The Great (Textual) Communicator, or, Blindness and Insight

Nabokov Studies, 2 (1995), 277-89. REVIEW ARTICLES BRIAN MCHALE (Morgantown, WV, USA) THE GREAT (TEXTUAL) COMMUNICATOR, OR, BLINDNESS AND INSIGHT Maurice Couturier. Nabokov ou la tyrannie de l'auteur. Collection "Poétique," dirigée par Gérard Genette. Paris: Seuil, 1993. 415 pp. All literary texts, perhaps all written texts whatsoever, "program" their readers, in the sense that they anticipate and project an "ideal" reading to which any real reader's behavior may correspond more or less closely. There are, however, certain texts, certain authors, that are more exigent in their demands on the reader, effectively narrowing the latter's options to three: either to opt out altogether, closing the book and refusing to play along; to misread, falling into the traps planted by the author for the unwary ; or to rise to the occasion, becoming that ideal reader whose needs and expectations (special needs, high expectations) the text has been designed expressly to satisfy. Such texts simultaneously constrain the reader and liberate him or her by inviting identification with the demiurgic author. Joyce has often been regarded as the classic example, for better or worse, of this type of authorship. Maurice Couturier disagrees; he thinks the great exemplar is Nabokov, and he has written well and persuasively, especially in the last chapter of this new book, about the special difficulties facing any critic who dares to comment on the works of so exigent, so totalitarian, an author. His reading of Nabokov, as Couturier himself somewhat ruefully admits , is Nabokovian. In almost every case it is the sort of reading that Nabokov would have endorsed and might even, one imagines, have undertaken himself, the sort of reading that his texts anticipate and for which they are, as it were, pre-programmed. Couturier reads with the grain, not against it, and if this means that his commentary inadvertently reproduces some of Nabokov's blind-spots, it also, and much more importantly , means that it yields insights of a kind that are only to be gained 278 Nabokov Studies when one has submitted willingly (and knowingly) to the tyranny of the author. 1 A minor instance of what is to be gained from reading Nabokov with rather than against the grain is Couturier's running commentary here on the French translations of Nabokov's texts. This close attentiveness to the details of translation has in a sense been imposed on Couturier by the necessity of referring wherever possible, in a book written in French for a French readership, to generally available "standard" French versions of his author's writings, versions which are often demonstrably defective. But there is more to it than just the necessity of unmangling a mangled text before one can comment on it, for of course Couturier could not help but be aware of the high standards for translation set by Nabokov himself in his version of Eugene Onegin and elsewhere. Nabokov was, to say the least, impatient with ill-informed or otherwise "free" translations, and traces of his author's somewhat cranky literal-mindedness are occasionally to be found in Couturier's witty sniping, carried out mainly in footnotes , it is not just crankiness, however, and not just sniping; there is a serious issue at stake here, and one which Couturier, who has himself translated several volumes of Nabokov's fiction, is ideally placed to raise. Too often in book reviews and elsewhere we see translations commended for their "smoothness"; "smoothness," indeed, appears to be the criterion for a successful translation, at least among reviewers who cannot read (or at any rate have not read) the originals. But all that "smoothness" actually indicates in a translation is that the translator has found suitably low-profile, self-effacing, prefabricated language to render what, in the original, may well have been wildly anomalous and attention-grabbing. Translators, in other words, are regularly commended for having smoothed out the roughness and knobbiness, the texture, of the original, for having normalized its abnormalities. Couturier, like Nabokov (in his capacity as a translator) before him, seeks to restore wherever possible the rough patches that "standard" translations so often smooth out. This represents a semantic gain as well as an aesthetic one, for...