The Poetics of Subliminal Awareness: Re-reading Intention and Narrative Structure in Nabokov's "Christmas Story" more

European Journal of English Studies |J Routledqe 2004, Vol. 8, NO. 1, pp. 27^8 l\ T.ytor&FmJ?G,o,,p The Poetics of Subliminal Awareness: Re-reading Intention and Narrative Structure in Nabokov's 'Christmas Story' Jose Angel Garcia Landa Universidad de Zaragoza 'The Christmas Story' was not included in the collections of Vladimir Nabokov's stories published in his lifetime.1 Nabokov, it has been thought, considered it too avowedly political or didactic in aim to qualify as a first-rate story. It contains, indeed, a caricature of Soviet aesthetics, and a denunciation of its simple-minded version of reality through a case study of bad faith in a writer. The value of the story goes well beyond Nabok- ov's polemics with the Soviet regime and with poshlost' (vulgarity). Still, the story is intrinsically linked to those polemics. It reveals the deepest groundings of Nabokov's rejection of regimented writing as it takes us on a tour through the inner workings of imagination, memory and desire. Show- ing the way in which this work is more complex than may seem at first sight will involve tackling some characteristics of Nabokov's narrative poetics which account for his elaborate representations of consciousness. It will also involve going beyond the consciously designed aspects of the story as an aesthetic construct, in order to relocate the intended aesthetic effect within a wider interpretive frame. A first interpretive step requires reading the story as a conscious aes- thetic construct. This involves reconstructing the author's designs, both experiencing (at the level of reading) and describing (at the level of criti- cal metalanguage) a number of semiotic structures and relationships. For instance, the title places the story within an intertextual framework: the Correspondence: Jose Angel Garcia Landa, Universidad de Zaragoza , Departamento de Filologia Inglesa y Alemana, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain. E-mail: garciala@unizar.es I wish to thank Beatriz Penas for her suggestions and her help in revising the manuscript - and for the reflections in her eyes. 1 Vladimir Nabokov, 'Rozhdestvensskii rasskaz' [signed V. Sirin, 1925], Rul' 2458 (25th December 1928): 2-3; references unless otherwise specified are to the English transla- tion by Dmitri Nabokov: Vladimir Nabokov, 'The Christmas Story' in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), 22-27. 1382-5577/04/0801-27$16.00 © Taylor & Francis Ltd. 28 JOSE ANGEL GARCIA LANDA genre of Christmas stories, well known to readers through such paradig- matic works as Dickens's A Christmas Carol or The Bells; Nabokov had already published another such story, 'Christmas' ('Rozhdestvo'), in 1925. In the later work ('The Christmas Story') the conventions of the sub-genre are upheld: the protagonist is an emotional Scrooge2, thirsty for petty fame, not for his happiness or his soul. But these conventions are also given a metafictional twist, since this is a Christmas story about the writing of Christmas stories, and ultimately about writing and (spiritual) insight. Reflections in an I A brief summary may be in order. The setting is the Soviet Union, some years after the 1917 revolution. Novodvortsev, a third-rank writer and would-be pride of Soviet letters, receives in his room an aspiring proletar- ian writer, Anton Goliy, who is being introduced to him by a Communist critic. Goliy, like Novodvortsev, writes run-of-the-mill socialist realism, that is, politically correct Communist Party propaganda (I will refer to such writing as PCCPP). Novodvortsev scarcely pays any attention to the beginner, being completely engrossed in a self-aggrandising view of his oeuvre, which he feels lacks adequate recognition. The critic, far from acknowledging Novodvortsev's significance, taunts him with a reference to the Christmas stories he and other writers would have been writing on a day like this before the Revolution. Novodvortsev rejects the critic's insinuation that he is a turncoat, but once he is alone he abjectly clings to the critic's suggestion that he should write a 'new-style' Christmas story depicting the class struggle - he fantasises to the effect that such a story might consolidate his literary reputation (and his political one too, one gathers). As he faces the blank page struggling with several Christmas motifs, his concentration is interrupted by his neighbour, a card-holding Communist, who drops in to ask for a pen. Alone again, Novodvortsev is distracted by an involuntary flash of memory as he played with the idea of Christmas trees (a motif first mentioned by Goliy): he remembers one particular Christmas long ago, and the woman he loved in those days, and all of the tree's lights reflected as a crystal quiver in her wide-open eyes when she plucked a tangerine from a high branch. It had been twenty years ago or more - how certain details stuck in one's memory ... (p. 226) 2 R.W. Dillard, 'Nabokov's Christmas Stories', in Torpid Smoke: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, eds. Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 35- 52, p. 51. THE POETICS OF SUBLIMINAL AWARENESS 29 The memory flash has an epiphanic vividness well described by Boyd (with reference to another Nabokov story): 'the unique complex of par- ticulars becomes an instant unbearably vulnerable and poignant, fading even now from memory - but surely, surely, preserved in the past?'3 That is the effect produced on the reader. But Novodvortsev rejects this memory and tries again to concentrate on his story. As he hits upon an adequate PCCPP theme involving Christmas trees, Nabokov's story is brought to a conclusion: With triumphal agitation, sensing that he had found the necessary, one-and-only key, that he would write something exquisite, depict as no one had before the collision of two classes, of two worlds, he commenced writing. He wrote about the opulent tree in the shame- lessly illuminated window and about the hungry worker, victim of a lockout, peering at that tree with a severe and somber gaze. "The insolent Christmas tree," wrote Novodvortsev, "was afire with every hue of the rainbow." (pp. 226f) Eye-rony The aspect of the story which immediately strikes most readers is its dimension as political satire. As such, the story is a merciless attack on the cliches of Soviet-sponsored social 'realism'. It drives its point home by offering itself as a specimen of writing which is far more complex aesthetically, and provides a more complex and intelligent approach to reality. Some satirical points are overt enough. Thus, the critic works for the Communist-sponsored periodical Red Reality. The insolent Christmas tree stands thus as a fit emblem of the many-coloured reality which is overlooked by those who only see red. It is also adorned with God's plenty, while the name of Anton Goliy ('naked', 'bare', 'cropped') suggests the impoverished notion of reality, realism and writing the 'new times' have brought along. The protagonist began his writing career in the old regime, but it is now that he has come into his (scant) own and has really become novodvortsev, the 'new courtier' within a new system of privilege. Novodvortsev's point of view is presented through psychonarration, merging with the narratorial description and re-emerging from it only to be held up for the reader's ironically detached contemplation. Consonant Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 238. 