Published in: Interlitteraria 8. Tartu, 2003, pp. 291-307.

On Some Semiotic Models in V. Nabokov’s Fiction

Marina Grishakova

The Spiral

The spiral is a basic symbol in many cosmological and religious systems. It combines expansion, an image of spiritual or biological energy, with contraction, movement towards enclosure and death (e.g. Boticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s “Hell” or Hitchcock’s sinister water spirals). One of the most obvious Nabokov’s sources is the Symbolist idea of the spiral as a spiritualized circle (Nabokov 1989: 275) elaborated in the polemic against the Nietzschean “vicious” circle of the “eternal return”. However, in Nabokov, the vicious circle of logical thinking (“Bend Sinister”) and the negative meaning of the encirclement as pressure of the material world (“The Defense”) are counterweighted by the positive sense of the circle. The ring of the sonnet surrounds the fourth chapter of “The Gift”, “apparently barring the way, but perhaps, on the contrary, providing a secret link which would explain everything – if only man’s mind could withstand that explanation” (Nabokov 1963: 203). Thus, the sonnet grants an access to the “full” explanation, which usually means the “otherworld” vision. As the border, which belongs to both “this” and “other” reality, the circle not only detaches, but links them as well. Further, the circle has a positive meaning as the form of the book corresponding to “the circular nature of everything in existence”. The protagonist succeeds in turning the finite form of the book into “a consciously curving, and thus infinite, sentence” (Nabokov 1963: 196). The circle or closed spiral of a falcon’s or a boomerang’s flight evokes a comparison between hunting and artistic mastery as an image of energy and self-fulfilment: “…for the motifs /…/ are now obedient to me – I have tamed /…/ themes, they have become accustomed to my pen; with a smile I let them go: in the course of development they merely describe a circle, like a boomerang or a falcon, in order to end by returning to my hand” (Nabokov 1963: 226). A similar spatial pattern is characteristic of the top-level tennis game: “…the momentum begun with an arching swing still continues after the loud twang of taut string, passing as it does through the muscles of the arm all the way to the shoulder, as if closing the smooth circle out of which, just as smoothly, the next one is born” (Nabokov 1971: 47). The protecting “envelope” of love is also circular (Nabokov 1963: 171). The envelope of flesh protects autonomy of human creatures: “..one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists insofar as he is separated from his surroundings” (Nabokov 1997: 17).

Manuscript “Notes for Texture of Time” (1957-1968; the NYPL Berg Collection Nabokov Archive), partially used in “Ada”, contain some clarifying remarks on the relationship between circles and spirals in Nabokov’s fiction. The card 1 on “Spirals” says: “The spiral is the escape from the cycle”. The dictum is, as further indicated, taken from “Fraser, 1966”, i.e. from J. T. Fraser’s “Voices of Time”. It is accompanied by Nabokov’s own remark in square brackets: “No, the circle is an infinite spiral with the lines of convolution merging – see next card”. The card 2 dated October 28, 1964 says: “If Time can be imagined to have a shape this shape is a spiral”. “The spiral is a circle (an orbit) that comes apart. A circle (an orbit) is a spiral so tight* as to seem closed.

*with the lines of convolution so closely following each other as to seem to merge”.

Thus the circular spiral is an embodiment of the infinite renewal of the convolutions of time. The movement of the human observer is illusory: “the unfortunate image of a “road” to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion” (“The Gift”; Nabokov 1963: 294). The simplest parallel to the Nabokovian image of time is the Archimedean spiral. Insect’s movement along the slowly rotating clock-hand from the centre of the clock-face usually exemplifies the Archimedean spiral in popular literature. The movement of the insect is spiral, although it might seem straight from the point of view of the insect itself.

