Literary Stereography: Nabokov Drawing and Reading Maps

Abstract:According to Vladimir Nabokov, exactness of detail in the composition and the reading of literary texts can yield "the sensual spark without which the book is dead": one needs, for instance, to understand the topography of Mansfield Park in order to respond to Austen's "stereographic charm." Speaking after Stuart Gilbert's chart of the episodes of Joyce's Ulysses but before Gifford and Seidman's maps in Ulysses Annotated, Nabokov protested against "the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings" and advised careful readers to "prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom's and Stephen's intertwining itineraries clearly traced." Nabokov himself draws maps in his (posthumously published) lecture notes of the 1950s. This paper comments on the "stereographic" implications of his maps and then turns to Nabokov's biography of Pushkin's African great grandfather. Studying the possible origins of Abram Gannibal, Nabokov reads maps of Ethiopia. Though his essay is largely a matter of the critique of sources, the course of Ethiopian river-beds seems to give him "the sensual spark" which, despite his vexed insistence on the literal in Ulysses, follows Joyce's novel in understated transmutation of stereographic detail into symbolism.