Art is thinking in images (Shklovsky 5). Where words fail us images fill in the gaps and the vacuum. However, art is not a mere visual contouring of words. Words as semantic products have a definite and strictly drawn social life. It is through their social conditioning that words acquire a habitual meaning. The weight of habit informs the body and mind and trains it to respond to them involuntarily.
“And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war. ‘If the whole complex life of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.’” (Shklovsky 12)
Art comes as a relief for that dreary existence of habit. A breath of fresh thinking, it makes the observer see, perceive and sense beyond the boundaries of given and habit. Even in daily existence, art imparts a new meaning, a new sense and a new perception. Thus, “…art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life: it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” (Shklovsky 12) A revolutionary way of sensing things is imparted to the customary human world by art. Art becomes the medium of redefining a habitual world in completely new perspectives.
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky in his exposition Art as Technique postulated this ingenious method of perceiving life. A groundbreaking work, as it is, the postulation of Shklovsky added a new chapter to critical formalism. In their love for ‘art as a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object’, the formalists implied “that any concern with the moral, political, emotional, or philosophical implications of art is a form of philistinism.” (Waugh, Literary theory and criticism: an Oxford guide 216)
Indeed a shade of Nihilism plagued it; nevertheless, the formalists devised a magnificent system of narratology (Waugh 216-17). In their endeavor to create a narrative of perceptions formalism acquired the status and posture of ‘metafiction’ where the fiction tried to criticize the moral responsibility of the moralizing literature belonging to the bourgeois class, and in doing so become “self-conscious” (Waugh 3). Patricia Waugh has explained, “… the world… cannot be ‘represented’” rather is the “discourses” of the world that can be represented through literary fiction (Waugh 3).
This dilemma is alleviated by metafictions. Metafiction allows a novelist to relate a fiction within a fiction and allow the reader to draw from their literary reading and construct the world. As has been mentioned by Waugh, “Metafiction may concern itself… with particular conventions of the novel, to display the process of their construction.” (Waugh 4) Shklovsky being a prominent formalist assumed art as a medium of acquiring and perceiving this self-consciousness. In his explication, art acquired the paramount task of magnifying the artfulness or the sordid reality (just as one deems perfect to perceive) of each character and theme embedded in it.
In the light of formalism of Shklovsky, narration, as a prosaic or poetic art, assumed the role of a demystifying agent shocking the reader’s habitual introspective understanding of a text or a narration into a more aesthetic engagement with the ‘artfulness of the object’. Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce in their postmodern prerogative engaged in similar acts of recovering the sensations of life (Shklovsky 12).
In this capacity their literary creations Lolita, Pale Fire and The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man stands apart and sentinel at the gateway of formalism, which prolongs the road of perception as perception is an aesthetic end in itself (Shklovsky 12). In this paper, I shall try to fathom the extent to which the artfulness of object is recovered in all the three postmodern works and how they negate the habitual literary moralistic introspection stuffing fiction like a jack in the larger box of literary ‘discoursed’ fiction so that the readers can construct and perceive a meaning of their own from it as and when the jack pops out.
Vladimir Nabokov born in St. Petersburg on 23rd April 1899 fled to Crimea with his family during the Bolshevik Revolution. He is hailed as one of master prose stylists of the century in both Russian and English. The super prosaic literary creation of Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire (1962) abounds in literary absurdities through interplay of realism, metaphor, images, and allusions. The self-conscious issue of reality versus fictional (Isaacs 317) engages the readers in a categorical discussion with the text where they are called upon to solve and perceive a puzzle called life.
The first two lines from the poem Pale Fire presents a categorical engagement with the reader as if it asks the reader to interpret the puzzle embedded in the text: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/ By the false azure in the windowpane;/ I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I/ Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.” (Nabokov 15) Isaacs points out that a “radical opsis in a lyric” is a riddle that actually is intended to decompose the text to a visual form and helps in making sense of it, and that is what Shade’s opening lines have tried to do (Isaacs 318) Nabokov has tried to establish a “generic type of engagement” with the readers and challenge the readers to “interpret the image(s), thereby solving the puzzle or enigma, in order to arrive at an understanding of what is signified (Isaacs 317).