30 JOSE ANGEL GARCIA LANDA psychonarration often opens the way to narrated monologue.4 Which is what happens here - only, the consonance between narrator and character is ironic. The character's subjective distortions become all the more fla- grant as his point of view is reconstructed and ascribed to him by the reader within the framework of an authorial narrative, for instance in this passage in which Novodvortsev overestimates his influence on Golly and others: This was not the first time he had been subjected to such glum, earnest rustic fictionists. And not the first time he had detected, in their immature narratives, echoes - not yet noted by the critics - of his own twenty-five years of writing; for Goliy's story was a clumsy rehash of one of his subjects ... (p. 222) This opinion, for all the apparent objectivity of its consonant psychonar- rative form, is loaded with authorial irony - upon irony, since the ironic stance towards Goliy is shared by Novodvortsev and the consonant narra- tor's discourse. But from the implied authorial viewpoint, the question of whether Goliy and the other rustics have been inspired by Novodvortsev is a moot one, as both the master and the hypothetical disciples are mere mouthpieces for the official 'spirit of the age'.5 Far from being a conven- iently impartial peephole for the omniscient narrator's account, Novod- vortsev is shown here to be a vain and pompous focaliser. Such reflectorial colouring of a seemingly-authorial psychonarration may be easily misread by those not attuned to Nabokov's irony - as is the case with Naumann, who interprets descriptions like the foregoing as the kindly portrayal of Novodvortsev by an omniscient narrator, and describes the language of the story as 'direct and neutral'.6 The reader's correct understanding of Novodvortsev's distorted percep- tion is thus a central constructive principle in the story, and is also reflex - ively thematised in it - what is at issue in the story both as narrated action and as aesthetic construct, is the need for critical clear-sightedness and an adequate recognition of the mainsprings of writing and of perception. Part of the satirical effect of the story consists in Novodvortsev's failing to note that the image he chooses for the opening of his story expresses See Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. Zraan Kuzmanovich, '"A Christmas Story": A Polemic with Ghosts' in A Small Alpine Form-Studies in Nabokov's Short Fiction, eds. Charles Nicol and Gennady Barabtarlo (New York: Garland, 1993), 81-97, p. 87. Marina Turkevich Naumann, Blue Evenings in Berlin: Nabokov s Short Stories of the 1920s (New York: New York University Press, 1978), p. 113 and p. 115. THE POETICS OF SUBLIMINAL AWARENESS 31 his own frustration and nostalgia, in a self-defeating way that only readers (and the implied author) note. This crucial aspect of the story's intentional construction is recognised by Boyd.7 Still, that intended ironic effect fails to account for the overall effect of the story. As Derrida and other (post-)stmcturalists hold, authorial inten- tion is a necessary element in the text's machinery, but it is subordinated to the play of unintentional meaning structures. This is so even in the case of a preternaturally conscious author like Nabokov. A failure to grasp the story's structure beyond the satirical elements may account for the surpris- ing neglect and the generally low critical estimate of the story. For instance, in a recent monograph on Nabokov's stories, Shrayer provides readings of many stories which are both aesthetically acute and historically informed. However, his passing comment on this story is sur- prisingly short-sighted: 'Nabokov's short fiction makes a leap between the loose texture of "Rozhdestvenskii rasskaz" (A Christmas Story, 1928) and the astounding power of "The Aurelian" (1930).'8 As I hope my reading will make clear, 'A Christmas Story' is about as loose, structurally speak- ing, as a Swiss watch, and the otherworldly subjects which are elsewhere the object of Shrayer's suggestive analyses are equally inscribed, if ever so subtly, in this story. Other readings of the story are equally unsatisfactory. Naumann tenta- tively points to the polemical dimension in the story and argues that 'this is one of Nabokov's least satisfying stories'9 — and it is clear from her account that she does not grasp the basic 'point' of the story as described by Boyd. R.H.W. Dillard's article on Nabokov's Christmas stories ignores previous discussions of the story and is biased by a Christian perspective which tries hard to bring out the covert Christian in Nabokov. Dillard does not seem to grasp the intentional structure of the story as described by Boyd - the ironic vantage position that author and reader enjoy over Novodvortsev in being able to relate his flashback memory and the cen- tral image of the tale he writes. It is no wonder, therefore, that Dillard should consider that the story 'does not approach the artistic complexity of "Christmas'".10 Zoran Kuzmanovich's reading stands out as possibly the most critically informed. It teases out many dimensions of the story's involvement with current debates on art and imagination, but is less satisfactory in dealing 7 See Boyd, Nabokov, p. 287. 8 5££TD-,o£ayer' T'le W°rld °f Nabokov's Stories (Austin: University of Texas Press tyyy), p. 122. 5 9 Naumann, Blue Evenings, p. 116. 10 Dillard, 'Nabokov's Christmas Stories', p. 47. 32 JOSE ANGEL GARCIA LANDA with their role in the structural dynamics of the story. For instance, Kuz- manovich traces the image of the tree reflected in an eye back to other Nabokovian satires of naive materialism in Nabokov's novel The Gift. This intertextual link accounts for the satirical element in the reflected tree image, but not for its concrete narrative articulation in "The Christmas Story' as an epiphany which opens an otherworldly vista into the charac- ter's experience.11 The tree image performs in the story an experiential role (the refutation of materialism) contrary to the one ascribed to it by Kuzmanovich. Overall, Kuzmanovich stays within the bounds of 'friendly criticism', mostly following the interpretive moves of the implied reader inscribed by the author in the story (his subliminal treatment of the prox- emics in the story, I will shortly argue, is symptomatic of the limits of his reading). We face here the problem of defining which is a work's 'main' subject, as different truths may exist at different planes of the story and depend on the reader's level of critical engagement with the story. Nabokov's writing seems to forestall critical reading in that it articulates translucent planes of superimposed subjects. Many elements which are