The “closed spiral” of time is also a form of the narrative “enspacement” (Derrida, Kristeva). In Nabokov, the motif of desperate attempts to escape the “spherical prison of time” is linked with another controlling pattern, that of metamorphosis, both “the evolution of the artist’s self through artistic creation” and “the cycle of insect metamorphosis” (Appel 1970: xxii). Nabokov’s novels “spiral in upon themselves and provide their own commentary”. In contrast with usual terms, such as the “self-conscious novel” or “metafiction”, Appel’s term “involution” underscores the process of interaction between the protagonist and the author/ narrator. The simplest forms of involution are found in cartoons and comic strips: “The creatures in cartoons used to be brought to life before one’s eyes: first, the tabula rasa of an empty screen, which is then seen to be a drawing board, over which the artist’s brush sweeps, a few strokes creating the characters, who only then begin to move. Or the convention of the magical ink bottle, framing the action fore and aft. The characters are sucked back into bottle at the end, just as they had spilled out of it at the start” (Appel 1970: xxiv). Proust’s or Nabokov’s novels are modelled upon much more complicated forms of involution, which include the multilevel correlation between the protagonist’s and the author’s/ narrator’s point of view as well as diminishing distance between them or even merging.

 

The Mirror

The mirror is a basic symbol of the modernist culture, the image of the self-reflective art and tension between the “artificial” and the “real”: the art is either the highest reality or the Platonian weak copy of it. For O. Wilde, priority belongs to the autonomous and solipsistic art: the portrait is always that of the artist, the nature imitates the art. A. Belyi’s painful desire to choose between the “art” and the “reality” is symbolized by the narrator’s fear of remaining for ever on the surface of the mirror: “If art is a copy of life, it is superfluous in the presence of the original… If, however, life exists for the sake of art, it exists for the sake of reflection that meets me each time that I approach the mirror… And yet, I don’t know – perhaps those who say that life exists for art are right, because we may turn out to be not people, but only their reflections. And it is not we who approach a mirror, but it is the reflection of someone unknown who approaches me from the other side and increases in size on the mirror’s surface. So that actually, we neither go anywhere, nor come from anywhere, but merely expand and contract on the surface, all the while remaining on the same plane” (A. Belyi’s “Third Symphony”; cit. in Maslenikov 1957: 45). Nabokov’s fiction discloses the rich semiotic potential of the mirror. For him the doubling (dédoublement) is not a part of a mythological or metaphysical paradigm, but the “self-conscious device”, mise en abyme, one of the “ideograms of the novel’s structure”, embodiment of the art’s “polarized vision” (Alter 1975: 188). Therefore, the figure of chiasmus is even more prominent in Nabokov than a simple mirror reflection.

In “The Visible and the Invisible” Merleau-Ponty regards the chiastic reversibility of the perceiving/ perceived, touching/ been touched as a manifestation of the primordeal synthesis between consciousness and the world, in which the subject and object distinction originates (Vasseleu 1998: 26). In his readings of Rilke and Proust, P. de Man shows how chiasmus triggers the whole series of crossings and reversals evoked by the impulse of consciousness to move beyond itself and totalization of subjective experience (de Man 1979). The term was applied to Nabokov’s work by Russel J.A. Kilbourn, who gives the following definition of the chiastic novel: “/…/a novel can be composed chiastically, or with chiasmus as a ‘structuring principle,’ imparting to the work a ‘conceptual centre’ or thematic fulcrum on either side of which the text ebbs and flows, toward not the ‘beginning’ and the ‘conclusion’ as much as one end or the other. What signifies in a strange way is the central point; the ends of the narrative in a sense circle back on themselves, ‘meeting,’ in “Ada”’s case, at the parodic ‘blurb’ which could as easily begin as conclude Van and Ada’s story” (Kilbourn 1998). Strictly speaking, only “Pale Fire” is a chiastic text since the two plot lines are “synchronized” and approaching each other from the two opposite points in fictional space to meet in the middle. On the contrary, the inversed mirror structures can be found in almost every Nabokov’s novel. However, as R. Norrman argues, the mirror inversion is part of chiasmus and always points at the missing part. In mythological as well as literary texts, inversion is a mirror reproduction of the other half of human earthly existence and thus a dream of the wholeness restored and paradise regained (Norrman 1998: 9-30). Nostalgic dream of the paradise lost and regained is one of the most conspicuous motifs in Nabokov’s work.

