November 28, 2009
EDGAR ALLAN POE & VLADIMIR NABOKOV
PALLID OVAL ABOVE & DARKENING ROAM
Vladimir Nabokov and Edgar Allan Poe share a deep dark obsession. One might easily dismiss this obsession as dirty and macabre, a fixation on death, but it is far more intricate than that, for both authors are awed and overwhelmingly overcome by the strangely amorphous nuances of being and “reality”—the blurry line that wavers between those beings who reside in the world of the living, those residing in the land of the dead, and even those residing in an in-between dream world. Nabokov and Poe dispose of the traditional oppositions that divide these states of existence and smudge them together. Through hazy tales of ghosts and persons, both Nabokov and Poe mesmerize the reader.
Nabokov straightaway launches the idea of overlapping worlds with the beginning lines of John Shade’s poem, Pale Fire:
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. (ll 1-4)
Nabokov shows the being of the waxwing on two different levels of existence: the living waxwing approaching the windowpane and the smudge left behind by the waxwing’s body that flies on in the windowpane’s reflected sky. Nabokov further describes the windowpane’s reflection as “A dull dark white against the day’s pale white,” (l 15). With these words, he writes the two worlds of life and death into coexistence, dual existence, a dull dark replica of the pale white world. He enthralls the reader with wonderful words and allows him too to see the reflected world in his own window just at the point when the sun and the moon cross paths at sunset.
Poe similarly wastes no time piercing the air with notions of dual, concurrent worlds in his opening to his “Sonnet—Silence:”
There are some qualities—some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade. (Poems and Prose 69)
Poe asserts that beings, when they die, do not simply pass out of existence, but are re-embodied in a twin existence. Describing this re-embodied stage as solid, he dismisses a conventional assumption that death deletes a person and makes it clear that this darker mirror of existence is every bit as “real” as the daylight of life and, in fact, coincides with life. Presenting the notion of the darker existence of the dead among the living, Poe captivates the reader’s curiosity and enlivens his imagination in his own present tense world.
In Pale Fire, Nabokov explores the darker existence by introducing communication between the living and the dead. Hazel makes notes of her interaction with the ghost in Paul Hentzner’s barn. Nabokov details Hazel’s notes: “If asked something that it found deliciously silly (‘Are you a will-o-the-wisp?’) it would dash to and fro in ecstatic negation, and when it wanted to give a grave answer to a grave question (‘Are you dead?’) would slowly ascend with an air of gathering altitude for a weighty affirmative drop,” (188). The connection that Hazel establishes between herself and the ghost shows the onset of Hazel’s blurred existence. Her communication with the world beyond foreshadows that she soon will fold seamlessly into that realm.
In Transparent Things, Nabokov delves deeply into the throes of the three tenses—past, present, and future. Using Baron R who is, on one hand, a dark omniscient narrative specter, and on the other, an active present tense character in the story, Nabokov successfully provides a literal folding of life upon death. He muddles the tenses of past and present pushing and tangling them into each other. Toward the end of the novel, Baron R narrates, “The room was exactly as he wanted it or had wanted it (tangled tenses again!) for her visit,” (559). Nabokov uses present tense, then awkwardly and self-consciously metamorphoses into past tense, purposefully highlighting their congruent existence. He uses this tangle to communicate between the worlds of life and death. The narrator says to Hugh, “This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another. Easy, you know, does it, son,” (562). Baron R speaks encouragingly to Person as he makes this so-called “mental maneuver” between past and present, between life and death.
By terming the transition between life and death as a “mysterious mental maneuver”, Nabokov implies that it might not only be a one-way street. While he himself does not bring characters back from the dead, Poe does explore the transition between life and death in both directions. In his Ligeia, he writes, “The greater part of the fearful night had worn away, and she who had been dead once again stirred,” (The Complete Stories 363). Poe brings Lady Ligeia back to life not only once, but several times, thereby fiercely blurring the conventionally steadfast one-way street between life and death. He horrifies the reader, incites their deepest fears, beckons them to see the thin haze that subtly hangs above life, contouring and transforming itself to allow shadows of people who once were to fly on in a replicated aether.