Life and death itself has been dealt with irony in the novel. First Nabokov has death the death of Hazel in a few pages and with little pathos and compassion, rather it has been described through “Shade’s disciplined couplets,” and “ironical and the farcical in hazel Shade’s life and death.” (Rampton 151). Thus, suicide in Pale Fire is reminded not by Hazel Shade’s stepping “Into a crackling, gulping swamp” (Nabokov, 47) but through Kinbote’s annotations on Zemblan’s thoughts to end his life. The readers are thus, accorded with the paramount task of perceiving the evident and the implicit references hidden by the author in the text.
The sense of reality in the novel becomes bleak, as Shade dies an “absurd death” in the hand of a madman, Jack Grey, who aimed to shoot a man who simply resembled Judge Goldsworth. The absurdity of Shade’s death is accentuated when “another madman appropriates it to form the basis for his Jakob Gradus fantasy” as he had stolen Shade’s work to meet his “megalomaniac ends” (Boyd 77). In the poem, Shade describes his perfect and orderly life, even after his daughter’s death.
However, Boyd points out that the missing final couplet represents a “mocking chaos” and not a perfectly “ordered cosmos” (Boyd 78). The antithesis of the plot is reached in the final lines of the commentary that leaves the reader appalled by Shade’s sudden death; however, Kinbote tries to distract the readers through the expression of his concerns to hide the poem.
Boyd has pointed out: “Because Grey suddenly calls into question not only the Gradus story but Zembla itself, we find it hard to pay Shade’s death sufficient attention.” (Boyd 78). Through such fictional or “paratext” (Pier) allusions to the world and the habitual realities of the world Nabokov makes the readers dwell in a fantastic world where they unhinge their own perception (not the mere worldly discourses) of the cosmos.
Just as Pale Fire abounds in absurdities Nabokov uses the constant consternation between the sense of decorum of the seemingly pervert Humbert and his lustful longing for Lolita in the book Lolita to inject fictionality within the fiction. The already fictional world of Humbert who is relating his story to the “ladies and gentlemen of the jury” (Nabokov 9) is turned doubly unbelievable by the imaginative and nonplussed description of the object of the narrative-Lolita- whom he portrays as “She was plain Lo, plain Lo, in the morning…She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted lines. But in my arms she was always Lolita.” (Nabokov 9) The flummoxed descriptions of the protagonists of the narrative is described as
“…a hypnotic subject of a performer in a mystic rite, produced sophisticated version of infantile make-believe by going through the mimetic actions of hearing a moan in the dark, seeing for the first time a brand new young stepmother, tasting something she hated, such as buttermilk, smelling crushed grass in a lush orchard, or touching mirages of objects with her sly, slender, girl-child hands.” (Nabokov 230)
This turns the narrative into a long drawn dream affording the reader an opportunity to define and perceive the world thrown at their disposal according to their own understanding. Imagery evoked through such descriptions affects a sense of non-reality amongst the readers hence opens new vistas of interpretations for them.
There are multiple texts embedded in the novel in form of letters, poems, magazine pages, signage (of motels, shops, roads, etc.), maps, pages from diaries, etc. Humbert presents ‘Exhibition Number Two”, his personal diary, which had been reconstructed from a “photographic memory”, makes the reader skeptical about its content:
“I remember the things so exactly because I wrote it really twice. First I jotted down each entry in pencil (with many erasures and corrections)… then, I copied it out with obvious abbreviations in my smallest, most satanic hand…” (Nabokov 40)
The narration of Humbert largely helps in convincing the readers that the text within the reproduced diary is not trustworthy. The repetition of words like “perhaps” presents uncertainty even on Humbert’s part in the reproduction of the text. As the readers go through Lolita, they get a feel that Humbert’s account is incomplete and requires the collaboration of the reader for completion. Thus, he ejaculates, “As greater authors than I have put it: “Let readers imagine” etc.” (Nabokov 65). The novel stands out in its approach of Humbert’s “nymphet love” (Nabokov 135) and through which it “taunts” the readers to reduce their conventional expectations out of the novel and begin using their interpretational skills.
“Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tender hearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential page!! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little” (Nabokov 129)
Thus, Humbert tries to delude the reader in his own existential ideas; the reader’s senses become stronger and thus help them to interpret the text from different angles. Such explicit taunting of the readers by the narrator is atypical of authors like Nabokov who adopt this as a
“… process of ordering, interpreting, and imaginatively “concretizing” is the same … but reading is either allegorized as a creative process shared with the author, … or it is actually made so disruptive and challenging as to force the reader, if he is to read at all, to so that ordering, interpreting, and imagining for himself.” (Hutcheon 143-4).
