"Perplex'd in the Extreme": Moral Facets of Vladimir Nabokov's work

Nabokov Studies, 2 (1995), 135-52. GERARD DE VRIES (Voorschoten, The Netherlands) "PERPLEX'D IN THE EXTREME"': MORAL FACETS OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S WORK The chearful sage, when solemn dictates fail, Conceals the moral counsel in a tale. Samuel Johnson (The Rambler, October 30, 1750) This article discusses the overt moral aspects of Nabokov's work with special attention to Laughter in the Dark and Lolita, the novels which have suffered most from the rebuke of amorality. I Nabokov often stated that moralizing can never be the purpose of an artist. An artist has "no social comment to make," nor does he have to "show humanity the right exit."2 This, however, need not imply that Nabokov dissociated himself from moral problems. "I never meant to deny the moral impact of art which is certainly inherent in every genuine work of art," wrote Nabokov. "What I do deny and am prepared to fight to the last drop of my ink is the deliberate moralizing which to me kills every vestige of art in a work however skillfully written."3 In the fourth chapter of Nikolai Gogol he demonstrates the failure which ensued from Gogol's attempt to present "righteous and pious people living according to the Divine Law" in the second part of Dead Souls. Whereas moralizing cannot be the main component of a work of art, moral inquiry can be a weighty part of its effect, and in his dealing with literature Nabokov pays this result scrupulous attention. In discussing Madame 1. Othello, 5, 2. I would like to thank Leona Toker, who read the manuscript, for her many suggestions. 2. Despair, "Foreword." Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent note references to the works of Nabokov refer to numbered chapters, sections, paragraphs, or, in the case of "Pale Fire," lines. 3. Vladimir Nabokov. Selected Letters 1940-1977, ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt Brace lovanovich, 1989), p. 56. 136 Nabokov Studies Bovary in Lectures on Literature he asks himself: "who are the 'good' people of the book?" And with regard to "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," the first question he raises is: "(i]s Jekyll good?" In Lectures on Russian Literature Nabokov studies the moral stance of Raskolnikov and discusses at length the moral impact of Anna Karenina: "what Tolstoy is interested in are the eternal demands of morality. And now comes the real moral point that he makes: Love cannot be exclusively carnal because then it is egotistic, and being egotistic it destroys instead of creating." The views Nabokov presents in his Lectures are not uncommon: he is opposed to any sort of crime, cruelty, or carelessness. More striking is his opinion on the nature of moral behavior: "commonsense is fundamentally immoral, for the natural morals of mankind are as irrational as the magic rites that they evolved since the immemorial dimness of time" (372).4 In answer to the question what distinguishes men from animals, Nabokov says it is "being aware of being aware of being," from which follows "the glory of thought, poetry, a vision of the unh/erse."s As the universe is the most the human mind can encompass, it seems plausible that the trio "thought, poetry" and "a vision of the universe" is presented in a specific order: poetry being superior to thought but surpassed by the creative insights gained by visions. The widest purview a powerful artistic imagination can attain is a vision of the cosmos. "Art," Nabokov writes in Nikolai Gogol, "appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass."6 The awareness of other worlds stimulates the comparison with the real one; life which is seen as a "mad, impossible , unutterably weird, /Wonderful nonsense."7 It is from the same imagined extraterratorial point of view that another visionary artist, Shelley, made a comparable observation: "poetry makes us inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos."8 Poets gifted with a penetrating perceptiveness and the ability to create accomplished works of art are on this account qualified to rely on their imagination in gaining access to the mysteries of human existence. That they do...