Mirror is exploited in art as a channel of information or a symptom of presence (Eco 1986). As a channel of information it has the double meaning: it is a model of both the exact, realistic reproduction and of the deceitful illusion or the conflict between the appearance and the essence. The mirror reflection is seen, but could not be touched: it is produced on the two-dimensional surface as an illusion of depth (Levin 1988: 9). The mirror is also a model of the dialogue: it contains the semiotic potential of doubleness. The dialogue is open for further interpretations as either a model of self-reflection and self-consciousness or that of pure copying and reproduction of one’s own appearance. In the first case, the mirror symbolizes the uniqueness of the self, in the second case, on the contrary, means a loss of identity (ibid).

The mirror as well as mimicry generates incompletely identical non-existent objects and is, together with memory, one of the many forms of splitting the subject and falsifying the “original – copy” relations: “…when you see yourself in the mirror, you see (1) a reflection of yourself, and/ or (2) yourself (your face) as if you were in the position of the mirror looking back at yourself” (Branigan 1984: 4).

The scholars starting from M. McCarthy have pointed out multiple structures of mutual reflections and concordances in Nabokov’s work. However, one should take into consideration also asymmetry, shift and displacement of mirror halves. Even the human body’s directionality and polarity of the vertical (up-down) and horizontal (front-back) dimension is asymmetrical: “Upwards and frontwards are positive, whereas downwards and backwards are negative, in an egocentric perceptual and interactional space based on the notions of visibility and confrontation”. Dexterity causes a slight asymmetry in the right-left dimension (Lyons 1977: 690-691). Binocular vision is based on slight disagreement of two versions of reality provided by two eyes. The final blow to the idea of enantiomorphic mirror parity has been dealt by the discovery in physics of a slight asymmetry on the sub-atomic level in the middle of the1950-s. The consequences of the discovery have been explained to the public by the famous popularizer of science Martin Gardner. The reverberations of M. Gardner’s book in Nabokov’s novel “Look at the Harlequins!” have been examined by D. B. Johnson (Johnson 1985). Lewis Carroll is one of the nearest sources for both Nabokov and Gardner (the latter is the editor of the “Annotated Alice”). The space of Wonderland contains innumerable opportunities of contraction, expansion, distortion, reversibility of two- and three-dimensionality. The Looking-Glass world is built upon the mirror reversals of asymmetric structures: the arrangement of chess pieces in the beginning of the game, the looking-glass books where “the words go the wrong way”, looking-glass milk which isn’t good to drink, reversibility of dreams (Alice dreaming of the Red King, who is dreaming of Alice, who is dreaming of the King, etc.) (Carroll 1970: 180, 181, 238).