perceived subliminally by the reader are consciously intended by the author (according to some of his best critics). But given this principle of construction no clear limit can be established between the inferences stemming from the deliberate and conscious semiotic relationships and those based on subliminally intended relationships. To this we must add the wider critical perspectives we might characterise as 'unfriendly' criticism or 'resisting reading', which identify themes or structures beyond the author's intention or in opposition to it. Some of the issues concerning intentionality can be exemplified through an analysis of the work's focalisation. Internal focalisation is restricted to Novodvortsev. As we have seen, the stream of his consciousness is directed by a smug egolatry; his thoughts betray Ms.thirst for recognition, and he is shown to misinterpret other people's attitudes, as if everybody were as attentive to him as he himself is. In this sense the character is mercilessly exposed through a narrative equivalent of dramatic irony, without the nar- rator's overt judgment. The presence of irony is not a matter of interpre- tive choice: a reading which ignored this level of the character's depiction would be a misreading. We need, therefore, to establish a well-defined implied authorial voice design in order to make sense of the satirical/ironic aspect of the story. This strongly defined implied author is part of what Couturier has called Nabokov's 'tyranny'.12 11 On Nabokov's 'otherworld', see Alexandrov, Nabokov's Otherworld; and Shrayer, The World of Nabokov's Stories. 12 See Maurice Couturier, Nabokov, on la tyrannie de I'auteur (Paris: Seuil, 1993). THE POETICS OF SUBLIMINAL AWARENESS 33 The concept of 'implied author' has been criticised by some narratolo- gists as unnecessary. In my view, an implied authorial attitude potentially exists as a constructive element in narrative, although it may be more or less clearly defined in a given work. Both the consciously communicated authorial intention and the wider interpretive inferences which make up a reader's image of the implied author must be granted a structural role. They cannot be discarded as non-existent or irrelevant, most particularly in the cases in which they are strongly defined, as in satirical works generally or (closer to hand) in the present story by Nabokov. The implied author is not an equivalent of 'the whole textual structure', or of abstract and col- lective norms, as some definitions would have it. The reader's image of the author - not to mention the reader's notion of the author's conscious intention - cannot account for all textual effects or stylistic traits. Being an aspect of composition and - in the last analysis - an illocutionary element, the communicated implied authorial attitude cannot dictate the overall response to the work, a matter which belongs to quite another communi- cative plane (perlocution, reception, reading, critical activity). Finally, the critique of ideology necessitates the concept of an implied author, since a resisting reading must resist something, or someone. Reading irony is therefore an interactive exercise in consciousness which requires establishing the mutual limits of at least four conscious- nesses: that of the ironist (the implied author here); that of the butt of irony (the character); that of the ideal witness necessary to conjure up a laugh- ing party (the implied reader) and that of the actual witness (the reader). But there exist other intentional elements in composition which need not be read as consciously designed in order to function within an intentional aesthetic framework.13 This is the case, for instance, of specular textual models, of proxemic or paralinguistic notations, or of symbolism. We will examine each of these in turn. Specularity (I) The story includes several mise-en-abyme structures. Some are works inside the work. In Novodvortsev's story 'The Verge' we find the intel- lectual Tumanov, who, unbeknownst to Novodvortsev, mirrors some of his attitudes - for example 'He recalled that, in "The Verge", Tumanov For a preliminary discussion of the differences between (modes of) intentionality and consciousness, see John R. Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 34 JOSE ANGEL GARCf A LANDA felt nostalgia for the pomp of former holidays' (p. 225). A similar mise en abyme is noted by Kuzmanovich: 'the plot of the story [Goliy] has just read becomes mirrored in what transpires in Novodvortsev's room'.14 Accord- ing to Kuzmanovich this mirroring is then reversed, since Novodvortsev the sputnik intellectual triumphs over Goliy the 'proletarian writer'. Per- haps both are being manipulated by the Communist critic, who is in ironic control of the situation (a weak control, though, and one structurally sub- ordinated to the implied author's). Non-verbal Communication Nabokov's fiction generally is uncommonly rich in its use of kinesic, prox- emic and paralinguistic elements, which contribute to the dense structure of the unsaid in 'The Christmas Story'. One of the story's constructive principles and themes is, as a matter of fact, what happens in the back of our minds as we perceive, create, invent and symbolically associate ele- ments of experience. Nabokov' s treatment ofiiori-codified body ^miotics evinces an awareness of proxemics and of the unconscious kinesics of the body as being cognitively motivated. Thus Novodvortsev walks to the window 'as if following in the critic's recent footsteps' (p. 224). Novod- vortsev bodily movements, of which he is unaware, show his imaginative and ideological subordination. But they are significant not as an allegory but as an 'organic symbol', in the sense that the symbolic meaning is cognitively grounded on the bodily semiotics shared by the character, the author and the reader. Let us examine more proxemic notations: 'The critic lit a cigarette. Goliy, without raising his eyes, was stuffing his manuscript into his brief- case. But their host kept his silence ...' (p. 222). These movements are all interactional markers (the critic and Goliy are waiting for Novodvortsev to evaluate Goliy's story). Here the use of the conjunction 'but' shows that the author is aware of the communicative-interactional import of the characters' actions. This conjunction does not join two propositions at the same semantic level; instead, it joins two proxemic descriptions which, thanks to the conjunction, are made to stand for the unstated propositions the reader is then forced to construct. The 'but', then, goads the reader into perceiving the descriptions as interactive moves — whether at a conscious (as is the case) or at a subliminal level on the part of the readers, it activates Kuzmanovich, '"A Christmas Story": A Polemic with Ghosts', p. 88. THE POETICS OF SUBLIMINAL AWARENESS 35 their own intuitive proxemic strategies. Kuzmanovich's reading could be used in this respect as a test case of Nabokov's 'creating wit in others' - like Falstaff - in the area of proxemics and unvoiced intuitions. Kuz- manovich's accounts of Nabokov's proxemic and paralinguistic notations show that this critic is subliminally aware of their importance, although that awareness never rises to the surface of the critical discussion in an explicit theoretical formulation. More Speculations Nabokov's fiction can be read in the light of contemporary work in psy- chology which studies the activity of the brain as an 'interpreter' which constructs reality, rather than passively recording it.15 Our conscious, self- aware mind, acting deliberately in the world, the world itself appearing as a transparent instrument for our deliberate actions on it, are not the unmedi- ated basis of reality, as the cogito and positivism would have it. They are representations, elaborately resting on perceptual processes and symbolic structures which remain unconscious. By 'unconscious' I do not mean, of course, 'repressed' through the deliberate action of an all-perceiving, all-controlling self or a social super-ego. 