The Web of Sense: Patterns of Involution in Selected Works of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov by Irena Ksiezopolska (review)

The Web of Sense examines what Ksiezopolska calls “the metafictional tendency” in the works of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov. Its features are the foregrounding of language, “unconventional personages,” and the use of memory as a “method of composition.” The term in the title, involution, “mirrors the self-reflexive, narcissistic quality of the texts” and “their complex structure . . . within which both the fictional characters and the intrigued readers tend to get lost” (13).

Ksiezopolska wants to “compare the structural models the two writers use,” rather than to establish influence or even similarity (14). She reads Nabokov through Woolf for fresh interpretation, and Woolf through Nabokov to find hitherto unexplored elements of her style. Part 1, “Signs and Symbols,” looks at structuring devices; part 2, “Unwritten Novels, Authors Characters and Readers,” at self-reflexive devices; and part 3, “Involute Abode,” at the connections between space, time, and matter.

Part 1 investigates patterning and coincidence in both writers’ works: Ksiezopolska considers that “the entire oeuvre of each writer represents a web-like structure” (34), and that Nabokov’s concept of “art as a divine game” is at work “in the less deliberately playful but ultimately empowered by the same mechanisms, texts of Virginia Woolf ” (35). She discusses The Waves and The Defense as similar examples of the importance of a kind of patterning she sees as typical of modernism. In the former, “motifs of moths, waves, flower petals on water, twisted cables and tree roots” “string up the entire text” (39); in the latter it is “solid objects” that “lure the human figures into some new complications on the game board” (43), forming “clusters of small triangles” that “distort the symmetry between the pair . . . providing an ironic commentary on the thematic duality” (44), an excellent complication of the black/white binary reading of this chess novel. Ksiezopolska then follows parallels in Nabokov’s later works, and introduces other novels that use devices similar to the ones discussed (Muriel Spark’s The Comforters, 1957; The Count of Monte Cristo; Gogol’s introduction of superfluous detail); but pointing in so many directions at once, however richly, rather distracts from the development of the argument.

In keeping with the idea that Nabokov’s novels comprise one text simultaneously, Ksiezopolska argues that Nabokov’s The Defense alludes to Ada “in the involuted space/time of the author’s mind” (55); this premise leads to some nice close analyses. Ksiezopolska productively traces motifs [End Page e-4] from one novel to the other in an associative “lost and found” (79). Nabokov’s “continuous use of the motif of keys” from The Gift to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, linking the motif to the Russian émigré state of homelessness (82–83), is paralleled with Woolf ’s use of a brooch motif in Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway as “secret object[s] of contiguity“ (85), which Ksiezopolska relates to the “metaphor of the past shed as lost luggage” (83). She tracks the migration of Luzhin’s peach pit in The Defense to the squirrel on the lacquered screen from Pnin’s childhood, concluding, though one might disagree, that “more important than interpretation . . . is the reader’s ability to identify elements of design” (91).

In part 2, Ksiezopolska investigates the authors’ metafictional methods and devices such as use of mise en abîme showing that both use postmodern methods before the postmodern. She traces the multiple artists and plagiarizers in King, Queen, Knave and the use of cinema and resulting ambiguity of reality in Mary. In the section “The Dystopia of Textual Power,” she discusses how the characters in Invitation to a Beheading carry out decisions made offstage “by the invisible but horribly omnipotent someone who must be identified with the author” (154). In Woolf ’s novels, too, Ksiezopolska finds the author to be a kind of angel of death, as in The Waves, where...