Leland de la Durantaye
“I am a slave of images.” —Vladimir Nabokov
It is said that you can’t judge a book by its cover, which is wrong in that we can and do judge being by seeming, inside by outside, essence by accident. We do so all the time, whether we like it or not. We check this first judgment—ideally—and afterward may find the gulf between, say, word and image funny or frustrating, illuminating or obscuring. This is to say that first impressions bring first judgments, and books are no exception in this regard—not even exceptional books like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
While Lolita offers no exception to this rule, it offers an exceptional array of covers to the student of its publication and presentation. Readers from Paris to Tokyo, Stockholm to Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv to Rome, have seen a wild variety of things on covers of Lolita. They see things that are absent from the book, such as an adult woman showering, glimpsed through a venetian blind; a Venus-like beauty in furs; a midriff with pierced belly button and a tattoo of a salamander; a futuristic silhouette against a metropolitan dreamscape; a keyhole through which stares an eerily smiling face. Closer to the book’s homes, and story, they see Sue Lyon looking through heart-shaped sunglasses, Dominique Swain reading on the grass, lushly magnified images of lips, legs, plaid skirts. They see Modigliani and Balthus. They see all manner of footwear, from high heels to saddle shoes. They see things being promised, few of which will be given.
Thanks to the encyclopedic efforts of Dieter Zimmer, we can now compare the bewildering array of covers the book has been given and see the ways in which they are signs of their times and reflections of their places. Taken together, the covers hold a mirror up to the nature of graphic design and the culture of marketing. Had Nabokov had his way, none of this would have been possible. He explicitly forbade the use of any image of his nymphet on the cover of his book, to comparatively little effect (after the first French, American, and U.K. editions). My small point in the following, however, is not by what right publishers have chosen such images, nor what book we might misjudge Lolita to be by its covers. Zimmer, Ellen Pifer, Duncan White, and others examine these covers elsewhere in this volume. To complement their investigations, I would like to discuss a distinct but related matter: what Nabokov thought of images, how he thought in images, and why these things might matter for his readers.
In Strong Opinions, Nabokov tells his readers not only what he thinks but how he does so: “I don’t think in any language. I think in images. I don’t believe that people think in languages. . . . I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of a brainwave, but that’s about all.” This idea becomes ever clearer in the interviews Nabokov gave in the years following Lolita’s publication. Asked by Claude Mercadié whence springs “literary creation,” Nabokov replied: “From an image. . . . I never start from an idea, but always from an image. . . . I then endeavor to reproduce exactly all that I saw in a flash. . . . It is long and difficult work.”1 In the Apostrophes interview, Nabokov remarks that “French, or rather my French—which is something very special—does not cede as easily [as does English] to my torturous imagination [aux supplices de mon imagination].” Similarly, in Look at the Harlequins!, Nabokov writes: “We think in images, not in words. . . . We do not usually think in words since most of life is mimodrama, but we certainly do imagine words when we need them, just as we imagine everything else capable of being perceived in this. . . world.”2 Here too, not only is the imagistic given primacy over the linguistic, but the linguistic itself is expressed as if it were but a debased version of the imaginative and the imagistic (“we . . . imagine words . . . just as we imagine everything else”). In Nabokov’s final interview, he said: “Yes, I write in three languages, but I think in images. The matter of preference does not really arise. Images are mute, yet presently the silent cinema begins to talk and I recognize its language”—which is, of course, the language of the image.3
One thus finds in Nabokov’s statements about the nature of thought pride of place given to the image. Art springs from the image and returns to it. Elsewhere in Strong Opinions, Nabokov remarks, “How we learn to imagine and express things is a riddle with premises impossible to express and a solution impossible to imagine.” For Nabokov, the origin of learning and thinking, their primary form as well as their subsequent translation into expression, is extraordinarily difficult to imagine.