'Unconscious' means that con- sciousness is an effect, a superstructure which needs much scaffolding and machinery in order to exist at all, and that the scaffolding and machinery remain by definition outside the subject's field of perception, just as an eye is meant to observe whatever lies in front of it and not what lies behind it - the retina, optical nerve, muscles, bone socket and brain which enable the phenomenon of vision. A scientific rationale for this conception of consciousness may be found in the work of contemporary cognitive neuroscientists. The (post-)structur- alist conception of the subject and consciousness as structural effects and not as originating (transcendental) prime movers may therefore be further theorised with reference to some neuroscientists' conception of the inter- pretive activity of the brain. Among the functions performed by the brain, the system Gazzaniga calls the 'interpreter' constructs our 'reality' for us, organising the information provided by other neurological sub-systems whose activity remains outside conscious awareness.16 Postulating such an 'interpreter' allows us to account for many oddities of perception and behaviour, such as blindsight, false memories or deja vu. The brain 'auto- 15 See Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Mind's Past (Berkeley: University of Califonia Press, 1998). 16 See Gazzaniga, Mind's Past, p. 24. 36 JOSE ANGEL GARCIA LANDA matically' organises responses and patterns of behaviour, and then projects (part of) these as deliberately produced by 'someone in charge' - the con- scious self; some are given a fully conscious elaboration, others remain subliminal (or are retroactively perceived as subliminal when a conscious re-elaboration is constructed). Thus, as I drive home from work I feel that I am in full control of my choice of route along the way, although quite often my thoughts have been busy with other matters and upon reflection I may well realise that I didn't actually choose to take a given lane or turn rather than another. No matter: my brain did the work for 'me', as usual, and on the whole T get the impression that T am in charge. The 'interpreter' cre- ates a conscious order out of subconscious materials. Among other things it creates a sense of self: The interpreter constantly establishes a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. It is the glue that unifies our story and creates our sense of being a whole, rational agent. It brings to our bag of individual instincts the illusion that we are something other than what we are. It builds our theories about our own life, and these narratives of our past behavior pervade our awareness.17 'The Christmas Story' dramatises precisely such a cognitive gap between action and interpretation: as the story ends, Novodvortsev's consciousness is shown to be building an ad hoc 'objective' narrative to bolster his sense of self, with materials whose subconscious origin is quite another. The story is therefore, among other things, a story about consciousness and about the circumstances and processes that contribute to the making of a sense of self (here emotional self-censorship is the primum mobile that allows some of the character's memories to become conscious while oth- ers can surface only subliminally or in a symbolically displaced version). The much-loved Nabokovian image of reflection, thematically and compositionally central to this story, stands out as a crucial instance of the narrative appropriation of subliminal cognitive processes. Reflection is a natural symbol for awareness and consciousness: thus, we speak of the reflexive quality of conscious processes in the brain, of reflexive fic- tion, etc. The reflected image of an object has to be processed with greater intensity than the direct visual image of this object. It is my contention that a reflection, even a represented reflection, makes us (subliminally) aware of the working of the mind as an interpretive re-projection: we need to con- Gazzaniga, Mind's Past, p. 174. THE POETICS OF SUBLIMINAL AWARENESS 37 struct the reflected image, mapping it onto a conceptual-perceptual pattern, in order to make sense of it. The active projection of conceptual patterns which is characteristic of conscious experience thus becomes more evident in the cognitive processing of distorted images, reflections, etc. This might be one reason for Nabokov's taste for perceptually complex images in his intensely visual fiction. In 'The Christmas Story', one such image has a pivotal role. The reflection in an eye is used to convey - to make us aware of - an intensity of re-cognition which suddenly opens up to the focaliser a glimpse of his own past as a terra incognita. Symbols, Riddles and Memories The dramatisation of (un)consciousness combines in Nabokov's aesthetics with game-like problems set for the reader to solve - for example: 1. Novodvortsev is negating the spirit of Christmas, with an amount of bad conscience which surfaces only between the lines, for the reader to perceive, and which remains altogether beyond the character's conscious awareness. The critic from Red Reality teases him by observing that it is Christmas Eve, and that '[i]n the old days, on this date, you and your con- freres would be churning out Christmas copy.' Now it turns out this is also an Easter story, as, like a second St Peter denying Christ, Novodvortsev promptly replies 'Not I'. At a pre-conscious level, though, he is aware of the Biblical parallel, and that is why the expression 'Golgotha of the Prole- tariat' (p. 224) used by his neighbour comes to his mind immediately after this. Here Nabokov is subtly leading the reader's textual memory18 toward a coincidence with the character's subconscious processes. Therefore, this intertextual indication will be active to some extent whether or not the reader identifies it in a fully conscious way. The notion of a textual memory may be further theorised in terms of the 'implicit memory' described by Tulving and Schacter.19 According to Pillemer's account, the perceptual representation system (PRS) underly- ing implicit memory can function apart from explicit memory and is tied to specific cues.20 'Priming effects', or nonconscious cognitive memories, I borrow this notion from Couturier, Nabokov. It is essential for an adequate description of Nabokov's narrative poetics. E. Tulving and D.L. Schacter, 'Priming and Human Memory Systems' in Science 241 (1990), 301-6; D.L. Schacter, 'Priming and Multiple Memory Systems: Perceptual Mechanisms of Implicit Memory' in Memory Systems 1994, eds. D.L. Schacter and E. Turving (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). David B. Pillemer, Momentous Events, Vivid Memories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 103. 