Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,23

and especially his rereader, was not the antic pleasure of their own interpretations, but the serious satisfaction of twinning the emotion of creation: I would say that the main favour I ask of the serious critic is sufficient perceptiveness to understand that whatever term or trope I use, my purpose is not to be facetiously flashy or grotesquely obscure but to express what I feel and think with the utmost truthfulness and perception.

By following all his threads, you are doing more than reading, you are given the opportunity to precisely reconstruct the bliss of vdokhnovenie, of Nabokov’s own writerly act. (And maybe even a trace of vorstorg. Nabokov thought that the “force and originality involved in the primary spasm of inspiration is directly proportional to the worth of the book the author will write.” We might hope, then, for a trace of the propellant to be left after the explosion.) The difference is that Nabokov asks that we admit it is the author’s gift in the design, rather than our gift at connecting the dots, that is truly meaningful, and meaning producing. No matter how I try to slot them together, Nabokov goes a certain way along with Barthes and no further. Reading is creative! insists Barthes. Yes, but writing creates, replies Nabokov, smoothly, and turns back to his note cards.

Maybe we can say that Nabokov makes his readers so very creative that we are liable to feel that we ourselves have made something. Pnin rereaders can follow the Lermontov hints (to a poem called “The Triple Dream”) and the Tolstoy hints (to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”) and find in those texts miniature versions of Pnin’s Russian doll structure, mise-en-abymes placed by Nabokov into his novel with the care of Van Eyck.31, 32 They are so hard to see, such particular details, that you feel you placed them there yourself. And the experience of rereading Pnin is never perfect or finished—there’s always some new detail to fondle. A newcomer to Nabokov will notice only the actual butterflies fluttering around; as you get further in, you’ll start to notice the entomology sunk deep into the weft and weave. Those Nabokovian words, pressed into service for quite other purposes, which, upon closer inspection, reveal their hidden wings and abdomens (bole, crepitation, Punchinello33). And it’s only on this most recent rereading that I think to kneel in front of my desk, place a glass of water at eye level and position a comb, on end, behind it. Zebra cocktail!34 Nabokov saw it—now I do. And it’s beautiful. Gratitude does not seem out of place.

Whether one quite approves of it or not, it’s a Nabokovian assumption that if you work to give him back what he has given to you, this should be reward enough (for you). His students learned this soon enough.35 And of course Vera lived it. (The character most closely modeled on Vera—Zina, from The Gift—is praised by the narrator for having a “perfect understanding . . . for everything that he himself loved.”) Here Barthes comes up against a wall of pure Nabokov. Barthes scorned that “image of literature, to be found in ordinary culture, [which] is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his hates, his passions.” And then Foucault, in the essay that answered Barthes’s own, and deepened it, identified the Author (or “Author-function”) as “the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.”36 In Nabokov’s case, the arrow hits its bull’s-eye: this author’s high-handed rules about reading, his various strictures concerning interpretation, and his defensive humiliations of his own potential readers (especially on the topic of Freudian critics and Lolita37)—these all work to “impede[s] the free circulation, the free manipulation, the composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.”38 But a question I never asked as a college rereader, now bothers me as a writer: and what of it?

It was meant to be obvious, to the college rereaders we once were, that any restriction on the multivalent free flow of literary meaning was not to be stood for. But to speak for myself, I’ve changed my mind. The assumption that what a reader wants most is unfettered freedom, rather than limited, directed, play,39 or that one should automatically feel nostalgia for a bygone age of collective, anonymous authorship40—none of this feels at all obvious to me anymore. The house rules of a novel, the laying down of the author’s peculiar terms—all of this is what interests me. This is where my pleasure is. Yet it must