Directrices valor arquitectónico

Highly self-conscious with respect to both its partial origins in the life of the author and its status as a fictional autobiography, Look at the Harlequins! abounds with references and allusions to authors of similarly (quasi-) autobiographical works—including three late- nineteenth/early twentieth century contemporaries: Arnold Bennett, the English novelist whose works are set in fictionalized version of the region of England where he was raised; W.N.P. Barbellion (the nom de plume of Bruce Frederick Cummings), whose revised and published diaries are filled with observations and reflections bearing on the themes and concerns of Nabokov’s novel; and, most notably, Marcel Proust, whose A la Recherche du

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temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past] (1913-1927), almost invariably read as a kind of roman à clef, is alluded to throughout the novel. What most clearly distinguishes Look at the Harlequins! from these works is that Look at the Harlequins! is “autobiographical” by way of anti-autobiography—an approach that has interesting implications in terms of the particular form of the dual-referentiality it exhibits.

II: V(l)adim(ir) V(l)adim(or)ovich N(abokov)

To borrow a metaphor inspired by the very first book that Nabokov ever translated (from English into Russian), Look at the Harlequins! is a record of Vladimir “Volodya” (as he was affectionately called by family and friends) Nabokov’s experiences through the looking-glass and an account of what he found there. The primary strategy employed is one of inversion, but as Emma W. Hamilton writes in “Look at the Harlequins!: A Corpus Compendium,”

When Alice goes through the Looking-Glass, she finds that the differences there abound and are far more than mere inversions…. Alice is the prototype of mirror- traversers, and what she proves is that Looking-glass land is far more than opposites land—opposites are too easy—instead it is a space of invention, subverting our expectations, created from the familiar pieces of our world recombined into something foreign, startling, and yet somehow applicable, meaningful. (14-15) The life and works of Vadim Vadimovich N. are not simply inversions, then, of those of Vladimir Vladimorovich Nabokov—they are, in different respects and to greater or lesser extents, at different times—perversions and subversions of their originals. Not everything in the novel, however, is completely fictitious or false with respect to Nabokov himself: as Schiff writes, “a latticework of truth occasionally flashes provocatively from beneath the luscious overgrowth of a thousand fragrant fictions” (352). As Maurice Couturier puts it in the essay, “I, X Does Not Equal Nabokov”—adapted from the fifth chapter of his book La figure de l'auteur (Paris: Seuil, 1995)—,

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In this instance Nabokov, who claimed as Proust did that the author's life is of no account and that only his writing is important, compelled his readers to take his own life into consideration. Look at the Harlequins! constitutes a kind of allegory on the theme of "the return of the author"; it is as if Nabokov, fearing near the end of his life that his subtle endeavors to absent himself from his texts might induce his readers to consider him an impostor or a pure fiction, had come back on stage for the last time to show that he was a real person…. Nabokov encourages us to practice a Sainte-

Beuvian variety of criticism even as we celebrate the author's death, thus placing us in a highly paradoxical situation. (3)

Because Vadim is clearly modeled after Nabokov—for there is virtually no single aspect of his life or character that does not have some corresponding element, some “original” in Nabokov’s own actual life and character—there is a sense in which Look at the Harlequins! is to be understood as a fiction “about” Nabokov. Following Gregory Currie’s argument in The Nature of Fiction about the role of real references in fiction, we conclude that to not recognize the parallels between Vadim and Nabokov—to not understand Vadim as a version of Nabokov—is to not properly understand the novel. Ultimately, what this means is that the declarations that establish what is fictive of, or true-in-the-fiction of Vadim can and should be understood as also entailing assertions about Nabokov. And the truth-value of these assertions is variable: each of the various aspects of Vadim’s life and character must be evaluated individually, according to the precise nature of its relation to the life and character of Nabokov, from which they are derived. Those aspects that are shared, by the two without revision or transformation are simultaneously both true-in-the-fiction, with respect to Vadim, and true, with respect Nabokov. Vadim’s birth in 1899, for example, is to be properly

evaluated in terms of both its being true-in-the-fiction that Vadim is born in 1899, and true that Nabokov was born in 1899. Those aspects of Vadim that represent inversions or re- imaginings of their corresponding aspects in Nabokov, however, are simultaneously both true-in-the-fiction, with respect to Vadim, and false, with respect to Nabokov. Vadim’s

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father’s being “a gambler and a rake” (Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! 96) for example, is to be properly evaluated in terms of both its being true-in-the-fiction that Vadim’s father was “a gambler and a rake,” and false that Nabokov’s father was “a gambler and a rake.”

A. The Original of Vadim: A (Brief) Comparative Biography, from Russian Childhood