At the outset of Speak, Memory we find a distinction between life and language. Nabokov laments “how paltry and puny in comparison to human existence” is “expression in words.” Later in that same work, noting the sterility of his own early poetry, he says that the poetry was made “not so much out of live cells of some compelling emotion as around a vivid term or a verbal image that I wanted to use for its own sake.” One can recognize here the seeds of potential confusion in the expression “verbal image,” as one must assume that a properly verbal image is to be differentiated from—and is likely only a debased or adulterated version of—an imagistic image. Though in Strong Opinions Nabokov refers to Ulysses as the greatest prose masterpiece of the twentieth century, in his Cornell lecture on Joyce, Nabokov criticizes his “too great reliance on typography” in his stream-of-consciousness technique, justifying this “too” by stating that “man thinks not always in words but also in images.”4 Nabokov says elsewhere in these same lectures that “obviously we do not think continuously in words—we think also in images.” Though Nabokov here concedes to language a direct, if limited, relation to thought, too great a concern for linguistic effects (which is to say, linguistic effects envisioned for their own end) risks darkening the image.5
This being the case, it is unsurprising that Nabokov condemns playing with language without the guiding force of an inspiring image as sterile. The vocation and activity of the writer, which Nabokov evokes through The Gift’s Fyodor, are precisely in the pursuit of this image: “shy and exacting, living always uphill, spending all his strength in pursuit of the innumerable beings that flashed inside him, as if at dawn in a mythological grove.” These flashing beings in the mythological grove of Fyodor’s mind are the images that entice and entrance him, and that make him an artist. In this same work, Fyodor considers his imagined reviewer’s reaction to his recently published collection of poems: “As he read them, did he read them not only as words but as chinks between words, as one should do when reading poetry?” For Fyodor at least, reading poetry is reading between the lines of the verse to glimpse the image shining behind and beyond them.6
With this situating of the origin and heart of thought in image comes a doubt, a suspicion of language itself. In Invitation to a Beheading, in Cincinnatus’s effort to express what he has “discovered” (“I have discovered the little crack in life, where it broke off, where it had once been soldered to something else, something genuinely alive, important and vast”), there lurks the threat that “all my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.” When Koncheyev reads his own verse aloud in The Gift, we are given a lyric expression of language as exile from the image:
There dwelt independently in them [his words] such music, in the seemingly dark verse such a chasm of meaning yawned at one’s feet, so convincing were the sounds and so unexpectedly, out of the very same words every poet was stringing together, there sprang up, played, and slipped away without ever quenching one’s thirst a unique perfection, bearing no resemblance to words and in no need of words.
Here, the reading of the verse magically rejoins the initial image of thought—neither bearing any resemblance to words nor being in need of them. In Look at the Harlequins!, Vadim tells his reader: “The book in my mind appeared at first, under my right cheek . . . as a varicolored procession with a head and a tail, winding in a general western direction through an attentive town. . . . An upsurge of nausea overcame me at the thought of imagining a hundred-thousand adequate words and I switched on the light and called to Annette in the adjacent bedroom to give me one of my strictly rationed tablets.” Just as in “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” where Nabokov traces the origin and inspiration of the work to his learning of the first drawing made by an ape (depicting the bars of its own cage), here an image lies at the outset of a work—and though this vision is in itself delightful, the task of translating it into words seems so difficult and depressing that one of Vadim’s “strictly rationed tablets” is called for. In the chapter from Speak, Memory devoted to Tamara, the author’s first love, Nabokov writes of nighttime meetings with the young woman and briefly stops his story to say: “One is moved to speak more eloquently about these things, about many other things that one always hopes might survive captivity in the zoo of words.” What is thus at issue in writing is the effort to safeguard the particularity of perception during its passage into the often cramped and artificial confines of language.
Speaking in his autobiography of an interruption just after the composition of the poem referred to earlier (which took place during a rainstorm, allowing the budding author and naturalist to see things anew, with rain-bright eyes): “During the short time I had been otherwise engaged, something seemed to have happened to such words as I had already strung together. . . . Some suspicion crossed my mind that I might be dealing in dummies.” The moment—the first in his career as a writer—is absolutely decisive for Nabokov’s vision of language, not merely in his learning to trust the precision of his artistic vision, as we saw before, but also in introducing a doubt as to the ability of language itself to communicate that precision.
This is a suspicion that, joyful writer though Nabokov was, he could never fully shake. In various guises, it will traverse his entire oeuvre and vision of art—so much so that he will elaborate a theory of inspiration based on the idea that, on an essential level, all words are merely “dummies”—if often delightful ones—while the reality of perception and imagination is in the image.
Nowhere, however, do we find this stress on the word’s image more clearly formulated than in Nabokov’s “Good Readers and Good Writers”:
Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. . . . When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.
Only when we begin to perceive the words as image, to perceive literary work as if it were an image, do we become good readers of good writers.
There is an important consequence of this imagistic aesthetic. This image, which is the template against which the work is measured (by the author), is inaccessible to the reader. Good readers can attend with the utmost care to the precise images of a work of art, but they are barred from the image of inspiration that lies at its outset. “The writer’s task,” remarked Nabokov in an interview, “is the purely subjective one of reproducing as closely as possible the image of the book he has in his mind. The reader need not know, or, indeed, cannot know, what the image is, and so cannot tell how closely the book has conformed to the author’s intentions, nor has the author any business trying to learn whether the consumer likes what he consumes.” The reader is here, in a certain sense, set adrift, denied entry into the ivory tower’s dark room in which the artist develops the images of his books. And it is this dialectic of the image that offers a deeper explanation of why Nabokov claimed to write only “for myself in multiplicate.”
