A Surface Reading of Vladimir Nabokov

Abstract

Within Vladimir Nabokov’s repertory of elaborate trickery, Transparent Things¹ stands out as an unusually slim, schematic volume, in the words of the New York Times Book Review ‘a small mock replica’ of a grander, life-long architectural enterprise.² Nabokov first published the 104-page novella in 1972, to little critical consensus. If some described it as the work of an author ‘at the height of his style, and the full complexity of his artistic understanding’,³ others received it as ‘a mere fragment’, ‘black humour its only attraction’.⁴ Among those who read it favourably enough to hazard an interpretation, attention was as likely to be paid to Nabokov’s construction of a schematic ‘X-ray of a novel’,⁵ as to the ‘grotesque comic’ of a ‘hero’, who is, ‘like Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, entranced by a creature preposterously inadequate to the adoration’⁶ — an interpretation less likely to offer insight into Transparent Things than evidence a tradition of readings of Lolita for which the novel itself has often been panned.⁷ Nabokov’s own diary entry from 1972 documents ‘Reviews oscillating between hopeless adoration and helpless hatred. Very amusing’.⁸ It may be this which prompted him to uncharacteristically offer an interpretation, if with tongue held firmly in cheek: in an interview with an unnamed New York newspaper stylised on the pages of 1973’s Strong Opinions, Nabokov frames Transparent Things’ as ‘merely a beyond-the-cypress inquiry into a tangle of random destinies’, creating a ‘structural knot’.⁹ As Eric Jarosinski would later remark, this in fact also functions as a ‘structural not’:¹⁰ a skein of briefly glimpsed, tangled and matted moments presented out of order, precluding the easy extraction of any central thread teased by the author.

Of course, Nabokov’s fictions have always been prone to inviting a measure of detective work on the part of his readers. It has become customary to read his novels as structurally indebted to games, riddles and puzzles, especially following the publication of his Lectures on Literature in the 1980s.¹¹ Extending the logic of Nabokov’s earlier Poems and Problems, which placed literary texts alongside invented chess scenarios with a presumed single solution,¹² Nabokov’s lectures posit an even more general affinity between textual and tactical games by reading authors from Dostoevsky to Austen as grandmasters of strategy games of their own invention.¹³ What distinguishes Transparent Things, published five years before the author’s death in 1977 and well into his repertoire of play, however, is that it from the first frames its activities as the matter of a game played between the literal figures of author and reader. That is, the text is unfailingly ‘transparent’ about its existence as text, the sort of thing which has been invented and written by an author in order to be read, interpreted, and perhaps, in the manner of a chess problem, ‘solved’ by the reader.

Indeed, Transparent Things begins at the precise moment when an unidentified narrating author first calls to a character (‘Here’s the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn’t hear me’), bickers with the implied reader’s assumed objections (‘Hullo, person! What’s the matter, don’t pull me. I’m not bothering him. Oh, all right. Hullo person … (last time, in a very small voice)’), and proceeds to draw the character, a person conveniently also named ‘Person’, into a fiction peppered with ambiguous remarks seemingly intended for the reader’s interpretive benefit (‘I shall explain’, the narrator announces, proceeding to instead only draw the reader’s attention to the ‘thin veneer of immediate reality […] spread over natural and artificial matter’).¹⁴ The instructions adopt the disorienting yet languid tone of a good-natured master introducing a novice to the rules of a game the two are about to play for the first time. After all, it would hardly be fair or, perhaps more importantly, fun for Nabokov to present the reader with a riddle the latter does not understand as one. A game is always partly structured by its constraints, whether one expertly navigates them or artfully inverts and extends their topologies, and so one must be aware of the existence of the board in order to take up the invitation to play. As Thomas Karshan observes, ‘the more rules there are, the more those rules generate possibilities of improvisation and play which make for the pleasure of the game’.¹⁵ By the same token, Nabokov’s literary game must bring out its underlying structure as a literary text if it is to be taken up as a game. As its title promises, it will be nothing but transparent about the sort of thing it is.

At the same time, if Nabokov promises that Things will be transparent, this does not mean that they will necessarily be apparent or precisely delineated. After all, transparency is not only the realm of the candid and clear, but also of the diffuse and vaporous. This is, in fact, precisely the paradox Nabokov relies on to propel the game past its introduction as one: while it quickly becomes apparent to the reader that Transparent Things’ narratorial ‘I’ is also authorial, its precise identity and vantage point remain airy and elusive throughout most if not all of the novella, so that the challenge to the reader instead becomes one of figuring out the precise who, where, when and why of authorship — literally of drawing a ‘figure out’ from the text. Five years on the tails of Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay on ‘The Death of the Author’, which provided an explicit framework for an approach to reading already in the process of articulation through modernist writing, Nabokov wittingly engages the reader in a fiction which explicitly relies on and demands reading for authorial presence.¹⁶ In doing so, he adopts as a permeating idea that of ‘transparency’, critical to his prose, poems and problems since at least the 1920s, when spectral characters had already established themselves as prone to flickering into and out of view of narrators eager to draw attention to the artifice of their own narration.¹⁷ But far from approaching transparency as the deceptive promise of disclosure, as have often his critics, Nabokov instead engages all of transparency’s incongruities, attending to its ability to encode both the palpable and the diffuse, the evident and the nebulous, the frank and the elusive.¹⁸ As a result, he produces a fiction which, as we will see, encourages incongruous practices of attending to text; complicates the roles of authors and readers; and metafictionally illuminates and resists some of cultural criticism’s most embedded assumptions, most prominently that the work of interpreters is that of looking past ‘surface’ in order to engage with the ‘depths’ which a text ‘really’ encloses.