38 JOSE ANGEL GARCIA LANDA can also be conceptually driven as new information is added to semantic memory, resulting in 'the acquisition of new associations between unre- lated words'.21 Nabokov's use of the reader's textual memory involves the stimulation of text-specific webs of word connections - thus, the intertextual allusion to the 'Golgotha of the Proletariat' generates its own text-internal web of subliminal associations as the reader goes through the text. 2. The neighbour who was said to use the expression 'Golgotha of the Proletariat' surfaces later in the story in the (paper) flesh, performing a new intertextual role. This time he is, implicitly, a 'Person from Porlock' who interrupts Novodvortsev's pathetic attempts at finding a suitable Christ- mas subject within the bounds of social-realist PCCPP - the neighbour's presence serves, therefore, to suggest a parodic inversion of the ideal of a free creative imagination epitomised by Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'. Dil- lard calls Novodvortsev's neighbour 'his own Person from Porlock'. The phrasing suggests that Dillard has been subliminally following here the reading path devised by Nabokov, in which the Person-from-Porlock motif is a carefully calculated item. That is, my Dillard believes the parallel with 'Kubla Khan' is an analogy generated by himself as a critic, rather than by the implied author, as is the case (In the 1940s Nabokov would use The Person from Porlock as a working title for Bend Sinister, a novel in which interruption plays a prominent role). 3. Novodvortsev's fame is 'pallid, pallid' in contrast with the multi- coloured beads of the abacus and with the bright colours of the Christ- mas tree,22 just like his life has become a pale simulacrum of the one he expected at the beginning of bis career, before the Revolution, during the Christmas he remembers 'twenty years ago or more'. Colour symbolism is also significant elsewhere. Novodvortsev has a 'thick, white hand' which shows he is a fraud by Soviet standards, a bourgeois rather than a prole- tarian. His emotional life is, clearly, as pallid as his fame. It is obvious he lives alone (although he shares a flat) a bleak, loveless life of frustration and petty ambition under a facade of relative social success and intellectual disinterestedness. Novodvortsev is subliminally attracted to the coloured images which symbolise the inaccessible ofherworld in this story: the beads of the abacus he sees through a facing window prepare our mind (and his) for the final imagistic synthesis involving also a warm indoor image seen through a window. The whiteness of the paper he is unable to write on, the 21 Tulving and Schacter, 'Memory Systems', p. 304. 22 The Russian adjective tusklaia suggests dimness, lack of brightness, as well as weak- ness or pallor. THE POETICS OF SUBLIMINAL AWARENESS 39 whiteness of the 'so-called Christmas snow', both characterise Novodvort- sev as occupying an anomic colourless space between Red Reality and 'all the hues of the rainbow' (vsemi ogniami radugi, '[with] all of the lights of the rainbow' - the last word as well in the Russian text). The concluding phrase is retaken in a stylistically similar context nearly twenty years after the writing of "The Christmas Story', in Bend Sinister. There the phrase is used by the writer of an Ekwilist (= Communist) pamphlet, and once again it evokes both the vulgarity of the writing in its hackneyed image, and the richness of the otherworld negated by the Communist writer's aesthetics, and symbolised by the many-coloured rainbow. In the Bend Sinister pas- sage the rainbow motif is also a figurative one, in this case a description of those archi-Nabokovian otherworldly symbols - butterflies - which are denounced by the Ekwilist writer as capitalist propaganda. Here is the passage from Bend Sinister: The most popular photograph which appeared in all capitalist news- papers of that period was a picture of two rare butterflies glittering vsemi tzvetami radugi [with all the hues of the rainbow]. But not a word about the strike of the textile workers!23 These parallel images may be read by some as deliberate intertextual markers; at the very least, they are 'obsessional symbols' which show the remarkable coherence of Nabokov's figurative patterns. 4. Finally, the key (symbolic) riddle. At the epiphanic centre of 'The Christmas Story', Novodvortsev experiences a memory flash which can be interpreted as an attempt at self-communication. Pillemer has emphasised the importance of memories of individual events in structuring a sense of self. He notes that the memory of an individual event is nonetheless 'recon- structed and ti-ansformed in the retelling'; we might extend this principle of transformation to the 'retelling' which is the memory itself: an event is reconstructed and transformed to yield a memory image. Novodvortsev is upset by the memory, which has an epiphanic importance he is not ready to recognise: 'Moments of illumination frequently have a self-reflective quality. The people affected appear to be self-consciously aware of, and even startled by, the intensity of their ideas and feelings.'24 Nelson's concept of autobiographical memory may also be relevant to Nabokov's narrative poetics of memory.25 According to Nelson, 'certain Nabokov, Bend Sinister (1964), p. 141; trans, between brackets in the original. Pillemer, Momentous Events, Vivid Memories, p. 45. See K. Nelson, 'The Psychological and Social Origins of Autobiographical Memory', in Psychological Science 4 (1993), 7-14. 