Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Priscilla Meyer (review)

The growing recognition of the thought-suffused texture and artistic excellence of Vladimir Nabokov's work has in recent decades gained expression in books wholly devoted to one of his novels—Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire, Ada— or even to a single short story such as "Signs and Symbols." In the past few years three books have been devoted to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, a novel once regarded by many (including, regrettably, my younger self) as brilliant but flawed and mainly transitional from Nabokov's writing in Russian to his English-language fiction. This new interest in the novel has been partly stimulated by a growing corpus of biographical materials—in the first place, Brian Boyd's biography of the novelist.

The first two of these books annotate the text chapter by chapter and offer solutions to the enigma represented by the novel's mysterious co-protagonist, the English writer Sebastian Knight, whose "real life" is being sought by his Russian half-brother V., the narrator of the novel. In Absolute Solution (2013) Andrew Caulton foregrounds the echoes of British detective fiction, especially that of Arthur Conan Doyle, in Nabokov's text in order to argue that Sebastian's secret is that he is a British intelligence agent, a version of the Scarlet Pimpernel (and that V. almost gets killed by spies of a hostile power in one of the novel's central episodes). In Silent Love (2016), Gerard de Vries makes a different tentative suggestion: the secret behind Sebastian's seemingly cruel break-up with Clare Bishop is his homosexuality (a criminal offence in antebellum Britain and hence, indeed, to be kept moot even should V. become aware of it).

The most recent book, Priscilla Meyer's Nabokov and Indeterminacy, abstains from offering a solution to the enigma of the protagonist's character and conduct and, on the contrary, discusses different aspects of indeterminacy in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in relation to Nabokov's other novels, in particular Despair, Lolita, and Pale Fire, showing that the themes and techniques of this novel, written in 1938–1939, are integral features of Nabokov's larger corpus. Whereas in Postmodernist Fiction Brian McHale places Nabokov on the borderline between modernism and post-modernism (modernism being dominated by epistemological concerns and post-modernism by ontological ones), Meyer traces the post-modernist features of Nabokov's work, which gain the clearest articulation in the 1962 Pale Fire, back to his last pre-war novel, and associates them with Nabokov's view that the term "reality" makes sense only in quotation marks. For Meyer this view of reality is not merely an epistemological issue but also a matter of metaphysical uncertainty staged in Nabokov's worlds. Her book belongs to the stream of Nabokov scholarship that foregrounds the theme of the "otherworld" and argues that search for a metaphysical insight, ineluctably incomplete, characterizes the bulk of Nabokov's corpus: "Nabokov has set his linguistic and cultural worlds into tension with the unknowable beyond; he cannot know if he can ever return in the next world to what he has lost in this one, but assuages the pain of that uncertainty by dedicating his work to optimysticism" (18).

In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, however, the coinage "optimystic" is used ironically, and mainly in application to believers in the "golden paradise" of established religions (1959: 177). At the beginning of Speak, Memory Nabokov protests against "the walls of time" that separate him and his "bruised fists" from the "free world of timelessness" (1966: 20). Did his fists make a dent in the walls? Meyer's book associates the indeterminacy of Nabokov's plots and layers of meaning with the unavailability of an answer to this question.

Yet in first-rate literary works indeterminacy can be an achievement rather than a failure and is accompanied by overdetermination: the reader is stimulated to set...