Asymmetry or false doubleness is a sense-generating structure in Nabokov’s novels. An encounter with a cinematographic unrecognizable double is recurrent in his prose. Ganin can hardly recognize his “sold” shadow on the screen (“Mary”). Magda is unable to make out whether it is her or her mother’s image while looking at her caricature filmic performance (“Kamera obskura”). The child on the screen turns away from his father: the real child is already dead by the time and the film is shown to compensate for his absence (“Bend Sinister”). The false doubleness is the basic motif in Nabokov’s novel “Despair”. It is a story of “Jekyll-Hyde” type merging with one’s own shadow or a deformed side of one’s own personality. Dr. Jekyll’s split cane left at the crime place symbolizes his split personality. A similar object, a stick, betrays Felix’s “other half” in “Despair”. The plot scheme recalls the Lacanian “mirror stage”, where the “self” uses the “other” to find a confirmation for its own existence. The mirror both objectifies and destabilizes the imaginary process of self-identification. A “shared” personality is an unstable personality, where a permanent struggle for dominance between the two halves occurs. Thus, Hyde finally gains a supremacy over Jekyll. Likewise, a hypothetical resemblance between Hermann and Felix threatens to overturn the mimetic relation: “it was he and not I who first perceived the masonic bond in our resemblance; and as the resemblance itself had been established by me, I stood toward him – according to his subconscious calculation – in a subtle state of dependence, as if I were the mimic and he the model. Naturally, one always prefers people to say: “He resembles you”, and not the other way round. /…/ At the back of his muddled brain there lurked, maybe, the reflection that I ought to be thankful to him for his generously granting me, by the mere fact of his own existence, the occasion of looking like him. /…/ He appeared to my eyes as my double, that is, as a creature bodily identical to me. /…/ He on his part saw in me a doubtful imitator” (Nabokov 1966: 22-23). Hermann, like Jekyll, “used to write letters to himself” (ibid, 201) simulating presence of extra participants of the story. He introduces another mirror substitute for his own person, a “brother from Russia” alias “brother from Germany”, who, as Hermann alleges, has committed murder and is going to commit suicide. Both Hermann’s and Jekyll’s personality is finally absorbed by the double: “Thus, a reflected image, asserting itself, laid its claims. Not I sought a refuge in a foreign land, not I grew a beard, but Felix, my slayer” (ibid, 186). Hermann as well as Jekyll murders “himself” murdering the other, i.e. “commits suicide”. In both cases the process of a full mirror reversal fails. Both protagonists leave confessional notes to explain their failure. The mirror plays a significant role in both stories. J. Levin lists the following functions of the mirror in the “Despair”: (1) confusion of the original and the copy, exchange of roles; (2) the original acquires the properties of the copy; (3) merging of the original and the reflection; (4) the reflection as the “minus-original”; (5) a distorted image (Levin 1988: 20-21).

In “Despair” the mirror serves also as a metaphor for mimetic illusion. The mirror is to confirm a perfect identity, but instead betrays a difference. A perfect identity is ultimately the identity of the dead, nature morte. That is why Hermann avoids mirrors while writing down his story. Hermann’s artistic taste is limited to “the plain, crude obviousness of the painter’s art” (Nabokov 1966: 26). The literary genre he uses is confession, which, although unable to render a perfect identity, is sincere (i.e. tendentious, ideological) and therefore might find readers in the Soviet Russia. The linkage between the “crude obviousness” of the realist painting and the Soviet literature is later highlighted in “Pale Fire”: “Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colours; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped” (Nabokov 1991: 192). The mirror metaphor is related to the theme of the Soviet Union, the land of resemblances, and as such might be projected upon A. Gide’s “Retour de l’U.S.S.”, where the writer depicts the Soviet life devoid of individual distinctions. There is also an erotic thematization of the mirror metaphor incorporated into the English version of the novel: Hermann’s voyeuristic habit to imagine himself sitting at a distance, observing himself in the bed during a sexual act (Nabokov 1966: 37-38). Thus, the mirror metaphor is, first, thematized as a story of the imaginary double and, second, used as a constructive principle of the fictional space. In his article on “Despair” (Garland 1995), S. Davydov examines the mirror structure of the novel. He, however, overestimates a measure of Hermann’s control over the text. As P. Tammi demonstrates, Hermann belongs to the group of narrative agents, who “fail to recognize those very “clues” that they are recording in their narration” and become themselves “an object of ironic observation” (Tammi 1985: 292). The relation between the author and the narrator is laid bare and hypostatized in Hermann’s address to the “writer-reader”, whom he intends to charge with his text’s publishing. Hermann suspects that the substitute author might appropriate his auctorial rights. Thus, the sender-receiver (author/ reader) relationship is also reversed in the mirror world of the novel. The auctorial presence is veiled; the narrator’s perspective is explicit, sometimes even too exposed and declarative. The situation is part of the broader Nabokovian metafictional/ metaphysical problematic of “the mind behind the mirror”, i.e. the Author alias God alias “petty demon” (see Carroll 1982), who implicitly controls the situation. Hermann is the protagonist-witness in the auctorial fictional world, where some clues are made visible for him (the “yellow post”) and others remain hidden (e.g. his wife’s adultery or the function of the “stick”).