40 JOSE ANGEL GARCIA LANDA events have a privileged status in memory because they matter to the indi- vidual's evolving "life story'"26. We might describe the relationship of such memories with the life story as compositional, part of the individual's memory-system rather than exact mimetic analogues of 'what really hap- pened' ; Nelson argues that' [m]emories do not need to be true or correct to be part of that system'27. We may interpret the artist of memory's symbolic action as an extension of this principle. Vivid memories are rich articula- tions of symbolic meaning at a life-experiential narrative level, but that articulation of meaning can then be further displaced through a secondary modelisation system and used as constructive elements in a written narra- tive. Whether the narrative is fictional or not, the roots of this textualised memory extend into the author's life-experience. Playing on the different terminology of Pillemer and Nelson, we might define Novodvortsev's memory as a personal event memory which is censored, repressed, and therefore will not become an autobiographical memory. The memory remains nonetheless a relevant biographical memory of Novodvortsev's for the implied reader. And part of the flashback's symbolic charge returns - dulled and camouflaged after a process of displacement - in Novod- vortsev's own story. Writing his story is for Novodvortsev an ambivalent move: partly a symptom of the illness, partly a pathetically inadequate attempt at a cure through indirect symbolic action.28 Actually, the ending of the story sketches a recursive structure of sym- bolic displacements. The worker in Novodvortsev's story, trapped in the cold and peering 'with a severe and somber gaze' at the rainbow-coloured Christmas tree behind the glass window, is for Novodvortsev a symbol of the oppressed working classes, humiliated and insulted by the luxury of the aristocratic Tsarist regime or of the capitalist class. For the reader, the illu- minated store window becomes all too readily the symbol of a past time of happiness, tradition, abundance and emotional satisfaction in contrast with the 'frozen sidewalk' of the Soviet present - Novodvortsev's symbol thus becomes self-defeating. Novodvortsev's frustration is thus enacted rather than being simply told; it is 'shown' through an act of creation which must Pillemer, Momentous Events, Vivid Memories, p. 50. Nelson, 'Psychological and Social Origins', p. 8, quoted in Pillemer, Momentous Events, Vivid Memories, p. 50. '[A]dding narrative description, interpretation, and authority to stark, unintegrated sensory images is a prominent component of psychotherapeutic treatment of trauma'; 'Once raw perceptual images are tied to narrative representations, feelings of dissocia- tion diminish. The alien image becomes part of the self (Pillemer, Momentous Events, Vivid Memories, p. 166, p. 170). The split between present and past selves experienced by Novodvortsev, or by Nabokov for that matter, may be interpreted as a low-intensity trauma. THE POETICS OF SUBLIMINAL AWARENESS 41 be dismantled by the reader. The striking power of the symbol is greater insomuch as readers must make and unmake the symbol themselves, expe- rience the symbol-making process undergone by the character, only at a higher level of awareness, since they must at the same time deconstruct the symbol. The story ends thus in a truly devastating symbolic climax. Unbeknownst to himself, Novodvortsev has pulled'his emotions to pieces under the pitiless gaze of the implied author and reader. Only the gaze is not so pitiless, after all. At a deeper level, the irony is complemented by sympathy and pity towards Novodvortsev. This sym- pathy and pity spring in part from self-pity for a loss in which the author and the character share: the loss of the past, of youth and illusion. It is the story of a pathetic experience in which author and reader partake - and thus the story goes beyond its political occasion, to tell a universal tale of loss and symbolic compensation. The story offers a unique combination of pity and scorn, intertwined in a way which can only be accounted for through a description of the story's construction, of the way the reader constructs the different narrative levels of the story: the fictional character's creative process, and the implied author's calculated codification of a judgement which is both moral and aesthetic. The implied reader understands - re- experiences, rather - the aesthetic limits of Novodvortsev's writing and cannot choose but pronounce that Novodvortsev's aesthetic blindness is the result of moral impoverishment. Thus the story provides a unique expe- rience of ethical and aesthetic communication which is inseparable both from its structure - Nabokov's technique of constructing a self-contained narrative memory, as described by Couturier - and from its historical occasion, both at the level of the author's situation and of the contents portrayed in the diegesis. Deep Intentions and Intertexts Loss is an all-important theme in Nabokov's fiction, which is in one sense a vast attempt to come to terms - to symbolic terms - with the loss of childhood, of Russia, of teenage love, of the family house and of the father. Imaginative variations on fictional autobiography crop up everywhere in his works - not just as 'raw material' for fiction, but as a deliberate exploration of possible, rejected or unacknowledged sides of the author's personality. Such is the case even with a satirised character like Novodvortsev. Nabokov would perhaps have rejected as preposterous any parallel between Novodvortsev as a quasi-official writer of the Soviet regime and Nabokov 42 JOSE ANGEL GARCIA LANDA himself as a quasi-official writer of the emigre Russian community in Ber- lin. Note, though, the N-v bracket linking their names. There are a number of other parallels between the author and his unfortunate puppet (or ' gal- ley slave', to use a Nabokovian expression). The satire on literary vanity draws from materials known to any author from the inside, and it neces- sarily contains elements of self-parody. This is clear in the case of other Nabokovian authors, such as Fyodor in The Gift, more closely modelled on Nabokov himself. The reflexive motif of structuring a story around the overcoming of a writer's block likewise draws from personal experience. Such use of the author's personal experience is hardly confessional or autobiographical, since it is refracted through the 'prismatic bezel' of the various narrative layers and carefully used as a calculated compositional element. Still, it is my contention that in such artistic re-elaborations there remains an excess or 'margin', one which escapes the intentional aesthetic project of the work, and may return to haunt it. Not that Nabokov does not keep his peripheral vision on that marginal element; far from it, he uses it as a compositional element of his oeuvre (not necessarily of the individual work) at another level, a level at which the author himself is at risk, since it is the level at which his work is the imprint of his life. At this level of writing, Nabokov is no longer in full conscious control, the way he was as long as we remained within the story he (deliberately) wanted us to read. Instead, he shows us the underside of his constructed authorial persona, half pointing to the things he cannot tell, half turning away from them. In many stories of the twenties, and in his first novel, Mary, Nabokov plays imaginative variations on the theme of lost love, usually a version of Nabokov's teenage lover Valentina Shulgin, 'Tamara' in Speak, Memory. Here the Tamara motif surfaces as Novodvortsev suddenly remembers 'the woman he loved in those days, and all of the tree's lights reflected as a crystal quiver in her wide-open eyes when she plucked a tangerine from a high branch. It had been twenty years ago or more - how certain details stuck in one's memory (p. 226). Both Nabokov and Novodvortsev - and we might add Tumanov - have lost a Russia associated to a sense of rootedness, of family warmth and a happy childhood. Insofar as Nabokov 'is' Novodvortsev, he is also imagining a future