Nabokov’s Experiments and the Nature of Fictionality

The case of a character in a novel bearing the name or likeness of its nonfictional creator dramatizes the fault line that separates fiction from nonfiction, a distinction more durable than many care to acknowledge yet not as unbridgeable as others would aver. We can get a sense of what is at stake in this distinction by glancing at the way Nabokov begins his afterword, “On a Book Entitled Lolita”: “After doing my impersonation of the suave John Ray, the character in Lolita who pens the Foreword, any comments coming straight from me may strike one—may strike me, in fact—as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book” (1970: 313). One of the great intellectual achievements of modern narrative theory was to establish a fundamental differentiation between the narrator and the author and to ensure that the positions advocated by the one are not simplistically and erroneously predicated of the other. And this distinction is most important for the understanding of Lolita. But the separability of author and narrator does not mean that the two cannot be brought closely together (even in Lolita, as we will see).

The differentiation between the author and a fictive being who closely resembles the author was central to the theory and practice of classic modernist fiction, and it is worthwhile to review it here. In the major novels of Joyce, Proust, and others, some of the characters are undisguised versions of their authors’ earlier selves who think thoughts and undergo events similar to those experienced by their makers. For the most part such correspondences are ultimately adventitious: our reading of Ulysses is unchanged if we learn that the young Joyce actually had a conversation on Shakespeare’s Hamlet with John Eglington and others in the National Library in Dublin, rather like Stephen Dedalus does. Or, more deviously, readers’ interpretations of Ulysses are not likely to change even if they learn that it was not the young Joyce but rather Oliver St John Gogarty, the model for Buck Mulligan, who paid the rent for the Martello tower Joyce stayed in, whereas in the novel it is clear that Stephen pays the rent and Buck thereby becomes the “usurper.” In these cases, the life of the author is simply convenient raw material that will later be reproduced or radically reworked in the storyworld depending on the requirements of the composition of the text. If Dedalus needs to be dispossessed of his lodging, he will be, whether or not Joyce actually was. The relation then between life and art is one of largely indifferent correspondences. Insofar as the author’s life forms an appropriate narrative trajectory, its salient details will remain; insofar as those details fail to cohere, new ones will quickly be invented.

In this context it is illuminating to recall the reflections of author Christopher Isherwood on the character-narrator whom he created and who bears the same name: “In writing Goodbye to Berlin, I destroyed a certain portion of my real past. I did this deliberately, because I preferred the simplified, more creditable, more exciting fictitious past which I’d created to take its place. Indeed, it had now become hard for me to remember just how things really had happened. I only knew how I would have liked them to have happened—that is to say, how I had made them happen in my stories. And so, gradually, the real past had disappeared, along with the real Christopher Isherwood of twenty years ago. Only the Christopher Isherwood of the stories remained” (1954: vii–viii).

Similarly Nabokov’s earlier novels require a substantial separation of the fictionalized and the autobiographical self, even when, as in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941/1959), the narrator’s own life merges with the novels written by his half-brother, novels that he is trying to comprehend and save from critics who insist on—what else?—a narrow biographical reductionism. The narrator of this work, identified in the text only as “V.,” does have numerous features in common with Nabokov himself; his elusive alter ego, Sebastian...