When in the end Humbert realizes, as Hutcheon points out, “that he can only possess Lolita, only make her live, imaginatively, in a diegetic erotic version shared with the reader.” (Hutcheon 85) Thus, he calls upon the readers to imagine, realize and perceive him and his “Lolita” so as to make them come alive in both their reality and fantastic existence.
James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man transports the readers to another world of unreality subverting the informed or conditioned reality. In the book, he traces the journey of the young Stephen Dedalus, a silent, exiled and cunning Irish boy, considered by literary critics to be the fictional self of Joyce himself. The entire narration revolves in a dream like sequence. He aims to write a dream that will resemble the real course of dream.
He pines to have in the course all the ‘eccentricities’ and all the ‘aimlessness’ that pertains to a true dream yet wants to have running within it a ‘leading idea’ (Levin 141). The book begins with a story, absurdly unreal, recounted often by Stephen’s father. The dream suddenly breaks into real people with real feeling and opinion, caught in a web of turmoil pressing over Ireland, the space of the narrative.
Gradually the story moves forward explicating the variegated experiences of Stephen who uses his childlike understanding to unfold before the authors the condition of a nation in upheaval. The readers move in the spot along with Stephen as he survives school in chapter one and his encounter with Father Dolan. The narration of the encounter however again reverts to the same old dream like quality at the end of the chapter:
“The air was soft and grey and mild and evening was coming. There was the smell of evening in the air, the smell of the fields in the country where they digged up turnips to peel them and eat them when they went out for a walk to Major Barton’s, the smell there was in the little wood beyond the pavilion where the gallnuts were.” (Joyce 49)
The sudden allusion to natural beauty creates profound images of a world quite unreal, a world possible only in dreams. The sensation of air, the smell of a time and space jumbles together to evoke in the minds of the readers a fantastic image where they are made to question the veracity of the account recounted by the book.
The dream stretches itself and in its web gives rise to contested notions about existence. Thus, Stephen reminisce, “How strange to think of him passing out of existence in such a way, not by death but by fading out in the sun or by being lost and forgotten somewhere in the universe!” (Joyce 78) Existence- past, present and future- looms large over the dream webbed by Joyce. Joyce was running away from the nightmare of history, the greatest function of existence.
Caught in this web the reader wonders about the identity of the narrator and the dreamer. They are left to fathom the real narrator behind the dreamer and the dreamer hidden within the narrator. Joyce uses subtle dream sequences to prick the interest of the readers and enhances their curiosity to know that is Joyce speaking through Stephen or is Stephen a dream Joyce is having. Thus, the dream like narration of the work appeals to the reader to perceive not merely the author i.e. Joyce within Stephen Dedalus but something more, and beyond. Joyce gives the reader a free rein to interpret the book as it unfolds itself as a dream before their perception, flouting literary stricture of moralizing both in-text and paratext.
Art indeed finds fruition not in perception of something that is already there but in something that can be there beyond the “already there”. It is in the imageries, the un-realities evoked by art that it finds a meaning for itself. Nabokov and Joyce engage their reader in similar game of perception. They transform their prose into a long ride of unreality and dream to let the imagination of the reader have a free rein.
They are called upon and appealed to implicitly, often overtly, to join the author, the narrator to ‘imagine’ the text, hence create, or bring into existence the entire narrative. Nabokov utilizes tools of subtle befuddlement to wake the reader to a great task- not of reading- but of bringing alive every situation, every event and every characters of the text. He gives the reader the eerie satisfaction of creating a textual world beyond the prescribed boundaries of literary criticism. Thus, narration becomes a function of perception. James Joyce gives a mystical quality to his narration, a delusion meant for his authors.
His work ensnares the readers to be caught in a shady alley in the capacity of a narrator redefining the movements of the characters on the main street of the text. A strange combination of Homeric mysticism and grandeur of Byron the characters and events of the text emerges as dreams devoid of well-specified space and time. This lack of specificity accords the dream an open-endedness that the reader can define and interpret in different ways.
Thus, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Lolita, and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man celebrates art to the brim by allowing and appealing to the reader to perceive the artfulness of their art form-the prosaic text- through befuddlement and dreams. Such rendition of the prosaic text coagulates reality with fiction and demonstrates a new way to aesthetic fulfillment-through metafiction.
Bibliography
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