Another metaphor for Hermann’s behaviour is “screen-writing”: he tries to press upon his screenplay, which is, nevertheless, corrected by the auctorial hand. Hermann’s obsessive attention to repetitions and resemblances is based on a belief in his “memory of the camera type” (Nabokov 1966: 71). There is, for example, a number of mnemonic links between the geographical spaces of Russia and Germany. The concordances are inexact, asymmetric or false. Hermann’s “photographic” memory erases a shift, a discrepancy between them. A courtyard in Tarnitz and “something seen in Russia ages ago” (ibid, 78), two Carls Spiesses, the bronze duke monument in Tarnitz and the bronze horseman in St.-Petersburg are seen by him as identical twins (see other correlations in Tammi 1985: 308). Hermann’s wishful unification of two persons is anticipated by the contamination of the two paintings: he mistakes the picture in a tobacco shop in Tarnitz for Ardalion’s painting. As I. Smirnov points out (Smirnov 2000: 142), the painting with two roses and a tobacco pipe on green cloth belongs to Juan Gris (“Roses in a Vase”, 1914). As it turns out later, there are two peaches and a glass ashtray on Ardalion’s nature morte.

The theme of false resemblances and robust contaminations is counterpointed by the motif of “crazy”, unclear, cracked or crooked distorting mirrors, where, on the contrary, a resemblance is erased. Hermann imagines the afterlife as a mirror world, where the resemblance is an effect of demonic mimicry.

In Nabokov’s cinematographic novels, mirror is a metaphor for limited space or presence. It is a fictionalizing device, which creates the double frame. Instead of being rendered directly, character’s movements are mediated by this double frame: “Franz /…/ recoiled from the embrace of the clowning mirror and went for the door”; “He turned around quickly as though feeling that someone was watching him, and moved away; all that remained in the mirror was a white corner of the table against the black background broken by a crystal glimmer on the sideboard”; “The looking glass, which was working hard that night, reflected her green dress /…/ She remained unconscious of the mirror’s attention /…/” (Nabokov 1968a: 23, 61, 64). As C. Metz observes, the mirror plays in the cinema a role of “the frame in a frame”: it either multiplies the frame space or opens up a new space (Metz 1992). In “King, Queen, Knave”, it is usually the repeated or illusionary space that opens within the mirror. A false localization may happen as a result of an optical illusion or illusory reflection. Nabokov employs a “catoptric staging” device, when the audience is meant to mistake illusion for reality or to be involved in a deceptive situation (Eco 1986: 231). Thus, Franz hurrying to Martha’s boudoir is involved in the optical illusion which might be caused by double reflection: “he pictured how in instant he would push open that door over there, enter her boudoir /…/ he pictured it so vividly that for a split second he saw before him his own receding back, saw his hand, saw himself opening the door, and because that sensation was a foray into the future, and it is forbidden to ransack the future, he was swiftly punished. In the first place, as he caught up with himself, he tripped and sent the door flying open /…/” (Nabokov 1968a: 85). The effect is similar to the cinematic usage of mise-en-scene. The protagonist probably identifies himself with his receding image in a mirror behind, which he sees in a mirror in front, so the collision with the real door comes as a surprise bringing him back from the mirror world to reality.

Mimicry

Mimicry produces artificial non-existent objects or simulacra that threaten to replace the originals: the advertising world of “handsome demons” mimicking human existence (Nabokov 1963: 20); Chinese rhubarb root resembling a caterpillar or the caterpillar copying the root (ibid, 121); dream mimicry: hair clippers, “which took the most unexpected forms – mountains, landing stages, coffins, hand organs” (ibid, 133).