But before attending to the play, or authorial ploy, of Transparent Things, let us first account for its pieces. If a plot is to be extracted from the novella, it is one which chronicles a number of episodes circling the life of one Hugh Person — to be confused with ‘you person’ — an inept and awkward North American literary editor and proofreader who repeatedly arrives at and departs the same small Swiss village from childhood until death. First, he does so with his father, the elder Person, who dies in a clothes-shop after trying on a pair of ill-fitting trousers. Next, it is to ingratiate himself to the famed and eccentric German-born novelist R., through the editing of whose English manuscripts Hugh comes to be acquainted with his future wife Armande. Finally, it is to reminisce after having strangled Armande in what Hugh claims to remember only as an oblivious, somnambulant fit — having since childhood been prone to episodes of sleepwalking prevented only by deliberate invocations of dream-tennis.¹⁹ On this last occasion, a fire breaks out in the hotel Hugh has been staying in and kills him, too, albeit not before offering him the honour of a dance with the polite, cheerily humming flamelets. Thus, Hugh is at last left with the potential to complete that ‘mental manoeuver needed to pass from one state of being into the other’²⁰ and join the ranks of such beings as authors, whom Nabokov has been wont to nudge all his most insubstantial characters towards over the course of over 50 years of authorship. But where Invitation to a Beheading’s diaphanous Cincinnatus or Bend Sinister’s spinning Krug can easily slip through the flapping scenery and phase from one state to the next — death and authorship simply modes of being in the grand scheme of things²¹ — Nabokov’s slow, graceless Person requires a little more authorial encouragement: ‘Easy, you know, does it, son’, reads Transparent Things’ narrator’s final line of instruction to its protagonist and, with it, the final line of Nabokov’s text.²²

In figuring out the thing that has explicitly declared itself transparent, we find ourselves in a precarious position. After all, there is a latent paradoxical quality to transparency: in order to qualify for the designation, a thing must either be easily ‘seen through’ or else easily ‘seen’. As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, the ‘transparent’ either has ‘the property of transmitting light, so as to render bodies lying beyond completely visible’ or else is itself easily ‘recognised, understood or detected’, forming the impression of that which is ‘frank, open, candid’ and ‘manifest, obvious, clear’.²³ The two definitional clusters, understood approximately as perfect permeability on the one hand and palpability on the other, operate in inverse proportion to each other. The more easily a thing is seen through, the less easily it is seen as a thing in its own right: transparency obscures the thing it describes. At the same time, the more one attends to the thing as such, allowing it to attain discernibility and solidity in its own right, the less one has insight into that which it lights, frames and encloses: transparency illuminates and reveals the thing, and in doing so obscures its contents.

This polysemy has allowed the ‘transparent’ to serve as the metaphorical matter for a number of ontologically and metaphysically slippery experiences.²⁴ Perception is, for instance, often claimed to be experienced as ‘transparent’ in one sense, which in fact means it is often also ‘transparent’ in the other. Perhaps originating in the work of G.E. Moore²⁵ but more famously articulated by Gilbert Harman, the argument is that when we perceive, we attend to the properties of the environment but not to the experience of perceiving itself, though it is the latter, which inevitably structures our experience of the former.²⁶ This is true even if the properties attended to, such as colour, do not actually exist outside of the experience of their perception: although a birch may have only ‘phenomenally’ white bark, the property of white is experienced as a property of the birch, not of the perception of the birch. As a result, the properties of interaction between the medium and the thing it encloses are intuitively transposed to the latter, so that the medium appears to attain one sort of transparency, that of being easily seen through, while the thing attains the other, that of being easily seen. But, of course, this is a precarious perspective: we know the birch has ‘only’ phenomenally white bark not because we experience its whiteness as phenomenal, but because we experience it changing colour under different light conditions, investigate the role wavelengths play in our perception of colour, and so forth. In these moments, we might instead come to think that in perceiving, properties of the medium are, effectively, all we can see, never being in a position to see through it the properties of the thing it encloses.²⁷

The enclosed thing and the medium thus alternate places as ‘true’ transparent matter of attention, and will continue to do so every time we remember that that which is seen through a transparent thing, such as glass, is in fact obscured behind the glass only to be observed in the glass, which is, in turn, never observed in and of itself. In attending to any one transparent thing — perception among them, and by extension also its particular modes of reading literature and viewing painting — we find that it is in fact prone to taking on several different, equally elusive modes of transparency, simultaneously too diffuse and indistinct to be seen in its own right and too solid and prone to producing interferences — not least of all the glare that results from sudden illumination — to allow much else to be seen outside of it. It is this quality of inevitable oscillation of modes of seeing which allows transparency to gain particular potential as a technique across texts which expose, articulate and question their own textual constraints, Nabokov’s among them.

At the core of Transparent Things is its invocation of the antinomy of transparency. Nabokov’s reader is asked to oscillate between, on the one hand, what Peter Lamarque refers to as ‘reading transparently’, that is by approaching the characters and events presented in the text as if they were part of a possible world upon which the lens of the text is simply turned, and, on the other hand, ‘reading opaquely’, that is by recognising the contents of the text as constituted through and dependent on its existence as text.²⁸ However, where Lamarque’s lexicon evokes the sense of a spectrum of textual densities, it does not quite capture the sense of incongruity and contradiction at play in a text like Nabokov’s. Instead, it would be more apt to observe that the reader of Transparent Things is asked to alternate between ‘reading transparently’ through the text and ‘reading transparently’ that which is text. In invoking transparency as literary technique, Nabokov embeds into Transparent Things the seemingly incongruous activities of seeing through the medium into the imagined times, spaces and entities it encloses, from Person to conflagration, and seeing the medium in its own right, the appearance or dismissal of Person merely a matter of authorial caprice. In fact, as we will attend to in continuation, the challenge to the reader thus becomes one of comprehending the coexistence of these two seemingly disparate modes, which each appear to momentarily obscure the other in the manner of the popular optical illusion wherein a ballerina depicted only in silhouette alternatively spins clockwise and counterclockwise.²⁹ That is, the reader must reconcile these two apparently incompatible modes by discerning the set of structural premises which enable their propulsion in both directions at once, in the case of the ballerina’s as well as Nabokov’s spinning — of bodies and of yarns, that is — indebted to careful shading which eludes the articulation of a precise viewpoint.

