Time Travelers: Narrative Space-Time and the Logic of Return in Nabokov’s American Fiction

From Humbert Humbert to Charles the Beloved and Sebastian Knight, Vladimir Nabokov’s characters are perpetually taking to the road, and many of his characters, not satisfied with traveling through space, also dabble with time travel. In Bend Sinister (1947), Nabokov’s first novel written in America, Adam Krug imagines the potential escape from his homeland as a paradoxical return home: “He saw the possibility of escaping from Padukgrad into a foreign country as a kind of return into his own past because his own country had been a free country in the past” (BS 180). In Look at the Harlequins! (1974), Nabokov’s last novel published in his lifetime, Vadim Vadimovich N. suffers from a peculiar malady in which “he has confused direction and duration. He speaks of space but he means time” (LATH 252). Pnin’s trips to Cremona and The Pines each bring on flashes of a lost and irrecoverable past. Even Humbert tries to travel into the past when he sets off with Lolita on their second cross-country trip, hoping that a return to the West will also be a return to the (for Humbert) joyful days of their early life together. Writing self-consciously in what Hannah Arendt calls “the gap between past and future” left by the collapse of moral and political traditions, Nabokov turned his first American novels toward the immediate yet unrecoverable past of the twentieth century (Arendt 13).¹ The temporal games that proliferate in those novels explicitly address the questions of how to remember and how to act in response to political catastrophes, and Nabokov’s tentative answers to those questions—theorized and embodied in his novels—depend on explicitly marking his novels as separate worlds whose narrative operations neither represent nor reflect the everyday world of historical experience and political possibility.

For Nabokov, the artist or reader who acts as if the connection between art and the world were straightforward and representational ends up creating what he scornfully calls, in his afterword “On a Book Entitled Lolita” (1956), “topical trash” or “Literature of Ideas” (Lolita 315). While Nabokov felt both external and internal pressure to address the historical catastrophes emerging from and through totalitarianism, and, while his fictions hold traces of the totalitarian regimes that shaped his personal history, his novels are not and should not be read as historical accounts. Nabokov’s American novels—a set that is, not coincidentally, coextensive with his postwar novels—insistently return to the violent century played out in his native Europe, but Nabokov goes to great narrative lengths to avoid representing the Holocaust or the Gulag or writing “topical trash” that claims to show its readers the “truth” about totalitarianism. Nabokov’s essays and lectures insist that readers of fiction should avoid looking for explanatory truths or accurate representations and focus, instead, on understanding structure and form. He begins “L’Envoi,” directed to his literature students, by contrasting careful attention to form with the pressing temporality of historical events: “To some of you it may seem that under the present highly irritating world conditions it is rather a waste of energy to study literature, and especially to study structure and style. I suggest that to a certain type of temperament . . . the study of style may always seem a waste of energy under any circumstances” (LL 381).² Without agreeing to the charge of uselessness, Nabokov assents that his syllabus did not offer his students any life lessons, at least as far as the immediate moral or social application of his reading list was concerned: “The novels we have imbibed will not teach you anything that you can apply to any obvious problems of life” (LL 381). Nabokov rejects the notion that the role of art or the artist is to explain the world to his readers; the raison d’être for literature, according to Nabokov, is not identification, education, or explanation.

On the other hand, Nabokov insists that the escapist artist or reader who denies that there is any link between the worlds of fiction and historical experience fails both...