NABOKOV by LEONA TOKER

Author:LEONA TOKER
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2016-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

The effect of the anecdote is enhanced by the cataloguelike description of the art book: it is characteristic of Albinus to treat the book not just as a source of information but also, perhaps mainly, as a valuable—that is, expensive (“ten volumes, folio”)—possession. He wishes to turn Margot, or rather the beauty that he sees in her, into such a possession. Moreover; he has expected her to remain motionless for hours behind a bookcase, like an art book on its shelf or a cushion that has tumbled to the floor, waiting patiently for the master’s approach. The absurdity of this expectation foreshadows the disappointments that are in store for him, the empty rooms into which he will grope his way in search of his fickle mistress.

The name of the author of the art book can be understood as “a maker of nonnons.” In Invitation to a Beheading, “nonnons” are strange, grotesque objects that converge to make a picture when they are reflected in a special mirror (see IB, 135–36), probably an anamorphoscope (the mirror held up to nature?).11 As possessions rather than conditions of aesthetic experience, books and objects of art are little more than “nonnons.” Creative perception is the anamorphoscope that organizes entropic “average reality” (SO, 118) so as to endow it with “harmony and meaning” (RB, 24). Albinus and Margot are incapable of authentic perception. They structure their respective world pictures on movieland stereotypes, and as the pervasiveness of the film imagery in the novel suggests, their lives become parodies of film romances and therefore ample sources of the incongruous and grotesque.12

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