As Claude Gandelman shows in his article on mimicry in Thomas Mann’s “Doktor Faustus” (Gandelman 1984), the problem of direction and reversibility of the mimetic relation is as much a cultural and philosophic as it is a scientific problem. 19^th century positivism sees mimicry as an effect of natural selection dependent on the arrow of evolution and ascending from the non-organic to the organic forms: organic life imitates the non-organic forms. On the contrary, in medieval and Renaissance esoteric teachings, in German Naturphilosophie and Romanticism the mimetic process descends from the more spiritual beings to the less spiritual ones towards the non-organic forms: the latter are imperfect copies of the former. Reversibility of the mimetic relation may evoke diabolic connotations: the non-organic world is the image of the self-alienated spirit, whose aim is demonic reproduction or even substitution of its source. Modern science has some difficulties in ascertaining the direction of mimetic relation and testifies that the positivist belief in the arrow of evolution might have been erroneous. Nabokov’s objections to the Darwinian utilitarian and unidirectional understanding of mimicry in “Speak, Memory” (a fragment of the unpublished article incorporated into the autobiography - Boyd 1992: 37) are well-known. As Charles Lee Remington argues referring to V. Alexandrov’s study (Garland 1995: 282), Nabokov might have found metaphysical arguments against the Darwinian explanations in Hinton’s, P. Uspensky’s and N. Evreinov’s works. For P. Uspensky theatricality and mimetic forms of the provisional three-dimensional world are just the manifestations of the transcendental intention of nature and a pledge of fuller vision (Aleksandrov 1999: 272-273). Mimicry is also a creative model. The act of false or incomplete imitation, an illusory resemblance is the conceptual kernel of a number of his novels, e.g. “Despair”, “The Eye” or “Pale Fire”. In “Despair”, Hermann “tries to mirror himself in Felix, making Felix into a double that no one else recognizes. Felix thus becomes – or Hermann’s version of Felix becomes – an inhabitant of Hermann’s mirror world” (Clark 1986: 54). Likewise, Kinbote tries to mirror himself in Shade’s poem and to find reflections of Zembla in it (“Pale Fire”). Humbert’s story is permeated with allusions to Quilty (“Lolita”). Quilty, who initially accompanies Humbert as a shadow, intercepts the leading role and displaces Humbert to the role of the shadow. However, a question of an original and a copy remains open: the author is toying with the idea of mimetic reversibility.

Magdalena Medaric (Medaric 2001) points to the vast cultural significance of mimicry, equal to such important symbols as “labyrinth”, “mirror”, “enigma”, etc. She regards mimicry as the “game” and the “theatre” through the prism of R. Caillois’ game theory and Evreinov’s theory of theatre. On her opinion, mimicry as an illusionist device, mystification or visual ambiguity, belongs to the “manieristic” as contrasted with “classical” paradigm of culture, according to G. Hocke’s classification. Medaric observes that mimicry lies on the border between the pure idealism and pure materialism, metaphysics and positive science (ibid, 215). Her account focuses first and foremost on the metaphysical and cultural aspects of mimicry. Thus, Nabokov’s elaboration of the mimicry topic involves elements of the Romantic and Symbolist myth of the “double reality”, decadent aestheticism and scientific interest in natural asymmetry and reversibility of mimetic relations.

The models of polarized vision

Double or multiple reflection and mimicry belong to the vast class of models of polarized vision, e.g. vacillation between two- and three-dimensionality. In certain circumstances two-dimensional objects are perceived as three-dimensional and vice versa. For example, a “white parallelogram of sky” is actually a dresser with mirror as “cinema screen”, where swaying of boughs is produced by a human vacillation, “by the nature of those who were carrying this sky” (Nabokov 1963: 14). The dresser is first perceived as a flat geometrical object (parallelogram, screen). The mirror reflection (sky, boughs) generates an illusory three-dimensional space inside. However, the illusion is dispelled by a vacillation of the real world containing the dresser. The cinematographic “screen” metaphor is pertinent here: “It is one of the most important formal qualities of film that every object that is reproduced appears simultaneously in two entirely different frames of reference, namely the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, and that as one identical object it fulfils two different functions in the two contexts” (Arnheim 1957: 59). Another example of polarized vision is confusion or merging of the visual field and visual world, which produces an optical illusion, e.g. when butterfly closes its wings and with that disappears (Nabokov 1963: 80) or when footprint is seen as a part of a human body: “a highly significant footprint, ever looking upward and ever seeing him who has vanished” (ibid, 80). The stroboscopic effect which retains traces of the previous perception also produces a vacillation between the “normal” and confused or disturbed vision: he “nearly tripped over the tiger stripes which had not kept up with the cat as it jumped aside” (ibid, 16); “the yawn begun by a woman in the lighted window of the first car was completed by another woman – in the last one” (ibid, 308).