The task is complicated by the novella’s own advice about how it ought to be read. ‘When we concentrate on a material object’, the narrator of Transparent Things counsels us on its first page, ‘the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object’: this is why ‘Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want to stay at the exact level of the moment’.³⁰ If the sentiment appears familiar, it is remarkably like Nabokov’s own advice to his readers, especially across Strong Opinions, where the author writes that his ‘Reviewers […] made the lighthearted mistake of assuming that seeing through things is the professional function of a novelist. Actually, […] a novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past’.³¹ The nostalgic temptation to dive ‘through’ the present ‘into’ carefully cataloguing this or that detail originating in the past would interfere with the momentum and precision of Nabokov’s spin — both in the sense in which Nabokov’s craft is that of spinning yarns and in which it relies on his ability to serve unexpected twists and turns mid-game.³² Charles Lock has observed that ‘Paying attention to and in Nabokov often entails abnormal reading practices: the reader must focus on characters, letters and sounds instead of on the ideas that ought to be excited in her by them’,³³ and it is true that across Nabokov’s fictions, the uppermost and outermost layers of text, not least among them phonology and orthography, become critical to maintaining spin even as personal histories stutter, stall, and come to dead ends. Or, as the narrator of Transparent Things puts it, one must keep to the ‘surface’ of the matter at hand, ‘otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish’.³⁴ If the resemblance between the words of the text’s narrator-author and its author, Nabokov, is to be credited, as readers, we know we are to approach Transparent Things by prioritising the apparent surface upon which its miracles appear at the expense of the depths it promises to enclose, lest we get mired in molasses.

Of course, this is a decidedly ambiguous piece of advice. It is too immediately and candidly given for its incredible transparency not to seem patently incredible, especially appearing as it does in a text formulated around the identity and sincerity of its narrating consciousness. As diligent readers of institutionally ordained texts, even the most cursory instruction would have inclined us to be suspicious of any advice to ‘skim’, as Nabokov’s narrator is wont to phrase it, or affect the self-sabotaging feat of a ‘surface reading’, least of all when instructed to do so from a position of specious authority. Surely, we may think, no author would seriously instruct us to avoid reading ‘too deeply’ into text? Yet if we do not take Things’ narrator-author’s advice as sincere, it is difficult to know what else to do with it. Would a text truly anticipate resistance, appear to reverse tracks, and tell us to read it for its surface only to instead induce us to read it, as we already expect, ‘in depth’? The purpose to such a deception is too elusive not to leave us open to falling prey to it regardless, unsure of which of the author’s sly stratagems to look out for — which is, we might begin to suspect, precisely the point. Nabokov has characterised some of his writing as producing ‘clear, but weirdly misleading sentences’,³⁵ to which the critic William W. Rowe has added a penchant for ‘deceptive, but weirdly honest’ ones too.³⁶ No matter how we read Transparent Things’ instructions, the text draws out its own textuality in order to evade established practices of reading and place itself outside of categories of either sincerity, perhaps insincerely offered, or insincerity, even sincerely disclosed. If transparency is often understood as an offer, or articulation of an offer, of candidness and disclosure,³⁷ whatever one may ultimately conclude about its reliability, then Transparent Things’ insistence on evading these categories entirely functions to destabilise the idea of a shared, stable set of presumptions between reader and writer — and to invite the reader to consider an approach ‘forgetful of the rules’ in the manner Karshan describes of the player who ‘fantasises the completely unrestricted play which would lift him entirely out of the world of rules’, including presumably those of established textual practice.³⁸

At the same time as the text draws attention to and confuses processes of reading, it also exposes and dilates those of writing. The novella’s authorial-narratorial consciousness’ first act is to write, and in doing so conjure into existence, a person of interest: ‘Here’s the person I want. Hullo, person!’, the text tells us, and after the requisite number of calls, a ‘Person’ obligingly appears. If the person in question is also named Person, all the better to slot him into place as a generalisable third-person protagonist. The result is that of a conspicuously schematic, diffuse fiction, particularly when Nabokov allows his narrator to detail the rote proceedings of Person’s life, offering such clipped observations befitting of an assembly-line manual as ‘Person pays alert driver’, ‘Person remained alone’, ‘Person followed his chance girl’ and ‘Person felt the pull of gravity’.³⁹ As these imperatives continue, we are invited into ever-increasing implied collusion between author and reader, that omnipresent ‘we’ who calls into existence, observes and directs ‘our poor’ and ‘little friend’, whether Person or incidental pencil, even if ‘Direct interference […] does not enter our scope of activity; […] the most we can do […] is to act as a breath of wind and to apply the lightest, the most indirect pressure’.⁴⁰ Of course, reader and author are never true equals in this endeavour: it is only one of us who invents the game, while the other can only be inventive in our play. We are implicated in writing largely in the manner of Nabokov’s unnamed New York interviewer in Strong Opinions: an entity whose participation drives the exchange, as written, only when and where Nabokov wants it to, even if the interviewer’s participation is neither entirely scripted nor incapable of introducing novel interpretation into the author’s texts.⁴¹