self, in which professional achievements do not redeem the loss, and art is only a partially successful sublimation of frustrated desire. It is worth noticing that the image of the Christmas tree reflected in the woman's eyes also has an autobiographical source. In Speak, Memory, it is associated to adolescent sexuality rather than to early maturity (and thus suggests a closer connection of the image with Nabokov's own experience of Christmas in pre-Revolutionary Russia): THE POETICS OF SUBLIMINAL AWARENESS 43 The little girls in neat socks and pumps whom we and other little boys used to meet at dancing lessons or at Christmas Tree parties had all the enchantments, all the sweets and stars of the tree pre- served in their flame-dotted iris, and they teased us, they glanced back ... but they belonged, those nymphets, to another class of crea- tures than the adolescent belles and large-hatted vamps for whom we actually yearned.29 Here again, the Christmas tree is not remembered directly but rather through its reflection in the girls' eyes — the image, once again, indissolu- bly associates eroticism and Christmas. It expresses, too, a mismatched desire for the past, and a nostalgia for adolescent eroticism - a desire which can only be acknowledged retrospectively, and only in part at that (note the telling word 'nymphet' from Lolita). Thus, the roots of the emotional experience articulated by the story extend beyond the character's past as presented in the story, into the author's own sense of loss of self and of the past. The difference between the autobiographical roots and the story itself is, of course, a vast one. Nabokov forcibly articulates his own integrity and emotional coherence against a representation of hypocritical, emotionally frustrated Novodvort- sev - who apparently has no love life or family connections now, and is little more than a public facade, the official portrait on his complete works, which in turn are mere PCCPP. There is in Nabokov's handling of Novodvortsev a danger of overkill, of the author intellectually brutalising a subordinate. Authors' forcible articulations of their own integrity are not to the taste of contemporary critics.30 Nowadays (i.e. late 20th century and beyond) 'we' tend to like it better, as far as the dynamics of writing is concerned, when the element of viciousness one finds in satire backfires and returns to plague the inventor. Perhaps this 'return of the repressed' is present too in this story, plaguing not merely Novodvortsev (a reading which would yield only the overt subject of the story, necessary for its understanding), but also Nabokov (a reading which would yield an 'overstanding' of the story). Nabokov, Speak, Memory, p. 203. This reflection applies to aesthetically sophisticated criticism. Actually, 'friendly criti- cism' which endorses authorial self-righteousness abounds in those critical approaches mainly concerned with political correctness. 44 JOSE ANGEL GARCIA LANDA More Re-flections Novodvortsev thinks of the Russian dissidents or emigres (Nabokov's immediately intended audience of 'The Christmas Story') as 'people who had formerly been somebody, people who were terrified, ill-tem- pered, doomed (he imagined them so clearly...)' (p- 225). Part of the irony here lies of course in the fact that most emigres would not recog- nise themselves in Novodvortsev's image of them. The power of irony is present, too, in Nabokov's very ability to assume the detached stance that makes this description possible. But the irony backfires in two different directions: first, through the element of truth there is in Novodvortsev's depiction. Nabokov was a maverick, but there was a good deal of frustra- tion and ill-temper among the Russian emigres, just as there were among them some highly visible Tsarist aristocrats, nostalgic have-beens, and yes, even taxi drivers and White Army generals. Nabokov was often at pains to keep his distance from that section of the emigre population, and often satirised them as pitilessly as any Soviet writer (and with a far more devastating accuracy). There is, therefore, a disturbing pinch of truth in Novodvortsev's vision, which in principle might have been supposed to be intended as a mere Aunt Sally for the authorial irony. Possibly, the author's stance is not what we would expect it to be, catching the reader off-guard so to speak. Still, the irony also backfires in another sense - in the sense that there emerges a further parallel (albeit a half-conscious one) between Novodvortsev and the author. Just as Novodvortsev's emigres are an unfair caricature with an element of truth, so Novodvortsev him- self is a caricature, an exercise in 'imagining so well' an official Soviet writer which yields a caricatural version of the truth. There is a mirror, logic between Novodvortsev trying to picture the life of the emigres, a life forbidden to him but which nevertheless he can imagine 'so well', and Nabokov trying to picture - for his own Christmas story - the mind and life of the Other. As often happens, the Other is pictured with elements extracted from the bad conscience of the self. The structure of such mirror logics and play of self and other is announced by the title en abyme of the story. The metafictional title guides the reader through various interpretive manoeuvres: first, the title is read as self-descriptive (being the title of a story published in a newspaper on Christmas day); then the title is shown to describe the subject of the story, not the story itself; and finally the title becomes self-descriptive again, in a more complex sense - 'The Christmas Story' consisting in the paradoxical relationship between the text written by Nabokov and the one written by Novodvortsev. Such double duty is done, too, for instance, by the title of The Picture of Dorian Gray, a work THE POETICS OF SUBLIMINAL AWARENESS 45 which likewise plays dangerously with the abject image of the author's inner Other (Dorian's image in the picture, Wilde's in The Picture). The logic of the Doppelganger, applied to the 'other life' in the Soviet Union, appears in several other fictions by Nabokov, such as the story 'The Reun- ion' or the play The Man from the USSR. The mirror logic is also at work in the twin central images of the story: the Christmas tree reflected in the woman's eye and the hungry worker looking at the Christmas tree through the shop window. Novodvortsev first thinks of emigres weeping as they gather around a Christmas tree. He then displaces the image into an even safer cliche dictated by Socialist Realism, into Western Europe (with no explicit suggestion of emigre circles) with an as yet unliberated worker peering at the tree in a shop window 'with a severe and somber gaze'. Notice that Novodvortsev thinks this initial image is 'the necessary, one-and-only key', etc., in terms which may be displaced to Nabokov's finding the exquisite formula for his own story's conclusion: once again, the structural symmetry is significant here. At the overt level of the story, that of Nabokov's literary communication with his readers, the worker is a figural displacement of Novodvortsev: the image is created by Novodvortsev, and formulates in terms acceptable to his consciousness and his social face the sense of deprivation and loss he does not want to express overtly. Just as the worker is separated by the glass pane from the Christmas tree, love and the spiritual communion with others symbolised by Christmas are figured by a reflection in an eye - and there is no way Novodvortsev can get to the inside of that eye now. So, Novodvortsev is communicating on one level with his implied Communist readership and on another (a censored and subliminal one) with himself. This model of communication reproduces en abyme the communicative structure of 'The Christmas Story', with Nabokov writing political satire for his emigre readership on the one hand, and a more private, subliminal reflection on time and loss through his deeper engagement with writing on the other. This is a level of meaning which can be experienced bodily through a reading of the story, but which can become fully visible to con- sciousness only through an interpretive re-reading. In abstract terms, one might argue that irony and pity should cancel each other, that the satirical strand in the story is at odds with the compas- sionate sharing in the experience of loss. In practice, however, it is the complex emotional fabric made up of these attitudes working at different but interacting levels of interpretation that makes the story so successful a work of art. The story establishes a chain of successive symbolic media- tions to stave off loss and grief, a symbolic chain longer than the overt one described above: 46 jose Angel garcia landa - the worker cut off from the Christmas tree by the shop window, - the worker's author (Novodvortsev) cut off from his past hopes by the thicker glass of time and bad faith, - the author's author, Nabokov, cut off from Russia and from his child- hood by exile (as well as by time and the nature of things). - the readers who experience in a half-subliminal way the figural relation- ship between these elements, and respond emotionally to Nabokov's story, finding in it a vehicle for any feelings of loss and grief they may entertain, and - the critic (e.g. me) who responds to this element in the story and tries to give an explicit, discursive account of the figural and subliminal ele- ments in the story. So, in spite of the irony, there is a continuum between the deliberate, inten- tional links in the chain of meaning, those which emerge from a 'naive' reading and understanding of the story, and those which emerge only through critical interpretation. As I have pointed out with reference to the proxemic element, there is no absolute contrast between a naive and a criti- cal reading, as Nabokov establishes a symbolic circulation of desire which turns any (reasonably percipient) naive reading into an informed one to some extent. Interpretation does not create the relevance of the subsequent symbolic links ex nihilo: they are a linguistically objectifiable element in the story, and they contribute to the effect and successful structure of the same, but, unlike the consciously designed intentional elements, they are not conceptually available in an immediate way. We read them with the body, with the brain behind our conscious mind. Similarly, Nabokov may be said to have written them with his brain and body, beyond the epiphe- nomenal control of consciousness. So, perhaps my attempt to 'overstand' Nabokov fails after all. I may claim to have unearthed aspects of the story which are subliminal for the author, but if they go beyond the conscious aesthetic project of the story it is only to contribute to a more impressive ('deeply intentional') aesthetic structure which binds together many levels of semiotic action: intentional and conscious actions, subconscious intentions, proxemic perceptions, subliminal discourse connections, and non-codified symbolic articulations of attitudes. Narratology and Beyond Finally, I will recapitulate some implications of my analysis for narrative theory 'beyond' narratology: the poetics of subliminal awareness 47 The analysis of focalisation, represented thought and represented speech must be expanded and refined to include a number of levels of perception and consciousness a) in the character; b) in the narrator's account of the character; c) in the implied author's stance towards both; and d) in the reader's construction of these diverse modes of consciousness. An elaborate narrative art like Nabokov's articulates in unprecedented ways elements of focalisation, proxemics, non-codi- fied semiotic processes and implicit readership. It thus requires a cor- responding refinement of interpretive and narratological analyses. The logic of supplementarity, the play of centre and margin described by deconstructive criticism may offer a semiotic model for fire dynamics of fully intentional vs. subliminal narrative representations of conscious- ness. The narratological description of perceptual and experiential phenom- ena in narratives may benefit from ongoing research into the psycho- logical roots of such phenomena. The personal poetics of idiosyncratic writers may exploit in original ways some cognitive processes whose distinctiveness is only now being recognised. Such would be Nabokov's use of subliminal memory processes and of visually complex images. Intention is a relevant piece of the textual machine. It cannot be bypassed or denied, nor can it be described as a simple phenomenon. Intentionality manifests itself in many degrees, and at many different psychological and aesthetic levels. The interpreter is actively involved in the construction of intention, as well as in ascribing degrees of con- sciousness to intentional manoeuvres. Needless to say, interpretation is also crucially involved in making explicit (bringing to the reader's consciousness) elements whose semiotic-inferential relationship would otherwise remain implicit: these range from proxemic or paralinguistic notations at the level of the characters' action, to underscoring the lines in order to draw constellations of meanings at the textual level (e.g. the symbolic meanings of 'white' or 'glass' in this story), or at the inter- textual level (e.g. the game of doubles which becomes visible here only through a comparison with other texts by Nabokov). Therefore, there can be no proper rhetorical analysis of narrative which does not fully engage with an author's personal poetics, and the specific context in which a work is written and read. A work can be read at many levels, some of which are invisible from the horizon of author-contem- porary readership. A narratological description must take into account these different interpretive contexts, since the relevant elements of the work's structure are not the same in just any context. There can be no adequate narratological analysis which bypasses hermeneutics - herme- JOSE ANGEL GARCfA LAND A neutics both in the sense of coming to terms with the author's concrete linguistic universe, and in the sense of attending to the increment in meaning derived from re-reading and from the tradition of critical debate.