The Hourglass and the Möbius Strip

The hourglass belongs to the group of symbols of infinity. It is employed, for example, to describe Adam Krug’s hampered attempt to cross the bridge in “Bend Sinister”. The soldiers of the south side guard do not permit the philosopher enter the city since his pass is not signed by the north side guard, whereas the north side soldiers can not read and write. “Doomed to walk back and forth on a bridge which has ceased to be one since neither bank is really attainable. Not a bridge but an hourglass which somebody keep reversing, with me, the fluent fine sand, inside” (Nabokov 1974: 24). The hourglass is a metaphor for the measured infinity like a verse line, a unit of poetry. The metaphor refers to H. Bergson’s “Creative Evolution”: “It is not easy to get rid off the image of hourglass while thinking about time” (Bergson 1913: 21). The hourglass is an ambiguous symbol. On the one hand, it is an image of measurable infinity. If the movement of sand is identified with the direction of historical time, it turns out that measurable time runs towards the future, the future being filled and the past disappearing. On the other hand, the hourglass visually demonstrates that the future and the past consist of the same matter and the idea of time is relative. Being perceived as a visual image or icon, the hourglass represents the reverse time of human life (as depicted in the first chapter of “The Gift”): the diminishing future, the replenishing past. Time is reversible neither in the mathematical nor in the physical sense, but in terms of human perception: “What we are now trying (unsuccessfully) to do is to fill the abyss we have safely crossed with terrors borrowed from the abyss in front, which abyss is borrowed itself from the infinite past. Thus we live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds” (Nabokov 1974: 161). Finally, the hourglass is “associated with the point of contact between the novel’s two worlds” (Johnson 1985: 197): as a chiastic structure it is a model of the fictional space.

Fictional space is the “reverse side” of reality, which, in its turn, partakes of another, higher reality. Several scholars (S. Davydov, O. Ronen) describe the structure of “The Gift” as the Möbius strip, where the author/ narrator and the protagonist move along the different sides of the strip. The close relationships between the author’s biography and the novel are too apparent to ignore them: the author/ narrator and the protagonist are the two sides of the same texture. The grammatical first-person form is an expression of this linkage: in the first-person fragments the distance between the auctorial narrator and the protagonist is minimal. The Möbius strip is also the model of the relationship between narration and the narrative. They are paradoxically separate and inseparable: “…each is part of the other, like the front and back sides of a sheet of paper” (Branigan 1984: 4). The relationship between narration and narrative is a basic narratological problem further developed by psychoanalysis of the film as “(1) a play of presence/ absence between the author as subject and a narrator, i.e., any of the author’s representatives in the text” and “(2) a play of identity/ difference between the viewer as subject and a narrate, i.e., any of the viewer’s representatives in the text” (Branigan 1984: 11).

Movement along the Möbius strip or the reversed “eight”-shaped symbol of infinity is constantly repeated on the different levels of the text: “the conversation you are carrying on while your mind runs around you’re the outside of your own words and along the inside of those of your interlocutor”; random thoughts as well as details of the physical world form together “the reverse side of a magnificent fabric, on the front of which there gradually formed and became alive images invisible to him /the protagonist who is writing the novel – MG./” (Nabokov 1963: 158, 298).

Some conclusive remarks. Speaking of the “semiotic models” in literature, I refer, first, to the notion of the artistic text as a “modelling system”, as defined by the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school, and second, to the notion of modernism as highly reflexive, theoretical and “self-conscious art” (see e.g. Alter, Fokkema and others). The modernist theory is deeply enrooted in the practice of art and philosophy (see an overview in Grishakova 2002). A combination of an entomologist, writer and chess problemist in Nabokov’s personality testifies to the close relationships and multiple points of intersection between different realms of the “discursive formation” of the modernist age. The metaphors of spiral and circle, mirror, hourglass, etc., are exploited as theoretical models (in M. Black’s terminology) to investigate the properties of the fictional space, the status of the author and the nature of art.

References

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