Throughout, ‘we’ are motioned to attend to, focus on, and occupy the same plains as all of the past, present and future ‘Persons’ across Things: ‘Now comes the act of attention’ the text instructs early on, establishing an approach which will sporadically provide such explicit spatio-temporal directions as ‘Now we have to bring into focus the main street of Witt as it was on Thursday’ or else ‘We are back in New York and this is their last evening together’.⁴² In magic, summoning often operates by incantation: repeat the name ‘Bloody Mary’ three times in front of a looking-glass, and the spirit will appear before you, pulled through the mirrored surface which connects all immaterial things. In the equally arcane art of writing, conjuring a person requires inventing an appellation to bind the effigy to the idea and thus propel the ritual: it is only when the narrator has begun to sketch the details of our protagonist’s life, in Chapter 2, that Person sprouts the first name of ‘Hugh’.⁴³ At times, characters other than Person, too, enter the tale for longer than a turn of phrase and earn a more personal ‘Person’, if not always a name: ‘This Henry Emery Person, our Person’s father’, opens Chapter 6, ‘might be described as a well-meaning, earnest, dear little man, or as a wretched fraud, depending on the angle of light and the position of the observer’,⁴⁴ at the same time alerting us to the play of light on the transparent matter of text. Similarly, in Chapter 9, the narrator drolly observes that ‘Hugh and the new, irresistible Person’, his future wife Armande, whom he will turn out to find largely incomprehensible, ‘had by now switched to French, which he spoke at least as well as she did English’.⁴⁵

If in English, Person connotes ‘anybody’, its French analogue, personne, in the absence of a particle also connotes ‘nobody’, which is what Hugh and Armande will largely turn out to be to one another throughout their liaison. In fact, it is through Armande’s French-tinged mispronunciation of his name that Hugh will also become a particular sort of nobody who also serves as an anybody, phonetically transfigured into ‘you’, leaving only the silent, residual orthographic trace of a ‘he’. As we flip through the pages, we thus also find increasing instructions, directives and invitations to occupy the spatiotemporal realm of the ‘Person’ before us in a manner which encourages grammatical amalgamation not only with a third-person ‘he’ or analogue but instead with the second-person ‘you’: ‘As the person, Hugh Person’, that is ‘you person’, begins Chapter 2.⁴⁶ By Chapter 3, the text is already providing instruction pertaining to the reader’s gender and finical predilections: ‘Hugh Person, a tidy man’, that is ‘you person, a tidy man’, ‘noticed that the middle drawer of an old desk relegated to a dark corner of the room, and supporting there a bulbless and shadeless lamp resembling the carcass of a broken umbrella, had not been reinserted properly’.⁴⁷ This shift permeates from the implied phonographic to the explicit orthographic by Chapter 13, when the ‘He’ who ‘decided it was time for some more refreshments — and saw her sitting at a sidewalk café’ seamlessly transitions into a ‘You’ who ‘swerved towards her, thinking she was alone; then noticed, too late, a second handbag on the opposite chair’.⁴⁸

That is, Transparent Things petitions the reader to pass back and forth from looking over the author’s shoulder, somewhere between an apprentice and an audience, as the latter motions and shouts to the ‘Person’ in the distance; to occupying the same time and space, perhaps ‘in Witt’ or ‘on a Thursday’, as the ‘Person’ of interest; to finally being absorbed into ‘you person’ and sharing in the ‘I’s’ experience of attending to interiors, implements and even atomic debris: as Hugh notes the ‘improperly reinserted’ drawer, the narration adopts a ludicrous preoccupation with the pencil which ‘sho[ots] out’ from the conspicuous compartment and, attending to ever-finer levels of detail, invites the reader to consider ‘the complicated fate of [its] shavings’, delving even into ‘atoms of dust’, and thus become ensconced in all of the historical, philosophical and psychological detritus of Transparent Things.

Of course, the invitation for the reader to ‘sink into’ the depths of, as a later chapter explicates, all the ‘transparent people and processes’ present in the text with an ‘author’s delight’, albeit while frequently ‘singl[ing] out for this report […] only one Person’,⁴⁹ is an elegant bit of legerdemain. Transparent Things’ self-aware narration, wherein an authorial consciousness regularly appears to comment on the progression of the narrative, in fact prevents readers from being able to submerge into the experience and look through the text into the ‘depths’ it purports to enclose: As you/Hugh begin/s to attend to the remnants of the room inside which the eminent pencil resides, presumably left over ‘by the lodger or servant’, the text parenthetically disrupts immersion with a terse omniscient ‘(actually neither)’. Immediately after, the enigma of ‘who had been last to check if [the drawer] was empty’ is quickly dispensed with by the author-narrator’s bracketed ‘(nobody had)‘.⁵⁰ In a particularly striking example of authorial-narratorial intrusion, Nabokov details Hugh’s observation of an item inside a souvenir shop: ‘He found rather fetching the green figurine of a female skier made of a substance he could not identify through the show glass’, immediately parenthetically disclosing that ‘(it was “alabasterette”, imitation aragonite, carved and coloured in the Grumbel jail by a homosexual convict, rugged Armand Rave, who had strangled his boyfriend’s incestuous sister)‘.⁵¹ What at first appears to be a droll non-sequitur which elaborates the artifice of authorial omniscience in fact reveals the trajectory of the text: the ‘green figurine of the girl skier’ is glimpsed once again later, inside the hotel room in which Hugh attempts to trace the steps of his honeymoon with Armande after having strangled her in his sleep.⁵² If Armand’s last name, ‘Reve’, is one accent off from the French ‘rêve’ (‘dream’), the state during which Hugh will strangle Armande; and if Armande’s own French birth name, ‘Chamar’, is not far off from ‘cauchemar’ (‘nightmare’), all the more conspicuous. The apparently inconsequential thing which in its first instantiation draws attention away from the spatiotemporal realm of the text’s persons, towards Transparent Things’ existence as text, thus at the same time covertly intimates further details about the relationships and eventual trajectories of its ‘Persons’: Armand the homosexual strangler stands retrospectively as a funhouse mirror image of the heterosexually strangled Armande.