In The Premature Burial, Poe explicitly insists, “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” (The Complete Stories 712). Poe draws no solid conclusion. The hazy dull dark white of death sits and settles in the pale white world of life with no determinate edge. Its subtle smoke pervades the white of life and passes in and between the filaments and fibers of our supposed being.
Nabokov similarly suggests that the spectral world resides in the walls, the lightbulbs, the permanent fixtures that surround us. He writes:
The dead, the gentle dead—who knows?—
In tungsten filaments abide . . .
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights . . .
Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine. (Pale Fire l92)
Nabokov’s oh so soft and gentle voice prompts the reader to find the prospect of ghostlike existence in his or her surroundings somewhat desirable or even nostalgic. His dreamlike voice paints the warmly pleasant image of Shakespeare living on through the flood of bright shining lights in a town. If remnants of Shakespeare’s used-to-be mind and/or being can live on in our physical world, what, then, is our present tense “reality”? Or is our reality all just a dream?
In his poem “A Dream Within a Dream,” Poe writes, “You are not wrong who deem / That my days have been a dream,” (Poems and Prose 60). Poe admits that his life’s perception of reality has been but a dream. Even he has no hold upon it, no firm belief in its verifiable truth. He ends his poem with the question, “Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?” (Poems and Prose). He realizes that he can neither verify nor refute reality.
Reality exists in the individual mind. And yet, one bases every ounce of one’s being on one’s believed reality. The sheer possibility that one’s perception of the “real” may not, in itself, be “real” further blurs the various levels of existence. Nabokov writes:
Men have learned to live with a black burden, a huge aching hump: the supposition that “reality” may be only a “dream.” How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of your being aware of reality’s dreamlike nature were also a dream, a built-in hallucination! (Transparent Things 553)
Nabokov further problematizes the impossibility of understanding the idea of existence in a “real” sense. If one is not effectually real, how can one decide that one exists in an alive state? If one’s present tense self is a hallucination housed within another hallucination, one is only as real as, or possibly even less real than, the hazy ghosts that inhabit the tungsten filaments. Both Nabokov and Poe strive to blur these preconceived notions of life and death into one fluid existence; life and death must naturally be fluid if indeed life is only a hallucination of death.
In Berenice, Poe suggests this fluid existence of the soul. He writes:
But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before ¬– that the soul has no previous existence. You deny it? – let us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms . . . a memory like a shadow – vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist,” (The Complete Stories 130).
The vague memory of existing before lingers amorphously in the mind like a dream one cannot quite clearly recall, again implying fluidity of existence.
The world of dreams houses yet another vague and hazy state of existence that seems to lie someplace between life and death. One can enter a dreamlike state of being both in sleep and in one’s imagination. In Pale Fire, Kinbote’s radically detailed account of his fantastical version of reality acts as the primary plot of the novel. By placing it at the forefront, Nabokov sets up the reader to mistake Kinbote’s fictitious version of reality as real. Without careful attention to detail, the reader easily finds himself lost. Nabokov illustrates the operation of Kinbote’s imagination alongside of the “real” world by writing Jack Grey into several states of existence throughout Pale Fire. Jack Grey re-embodies in the shade of Jacques D’Argus, and gradually in the degree of Gradus. Kinbote’s imagination provides a dreamland in which his reality operates alongside of those who are more mentally grounded.
Poe’s “Dream-Land” operates in the realm of sleep rather than in that of the imagination. Detailing the journey of a dream traveler in his poem “Dream-Land,” Poe writes:
There the traveler meets, aghast,
Sheeted Memories of the Past—
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by—
White-robed forms of friends long given,
In agony, to the Earth—and Heaven. (Poems and Prose 58)
Again Poe explores the interaction between states of existence, the dreamer meeting shadows of death along his way through a dreamland. Taking the perspective of the dreamer, Poe delves into an ostensible bridge between life and death. After all, the origin of both Poe and Nabokov’s obsession with life and death seems to have originated from the dream as well as from dream-like states of mind (i.e. epilepsy, hypnosis, insanity.)