One result of this state of affairs is that, for Nabokov, the image can always serve as the word’s alibi. This is meant in both senses—not simply the literal, Latinate “elsewhere” (as the image is said to exist in another space and another time than the space and time of writing) but also the exculpation for stylistic crimes and misdemeanors: the acquittal of the poorly turned phrase as the result, not of the aesthetic weakness of the author’s imagination, but of the translation of the sharp synchrony of the image into dull, drawn-out language. The particularity of the image must skirt the sightless dangers of “hackneyed combinations of blind noun and dog-like adjective,” but since the image is what is truly at issue in the purest form of aesthetic experience (as Nabokov describes it), even the finest manipulation of language is separated from the image by an abyss.
This leaves us with the essence of literary art, at least as it was conceived by Nabokov. For his part, the image is not only the origin of the work of art, it is also its end and essence. This is why Nabokov so stridently claimed that there was no reading, only rereading. When we reread, we begin to experience the work as though it were more seen than read; we cease to be bound by suspense, sequence, or the time it takes for the story to unfold, and we begin to experience it as we might an image, where parts and whole are equally and radiantly present. This is the particular turn Nabokov gives to the age-old idea of ut pictura poesis, the theory of the image he offers. The true image of Lolita is, thus, not an image we could ever simply see, on a cover or elsewhere. When we truly see Lolita, we see it is an image, one that we access through our reading and rereading, as, “up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.”
1 “D’une image. . . . Je ne pars jamais d’une idée, mais d’une image. . . . Je m’efforce ensuite de reproduire exactement tout ce que j’ai vu dans un éclair. . . . C’est un travail long et difficile.” Interview with Claude Mercadié, 5. The introduction to this interview, serious in tone, tasteful, and intelligent, has the curious particularity of repeatedly referring to Nabokov as a “savant ethnologue,” or “erudite ethnologist”—an error, doubtless, for “savant entomologiste,” or “erudite entomologist.”
2 In Pale Fire, Kinbote, watching his beloved Shade during one of his habitual sessions of voyeurism, noted that it seemed that the poet “followed the images wording themselves in his mind”—an idea that accords perfectly with this conception.
3 Interview with Robert Robinson. Nabokov’s son offers a revealing biographical detail in this relation as he remarks, in “On Revisiting Father’s Room,” that his father had explained to him that “his writing . . . was all there, ready inside his mind, like film waiting to be developed.”
4 For Nabokov, in Joyce’s final masterwork this tendency to discount the imagistic and rely too heavily on the linguistic runs truly amok. In Strong Opinions Nabokov writes: “I detest Finnegans Wake in which a cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory.” Nabokov also described the work as “a formless and dull mass of phony folklore.” [Incidentally, Nabokov had no fondness for Ulysses’s precursor, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (“feeble and garrulous”).] In a 1936 letter to his wife, Nabokov wrote, “in these new things of his [the Work in Progress, which became Finnegans Wake], the abstract puns, the verbal masquerade, the shadows of words, the diseases of words . . . in the end sinks behind reason, and, while it is setting, the sky is ravishing, but then there is night.” One might note that the ravishing sky and sinking reason are the same that a number of Work in Progress’s most impassioned partisans (such as Samuel Beckett) saw in it, though with a far different valorization.
5 Given Nabokov’s other professional interests, it is worth noting that in insects (such as the butterfly), the definitive state, that of “complete metamorphosis”—in the definition of the OED, “the final or perfect stage or form of an insect”—is referred to as an imago.
6 This went as well for pedagogy. In Nabokov’s unpublished lecture notes, he hopes not that his students would remember a certain scene in question from Anna Karenina verbatim, but rather the “image” of it (“The point was did the image remain in your minds”; Nabokov’s italics).
It is worth noting in this connection Nabokov’s description of the compositional process of his treasured Pushkin. In a note to his critical edition of Eugene Onegin, Nabokov writes:
“Pushkin expresses here his concepts of the workings of the poet’s mind, in four stages:
1. Direct perception of a ‘dear object’ or event.
2. The hot, silent shock of irrational rapture accompanying the evocation of that impression in one’s fancies or actual dreams.
3. The preservation of that image.
4. The later, cooler touch of creative art, as identified with rationally controlled inspiration, verbal transmutation, and a new harmony.”
One might place, alongside such remarks, Nabokov’s response to an interviewer’s question as to what surprises him in life: “the marvel of consciousness—that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.” What bears noting is Nabokov’s figuring of the importance of the sudden image, breaking through the dark night of non-being: the sudden, sunny image of surprise that is art.