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

From the 1950s to the present, Nabokov scholarship has undergone several major paradigm shifts which reflect broader movements in literary theory and criticism. In the 1950s, Nabokov scholarship tended to view his literary output as a parody of realism, as a kind of anti-realistic fiction, which was then elaborated in the 1960s and '70s through theories of metafiction or, more broadly, postmodernism. For example, Paul Bruss distinguishes Nabokov's art through its "textuality," a keyword in postmodern literary discourse, while Larry McCaffery's theory of metafiction highlights the self-conscious presence of the author in the literary work through which any pretense to realism becomes obsolete. In the 1980s, critics began to turn their attention to Nabokov's negative views of Freud. Rather than try to read Nabokov from the perspective of Freudian psychoanalysis, a popular move at the time, critics like Jenefer Shute and Jeffrey Berman located Nabokov's aversion to Freud in his literary works, the most obvious example being Lolita. In the 1990s, critical currents shifted toward Nabokov's interest in the relationship between art and science, and how this relationship impacted and changed our understanding of mimicry and memory.

While these interpretive paradigms produced very different readings of Nabokov, there is a fundamental agreement within this scholarship over the essence of Nabokov's style, which is variously understood in terms of riddles, games, deception, disguise, doubles, and the transgression of the border between author and characters. In her new contribution to this discussion, Nabokov and Indeterminacy, Priscilla Meyer theorizes the invasion of the author into fictional worlds as a ghost in the otherworld. Meyer works to theorize how subtext in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first fiction written in English by Nabokov, functions as a shadow text. In her discussion of this novel, she notices the baffling ambiguity of the closing sentence, "I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we are both someone whom neither of us knows." This key sentence is repeatedly illuminated in Nabokov's other texts, and it gives rise to the indeterminacy of reading, a different approach from the indeterminacy of postmodernism.

In order to elucidate the importance of subtext, Meyer begins by questioning the conventional cleavage between modernism and postmodernism. Drawing upon postmodernism's similarity to Stephen Kern's definition of modernism, she seems to repudiate the ideology of literary schools, while reminding us of Nabokov's rejection of generalization in favor of the details in creating as well as in the reading process. In contrast to postmodern purposes, she takes into account the layers of interpretation not only between character and narrator, but also between narrator and author as the final sentence of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight reveals: the odd liaisons of character Sebastian, narrator V, and author Nabokov.

Exploring how the strong motivation behind The Real Life is illuminated in Nabokov's later works, Meyer attends to authorial intention and argues that "an analogy for a mystical otherworld" is needed in order to overcome the author's fatal defect caused by exile. He had to give up both his native tongue and culture, for which "only the palliative cure of art" (as he expressed it) would compensate. Life before exile is concealed within every text as much as life after exile is reflected within systems of subtextual references to other works, including British as well as American literature. In the vein of those traces, Meyer demonstrates the way in which Nabokov subverts binaries by means of a third term, the mysterious figure of Nabokov himself. She designates this third term "ghost" or "otherworld," not only in the sense of a longing for the unrecoverable past, but for a life beyond death, which is unknowable as well as unattainable. Consequently, Meyer foregrounds an infinite reading process that parallels Nabokov's understanding of reality as "an infinite succession of steps...