Even while inviting us to ‘sink in’, the text thus abounds with artfully placed smudges on glass. Nabokov ensures, for example, that we are aware that Hugh’s fellow lodger while at university, ‘Jack Moore’ is parenthetically ‘(no relation)’ in advance of ever presenting us with another character by the name of Moore of whom we might assume he is a relation,⁵³ and who we will later find intimately connects Hugh to his author. There is a sense of ubiquity to such recurring figurines, appellations and other coincidences which Nabokov scatters across the surface of Transparent Things, where they appear to interfere while revealing. Late in the text, when we are told that a magazine in a waiting room ‘had actually been left there by Hugh eight years ago, but this line nobody followed up’,⁵⁴ this is drawn out even more completely, the implication being that this coincidence, in fact any coincidence, whether pencil, Moore, figurine, magazine or indeed the realisation that Hugh and Armande’s mothers had both been ‘a country veterinary’s daughter’, could have been followed up, written and read as a means of accessing and exposing the novella’s machinations had the author desired to do so, or the trailing reader known to. It pays, Transparent Things tells us, to ‘skim’ and ‘slide’ from one non-sequitur, reduplication, tautology, quip, pun, and phonological or orthographic loop to the other in order to reveal and delight in the intricate architectures which turn out to scaffold the text and all of its Persons. It pays, in other words, to attend to what is, or appears to be, ‘surface’.

In fact, as we will see, one solution to the ‘problem’ of authorial presence posed by the text is, as both of its authors have intimated, on its surface — even if the game turns out to in fact be one of extending its own topologies past notions of both ‘problem’ and ‘solution’. Nabokov described a novella he was working on at a time shortly preceding the publication of Transparent Things as ‘about the soul of a novelist who has just died of liver disease’,⁵⁵ an affliction R., the novelist whom Hugh attends to, shares, his ‘wretched liver as heavy as a rejected manuscript’.⁵⁶ It is unsurprising, then, that R. regularly appears to intrude into the tale as a contender for the authorial consciousness at its core, most evidently in the epistolary episode between Armande’s murder and Hugh’s attempt to retrace the steps of their honeymoon in Chapter 21, in which he petitions for news of Hugh. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that this episode appears to bridge a time when R. is alive, interacting with Hugh, and after he has passed, like all transparent things, into the authorial beyond, from whence he, and at a distance from him Nabokov, are able to retroactively narrate Hugh’s life in what will become Transparent Things.

More tellingly, if Transparent Things’ author-narrator’s introduction of Person, whose name is parenthetically indexed as a ‘(corrupted “Peterson” and pronounced “Parson by some)’ appears to poke fun at the convolutions of omniscient narration by extending into etymological minutiae, it also anticipates the interaction as part of which R. will learn precisely this fact about Person: ‘I don’t think you met Mr. Tamworth. Person, pronounced Parson; and Tamworth […]’, R. introduces the two, prompting Person to correct him: ‘No […] it does not come from Parson, but rather from Peterson’, earning him the rote but familial response of ‘O.K., son’.⁵⁷ The latter is the same endearment the narrator will later use to beckon Hugh towards the state of authorship: ‘Easy, you know, does it, son’.⁵⁸

Other gestures towards the relevance of R.’s intimate experiences to the author-narrator of Transparent Things’ ability to offer ludicrous and lascivious asides leave a more discreet trail throughout the text: if Hugh’s college roommate Moore is emphatically ‘no relation’, the other Moore of the novella is none other than R.’s step-daughter Julia, whom the novelist appears to have approached in much the same manner as Humbert Humbert did Lolita: ‘I have been accused of trifling with minors, but my minor characters are untouchable’, R. puns.⁵⁹ The author-narrator and Hugh are in fact uniquely connected in their shared fixation on Julia: Hugh, who had once attempted to attract her attentions, proofreads and edits R.’s texts only to wonder when ‘the writer had begun to debauch Julia: had it been in her childhood […]? Or did he flirt with her in her first college year […]? How good to have that type of talent!‘.⁶⁰ The author, in turn, gets caught up describing Hugh’s coffee date with Julia by lamenting that the latter ‘had grown even prettier than she had been two years ago. Shall I now see her in dreams with those new eyebrows, that new long hair? How fast do dreams catch up with new fashions? Will the next dream still stick to her Japanese-doll hairdo?‘.⁶¹ Indeed, as ‘Julia and [Hugh]’ appear to confirm ‘a pact of the past’, they are transfigured into an ‘(alias Alice and the narrator)’, also confirming the association.⁶²

The narrator’s incidental remarks are not, it would transpire, entirely incidental, but turn out to refer, again and again, to experiences R. has had; people R. has found consequential, whose pasts he is invested in luxuriating in even as he prompts his readers to glide past; and verbal tics R. tends towards in his writing, which, in turn, incline towards lampooning Nabokov’s: ‘“Mister R. […]” […] wrote English considerably better than he spoke it. On contact with paper it acquired a shapeliness, a richness, an ostensible dash, that caused some of the less demanding reviewers in his adopted country to call him a master stylist’,⁶³ we are told, and might find ourselves recalling that while the Russian-born Nabokov has routinely been described as a ‘master stylist’,⁶⁴ he often wrote of being a far more apt writer than speaker of English — going so far, even, as to describe himself as a ‘wretched speaker’ whose ‘vocabulary dwells deep in [the] mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone’.⁶⁵ Faced with the task of proofreading one of R.’s manuscripts, Hugh finds himself having to puzzle out a penchant for obscure obscenity reminiscent of Nabokov’s own: ‘how did a “balanic plum” look, or should he cap the “b” and insert a “k” after “l”?‘.⁶⁶ Earlier, the author-narrator similarly observes ‘the dream of a Lutwidgean’ suspended in Armande’s mother’s home as Hugh studies her childhood pictures.⁶⁷ That ‘R’ is also an inversion of the Russian ‘Я’ (‘I’) serves only to tighten the knot: Hugh’s author is of course Hugh’s author, refracted through the text. That is, the appellation positions the reader and author each on one side of the transparent surface within which the text can be seen: what to us is ‘R.’, to the narrator who addresses us is simply ‘I’, transfigured through the text.