Nabokov himself vigorously dislikes the prospects of falling asleep. In Speak, Memory, he admits that he must sleep to maintain a spry brain, but that he “simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.” He elaborates, “No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus [the Roman god of sleep,] that black-masked headsman binding me to the block.” Referring to his childhood, he goes on to say that a “vertical line of lambency [seen from an adjacent bedroom] (which a child’s tears could transform into dazzling rays of compassion) was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim and my mind melt in a travesty of the death struggle,” (108-9). Nabokov absolutely hated and feared any sort of loss of or separation from his consciousness. Calling sleep the death struggle, he reveals his opinion that sleep is the halfway stage of death. He was revolted by the prospect of going into a death-like state, parting with the unstable reality over which he obsessed.
Similarly, Poe too seems to have loathed falling asleep. Though the source is unclear, Poe is credited to have written, “Sleep, those little slivers of death; Oh! how I loathe them.” In The Premature Burial, he writes on a similar subject, “Sometimes, without any apparent cause, I sank, little by little, into a condition of semi-syncope, or half swoon . . . Then, for weeks, all was void, and black, and silent, and Nothing became the universe . . . Just as the day dawns . . – just so tardily – just so wearily – just so cheerily came back the light of the Soul to me,” (The Complete Stories 719). Poe goes on to explain that although the swoon itself is painless and he eventually does awake, it causes terrible mental distress. Certainly sleep and lack of consciousness seem to bring one’s physical body closest to the verge of death.
In Mesmeric Revelation, Mr. Vankirk dies upon being woken from hypnosis. Poe writes, “I observed on [Vankirk’s] countenance a singular expression, which somewhat alarmed me, and induced me to awake him at once. No sooner had I done this, than, with a bright smile irradiating all his features, he fell back upon his pillow and expired,” (The Complete Stories 711). The irridule smile that strangely overcomes Vankirk’s face seems extraordinarily light and angelic for a moment of death. He seems to pass away into the realm of the angels of which he was discussing during his hypnosis. Poe uses the in-between world of dream as a bridge through which to pass into the realm of the dead.
Both Poe and Nabokov seem to build off of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on the question of being. Hamlet speaks:
To be, or not to be,—that is the question; . . .
To die;—to sleep;—
To sleep! perchance to dream! ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. (Shakespeare ll 56, 64-68)
Hamlet here addresses the three states of being which so greatly puzzle and transfix Poe and Nabokov. Being. Death. Dreams. Hamlet also mentions “the dread of something after death . . . [the] conscience does make cowards of us all, (ll 78, 83). Hamlet faces the same dilemma that Poe and Nabokov constantly attempt to uncover in their writing. The elusive notion of being tickles the senses with a semblance of understanding but refuses to solidify itself in a concrete form.
As if suggesting some sort of solution to this mess of a conundrum, Nabokov proposes a note from a philosophical patient in one of Person’s mental hospitals. He writes, “It is generally assumed that if man were to establish the fact of survival after death, he would also solve, or be on the way to solving, the riddle of Being,” (Transparent Things 554).
The riddle of Being surely became an unhealthy obsession for both Poe and Nabokov. This intense fixation, however, brought life to mesmeric stories and concepts that enamor, enchant, and hypnotize. Nabokov enchants with his language that travels between the tenses of life, death, and dream. Poe charms with his sometimes horrific but insightful tales. Both authors live in a maddening world of literary lunacy, seeking to solve the smudges of existence and being.
Works Cited
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Random House, Inc., 1989.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak Memory. New York: Random House, Inc., 1967.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Transparent Things. New York: The Library of America, 1996.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Poe: Poems and Prose. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Philadelphia: Horace Howard Furness, 1905.
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