabokov himself hoped to be read. For he felt his own work to be multiplex but not truly multivalent—the buck stopped at Nabokov, the man who had placed the details there in the first place. His texts had their unity (their truest reality) in him.

Consequently, seriously variant interpretations of his novels were only so much poshlust27 to him, to be filed next to “Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, over concern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.” This makes him a hard author to write about. He seems to admit no ideal reader except himself. I think of him as one of the last, great twentieth-century believers in the autonomy of the Author, as Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the last believers in the Architect. They both specialized in theatrical interviews, struck self-regarding and self-mythologizing poses, all of which would mean nothing (the Author being dead, you don’t have to listen to his self-descriptions) if it weren’t for the fact that they wove the restrictions and privileges of authorship into the very fabric of the things they built. For it’s true that each time I enter Pnin I feel its author controlling (via an obsessive specificity) all my reactions, just as, in Wright’s Unity Temple, one enters through a small, low side door, forced to approach the magnificence of the interior by way of a series of awkward right-angled turns. There is extraordinary, almost overwhelming beauty in Nabokov—there is also an oppressive rigidity. You will live in his house his way. Nabokov’s way means giving up the reader’s traditional linear right-of-way through a novel (starting at the first page and ending at the last) and confronting instead a network of connected leitmotifs, quotations, clues, and puzzles that are not so much to be read as deciphered. Faced with a Nabokov novel it’s impossible to rid yourself of the feeling that you’ve been set a problem, as a chess master sets a problem in a newspaper. I am always tormented by the sense I have missed something—and Nabokov makes me feel my failure. The Author, he claimed, “clashes with readerdom because he is his own ideal reader and those other readers are so very often mere lip-moving ghosts and amnesiacs.” He claimed to be writing, instead, “mainly for artists, fellow-artist and follow artists,” whose job it was to “share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author—the joys and difficulties of creation.” Follow artists! In practice this means subsuming your existence in his, until you become, in effect, Nabokov’s double, knowing what he knows, loving as he loves and hating his way, too,28 following each nuance, pursuing each reference, in what amounts to a reader’s mimeograph of the Author’s creative act. (And there exist many people who hate Nabokov for precisely this reason.) It is a reversal of the Barthes formulation: here it is the reader who must die so that the Author may live. There is a sensible school of thought that argues all writing makes us do this29—but few writers make you feel your subjection as Nabokov does. The only perfect tenant of the house that Nabokov built is Nabokov.30

3

When you teach Nabokov to students, along with the usual complaint that his vocabulary is unnecessarily baroque, they want to know whether all this game playing, all this punning complexity is, in the end, truly for the reader at all. They scrunch up their noses and direct you to a particular passage: “Now, isn’t this just Nabokov basically getting himself off?” The question is a fair one. The elusive, allusive, pleasures of the Nabokovian text—whose pleasures are these, really? When asked about “the pleasures of writing” in his Playboy interview, Nabokov answered: “They correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading, the bliss, the felicity of a phrase is shared by writer and reader: by the satisfied writer and the grateful reader.”

But isn’t the aside vital? Doesn’t satisfaction trump gratitude? With our twenty-first-century passion for equality, gratitude seems a slavish sort of attitude to take to an author. Is that truly our reward for being Nabokovians, for reading and rereading, pursuing every butterfly, every long-vanished Russian émigré poet? Nabokov thought so; he felt that what he offered his reader,