Apart from implicating R. as the author of Transparent Things, the single initial also embeds a prismatic pattern into transparent textual matter by proposing an affinity between R. and Nabokov that extends beyond matters of style. Notably, Nabokov wrote under the folkloric name ‘V. Sirin’ and introduced more than one character by the name of ‘V.’ with authorial pretentions into his fictions.⁶⁸ Indeed, in addition to both being a ‘sluggish’ sort of writer,⁶⁹ ‘a snail carrying its house at the rate of 200 pages […] per year’,⁷⁰ R.’s approach to reading also closely resembles Nabokov’s own, spotlighting ‘[the] spine (the true reader’s organ)’ as Nabokov did when he remarked that one ‘reads the book […] with [one’s] spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle’.⁷¹ But if Nabokov appears to have written some of himself into R.,⁷² the latter has also written Nabokov into his novels. We learn this from Hugh, who in the process of proofreading R.’s latest piece queries ‘the middle word in the name of an incidental character, “Adam von Librikov”’, an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov, ‘because the German particle seemed to clash with the rest’. Lest the reader not see the multiple translucent layers that produce a play of light on the surface of the name by virtue of seeing it too deeply as a name, the author assists with the sporadic bit of ‘translucing’ he is wont to extend: ‘or was the entire combination a sly scramble?‘.⁷³ At the same time, in what begins to look like infinite anagrammatic recursion, Hugh’s query also reintroduces ‘R.’ into ‘Adam von Librikov’, since the German-born R. provides the ‘German particle’ to be found in the midst, seven letters to each side, of ‘Vladimir Nabokov’.

Further, if Nabokov’s novella explores ‘transparent things’, R.’s has a kindred ‘holographic nature’ with an especial ‘translucidity of […] textual flow’.⁷⁴ Nabokov writes R. as making a show of puckishly attributing this only to a ‘prefer[ence] it not […] be read by’ simply anyone, least of all ‘Tom Tam or one of his boy typists’,⁷⁵ much like the author himself has been wont to do: ‘My books, all my books, are addressed not to “dunderheads”’, Nabokov writes in Strong Opinions, ‘not to the cretins who believe that I like long Latinate words; not to the learned loonies who find sexual or religious allegories in my fiction’.⁷⁶ Nabokov’s fictions flicker, instead, we are to understand, as a means of ‘evading’ the tired constraints of psychological, psychoanalytic and other symbolic readings. At the same time, in the very act of invoking these avenues of interpretation, even noncommittally and absurdly, Nabokov does not elude them so much as implicate them as avenues of interpretation while pre-emptively embedding into them a degree of scepticism, thus ensuring they cannot be read as definitively sincere or insincere, reliable or unreliable, serious or frivolous, but instead affect in his fictions a kaleidoscopic presentation.⁷⁷

This is ironised more generally in his writing of R. While in the epistolary Chapter 21, the authorial ‘I’/R. attributes all of his decisions only to airs and whimsy, the readerly R./‘we’ appears to sincerely, at times even desperately, demand information about Person as a ‘code’ to some critical ‘secret’ revelation beyond the particularities of Hugh’s existence: ‘[I]n a kind of code that would tell me you bear in mind this letter, give me, as a good old gossip, some information about him’, R. writes: ‘Please tell me all this […] because you can smuggle all kinds of secret information for this poor soul in your letter about him’.⁷⁸ This correlates, also, to Nabokov’s approach across Transparent Things: we are to understand Person simultaneously as nothing but a frivolous invention to deter the ‘Tom Tams’ and ‘Paul Plams’ of the world and yet also as the means to ‘decoding’ some elusive, ‘secret’ solution presumed to have been embedded into the ‘problem’ of the text by observing how Transparent Things, when the light hits it just so, illuminates within its thin, elusive matter the impression of depths concealed behind but in fact produced within it. In engaging and amplifying the oscillating potentials of transparency, incongruous with the logic of stable, distinct categories of surface and depth, in order to draw this parallel between texts and authors, Transparent Things leads us to consider that it is, inevitably, surface which merits our attention — because it is, in fact, surface wherein all textual phenomena are produced and perceived.

At the same time, this apparent revelation must also be approached suspiciously: if Transparent Things advises avoiding the ‘seductive’ past along with its potential to invite ‘involuntarily sink[ing] into the history of [this or] that object’, lest one find oneself no longer in the company of ‘miracle-workers’ but instead ‘among staring fish’,⁷⁹ the comprehension that this sentiment is narrated through R., whose interest in maintaining the idea that ‘[t]he charm of the Past Tense lay in its secrecy’ is tied up in his own intimate abuses, then this calls into question all of his prior advice. If, that is, R.’s critical instruction is less aesthetically motivated than predicated on the need to keep a predatory relationship with his stepchild within the insulating realm of rumour and suggestion,⁸⁰ then his narration is likely to advocate precisely for the sort of critical approach which obscures and absolves a passively and amorphously constructed notion of ‘the past’. Even more to the point, if R.’s authorship is deliberately aligned with Nabokov’s own, and Nabokov’s with R.’s, then the entirety of the novella engenders a more pervasive sort of suspicion still, one wherein the reader is tasked with diagnosing how its disparate authors, at different levels of or, rather, in text, operate in relation to one another. Is there a means of distinguishing between the ‘author’ and author who diffract across the transparent matter of Things? Or, is Nabokov’s self-alignment with R. an invitation to distrust him, too, without ever having the advantage of being able to see text, or through it, absent his orchestrations? Transparent Things invites, even authorises, the reader to be the one take on the task of crafting meaning out of its ‘translucing’ even as the novella continually underscores its dependence on authorship. At the same time, having earlier had the opportunity of observing, then practicing inscribing meaning into text, the reader is also invited into authorship. That is, if Nabokov’ earlier fictions often ‘depict[ed] the death or absence of his authors’, as Thomas Karshan has observed,⁸¹ then the late Transparent Things adds to this an explicit invitation for the reader to take the author’s place, further complicated by the author, or indeed authors, not having been entirely absented from it.

In describing the evening precipitating Hugh’s somnambulant strangulation of Armande, Nabokov draws out particularly aptly the affinity between Hugh and ‘you’ as readers of elusive, oscillating texts, and R. and ‘Я’ as writers thereof, with the reader refracted in both: ‘Our Person, our reader’, he writes as Hugh attends to his principal client’s manuscript — at the same time as R., on the other side of the transparent surface, pens his next manuscript in the afterlife — ‘was not sure he entirely approved of R.’s luxuriant and bastard style’.⁸² If ‘you’ do not fully approve of the text’s ‘I’’s stylings, it is because R. and Nabokov both deliberately evade a conclusive reading, asking instead for participation in a metafictional optical illusion. But that R. also sounds like ‘our’ is no coincidence, inviting collusion between author and reader, if in a lopsided companionship where we might suspect power inevitably accumulates into the author’s hands: ‘you’ might not even be sure you entirely approve of ‘our’ style.

In this manner, five years on the tails of Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay on ‘The Death of the Author’,⁸³ Nabokov engages the reader in a fiction which resists Barthes’ influential framework, and instead relies on and demands reading for authorial presence — including at several levels at once, while inverting and extending the topologies of text by allowing authors, author-narrators and even author-readers to nest into one another in an infinite recursion of implied authorship, if perpetually of indeterminate sincerity, reliability and capability. That is, if it is R.’s authorship which is embedded into and directs Transparent Things, it is also a text written by an author we are to understand is not only neither sincere nor reliable, but who is quite literally dead. While for Barthes, ‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’ functioned as an assertion about the nature of interpretation,⁸⁴ for Nabokov, it explicitly becomes part of the novella’s ironic plot, so that it is the passing of the author, both into death and into the apparently concomitant state of authorship, which initiates the reader into taking on the processes of writing and interpretation: the author is dead, the reader must make do. In the author’s most authorial state, the latter is also least authoritative. On the other hand, it is the author’s death which has ensured the latter’s particular point of view permeates and has become essential to structuring the conditions, progression of and revelation of the strategic scenario embedded into the text: the author is dead, the reader can no longer escape the author’s sphere of spectral influence. At the author’s most evidently dead, the latter’s presence also most thoroughly permeates the text — and serves to draw out, simultaneously, the authorial presence with perhaps the widest viewing angle of text, whether from without or within it, Nabokov himself. Michael Wood has remarked of Nabokov’s fictions that ‘The author is not dead or intending to die, he is seeking a perpetual controlling share in the interest his work arouses’.⁸⁵ Perhaps, viewed from another angle, we might instead observe that Nabokov is inevitably embedded into his fictions by positing that there exists no single, stable approach to authorship, or by implication readership, least of all across his transparent texts. Presence and absence are, after all, partly also a matter of whether one looks at or else through.

The transparent modes which intertwine through the novella structure a metafiction wherein the author, who has an affinity with but is not identical to Nabokov himself, is simultaneously always alive and dead, and the puzzle, even once authorial identity and point of view have been revealed, does not resolve but extends ever-further, demanding articulation of the sort of point of view which could accommodate such a layering of disparate points of view. If a conventional compromise between authorial intent and reader response might be to proclaim that meaning is collectively constructed between author and reader, as Jarosinski does,⁸⁶ Nabokov turns this on its head, allowing that it may be construed simultaneously by both at once — reader written in by author, and author resurrected in the process of reading — as well as by neither — author dead and reader doomed to trailing behind a corpse. Furthermore, neither author nor reader can entirely be relied upon: the first focused on ‘surface’ in a manner which serves to draw out the intricate patterns across text while suspiciously also backgrounding his own criminality into the recesses of a purportedly pedestrian ‘depth’, and the second consigned to beginning at a disadvantage and always lagging several steps behind, saddled with ingrained presumptions of the pervasive dichotomy of ‘surface’ and ‘depth’ which have no place in attending to transparent things.

In the end, the most effective approach to interpretation may be one which allows the author’s focus on surface while also divorcing it from its relationship with, and hence evading the reader’s proclivity towards, ‘depth’. That is, drawing on Nabokov’s invocation of transparent matter wherein all things appearing ‘behind’ a thing such as glass are in fact to be understood as more precisely ‘in’ it, one might discard R.’s artful apologism for surface as an alternative to depth, as well as the reader’s residual instincts towards depth — and, instead, subtracting them one from the other, arrive at ‘surface’ absent depth, which in fact becomes something of its own entirely. After all, depth is no more than an impression produced in and attributable to that which appears as, but is not quite precisely, surface — at least not without an inclination towards Nabokov’s impossible topologies. Nabokov writes Transparent Things as a metafiction where any and no approaches to practices of writing and reading will do, and where all invention exists only in the thin, delicately layered oscillating matter where all signs and symbols are produced and perceived in the disparate but interrelated optical phenomena made possible by the antinomy of transparency itself. Indeed, the only thing Nabokov’s reader can be sure of is the importance of that space where writing and reading is at its most transparently fluid, kaleidoscopic, and topologically elastic: that which appears to be, or is, ‘surface’.

In conclusion, what emerges from Nabokov’s engagement of the full range of transparency as literary technique is a text which is always also about the constraints of its own invention and the impossibilities of its interpretability. In oscillating between, on the one hand, inviting immersion into text which often occludes and, on the other hand, awareness of text which can appear to interfere while revealing, Transparent Things dismantles the dichotomous logic of categories of ‘surface’ and ‘depth’ which has long been endemic to critical studies, from early Freudian and Marxist approaches to the more recent emergence of feminist and queer theory. As Frederic Jameson wrote in 1981 in The Political Unconscious, drawing on one of the possible iterations of transparency, ‘If everything were transparent, then no ideology would be possible, and no domination either’.⁸⁷ That is, according to Jameson, cultural forms are to be understood as consisting of an occluding ‘surface’ and a profound if potentially insidious ‘depth’ which can and ought to be read for by looking ‘through’ surface into what is ‘really’ there. While a number of critics have taken to defending what is thus understood as ‘surface’ against its detractors, especially in recent decades, its dichotomous relationship with depth has not been so easily discarded and tends to persist even in the most spirited of ‘surface readings’. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, for example, resist the marginalisation of surface by arguing against the idea that ‘the most significant truths are’ necessarily ‘not immediately apprehensible’, that ‘literal meaning’ is incompatible with complexity, and by drawing out the potentials of ‘text-based’ approaches such as discourse analysis.⁸⁸ ‘[W]hat lies in plain sight,’ they write, ‘is worthy of attention but often eludes observation — especially by deeply suspicious detectives who look past the surface in order to root out what is underneath it’.⁸⁹ But this still leaves surface in a position where it must be legitimised through its usual, if favourably slanted, relationship with the ostensibly opposed category of depth. The latter is, in turn, problematised, usually by being ascribed the tendency to introduce alterations into text. As Susan Sontag provides the template for in ‘Against Interpretation’, advocating for transparency in its sense of permeability, ‘literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of a poem or play or novel or story into something else’⁹⁰ than that which is presumably ‘really’ there.

Indeed, surface, in such examinations, has a tendency to simply supplant depth as the thing that is ‘really’ there — rarely is there an acknowledgement that neither need exist at all. Jason M. Baskin perhaps comes closest to articulating the illogic of these critically entrenched categories when he proposes an approach undertaken with ‘soft eyes’ which operate under the assumption that ‘depth is not […] a separate space located “behind” the object’s surface […] even surfaces have depths that cannot be seen, yet can still be accessed’, so that one ‘does not venture “behind” or “beneath” the surface’ but instead ‘sees into surfaces, in order to gain access to the depths of surface itself’.⁹¹ If for Baskin, surface ‘cannot be separated from — or conceived without — depth’, for Nabokov, who looks not softly but ‘transparently’, surface and depth more precisely do not quite exist. Instead, they describe evaluative frameworks placed upon the same transparent matter, an attempt at clear separation of what might be conceived of as style and substance, form and content, signifier and signified, or layers of writing and reading, occluding one or another dimension of text whenever there is an attempt to treat them as distinct structures.

If one would usually expect to attend to text when it delves into the ‘depths’ of its characters’ lives, as we have seen in Transparent Things, activities of ‘sinking’ into to the histories of this or that person or object in fact consistently turn out to be less informative than ‘skims’ over the ‘surface’, where premature and seemingly arbitrary details about the appeal of green figurines, the activities of particularly dextrous convicts, and instances of phonological and orthographic innovation all expose the structures underlying Nabokov’s play, and invite one to trial and extend them. At the same time, as we have also become aware, attendance to surface does not involve a deliberate evasion of ‘depth’, since the two are not dichotomous — attempts to insist that they are turn out, in fact, to be rogue narrators’ strategic ploys to engender sympathy, and limit scrutiny, from their gullible readers. In this manner, the ‘foundations’ of the text are always ‘on’ but in fact ‘in’ its apparent surface, which, by virtue of being transparent, is the same thin sheet of matter prone to optical phenomena wherein all impressions of ‘depth’ are also produced and sustained. That is, it is not that surface does not exist without depth, but that surface and depth are words for the same phenomenon, ‘surface’ producing ideas of depth and ‘depth’ appearing in surface. Indeed, for Nabokov, surface, thus conceived, serves as the space where writing and reading are, necessarily, at their most fluid, malleable, and kaleidoscopic.

Of course, none of Nabokov’s interest in or use of transparency as literary technique is limited to Transparent Things, nor has no implications for authors beyond Nabokov himself. The former novella simply serves as the author’s most emphatic expression of a particular understanding of and attraction to transparent matter, which has permeated his oeuvre from at least the 1920s and 1930s until his death in 1977, and which has commonalities with other authors whose work is also concerned with its own processes of invention and interpretability. Indeed, among Nabokov’s texts, a number are embedded into and evident in the apparent surface of 1972’s Transparent Things, not least of all the refracted plot of Lolita, most explicit where Hugh ‘wondered […] if he would not disappoint the expectations of Julia, who according to Phil has been debauched at thirteen by R., right at the start of her mother’s disastrous marriage’.⁹² If transparency encodes both the potential for elucidation and an existential threat to the avenue which makes it possible, a revelation which is also a disappearance, it is indeed particularly suited to Nabokov’s demonstrable interest in textual sleight of hand. As Christopher L. Miller has observed, ‘all hoaxes are structured’ as ‘tricks that reveal truths, at least potentially, and eventually’.⁹³ Nabokov’s hoaxes are often tricks which reveal the absence of truths, dismantling and problematising notions of author and reader, trickery and sincerity, whimsy and strategy, and not least of all the relationship which underpins all of the above: surface and depth.