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Nabokov's Dystopia: Bend Sinister, America and Mass Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2009

WILL NORMAN
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Abstract

“I am as American as April in Arizona,” Nabokov claimed in a 1966 interview. Although he repeatedly emphasized his American citizenship and the affection he held for his adopted nation, my argument is that his 1947 novel, Bend Sinister, offers us an opportunity to interrogate the received narrative of Nabokov's unproblematic arrival and assimilation into the United States. In examining the engagement with mass culture in this dystopian novel, my intention is to restore some of the political valence denied the novel by both Nabokov and his readers, and to suggest how it functions as a critique of American culture which reveals the author's profound ambivalence about his adopted nation in the early to mid-1940s. Drawing on unpublished archive material, as well as theoretical work by Theodor Adorno, this paper opens up a new approach to Nabokov's American work and demands a reassessment of his avowed apoliticism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , April 2009 , pp. 49 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Nabokov, Strong Opinions (1973) (New York: Vintage, 1990), 98.

2 See, for example, this assertion from a 1969 interview: “I am an American, I feel American, and I like that feeling. I live in Europe for family reasons, and I pay a US federal income tax on every cent I earn at home or abroad.” Ibid., 124. Nabokov lived in America from 1940 to 1959.

3 Boyd's assertion that Bend Sinister is “less successful than much of Nabokov's other mature fiction” is representative of the ambivalence with which both scholars and reviewers have received it. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 105–6. John Burt Foster Jr., “Bend Sinister,” in Vladimir E. Alexandrov, ed., The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Garland, 1995), 25–36, 25–26, surveys these mixed responses.

4 “Without those infamous models before me I could not have interlarded this fantasy with bits of Lenin's speeches, and a chunk of the Soviet constitution, and gobs of Nazist pseudo-efficiency.” Nabokov, “Introduction” (1965), in Bend Sinister (London: Penguin, 2001), 6.

5 Nabokov, “Foreword” to idem, The Eye, trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author (1965) (London: Panther, 1968), 7–10, 8.

6 Nabokov, Bend Sinister (1947) (London: Corgi, 1967), 6.

7 Ibid., 8–11.

8 Probably the most influential work done on Bend Sinister is in D. Barton Johnson's Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985). As the title suggests, Johnson is primarily interested in examining the links between Nabokov's various created worlds, leading to metaphysical conclusions (Ibid., 187–205). David Rampton, in a chapter on Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading, surveys the apolitical slant on most criticism dealing with those novels, up to the publication of his book in 1984. David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). In addition see, as examples of critical work which engages with either intertextual allusion or the discovery of hermetic textual patterns without interrogating the novel's political or historical implications, Patteson, Richard F., “Nabokov's Bend Sinister: The Narrator as God,” Studies in American Fiction, 5 (1977), 241–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Begnal, Michael H., “Bend Sinister: Joyce, Shakespeare, Nabokov,” Modern Language Studies, 15, 4 (1985), 22–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Larmour, David H., “The Classical Allusions in Bend Sinister,” Russian Literature TriQuarterly, 24 (1991), 163–72.Google Scholar

9 Brian D. Walter, “Two Organ Grinders: Duality and Discontent in Bend Sinister,” in David J. H. Larmour, ed., Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's Prose (London: Routledge, 2002), 24–40; Baxter, Charles, “Nabokov, Idolatry and the Police State,” Boundary 2, 5, 3 (1977), 813–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Quotations from Nabokov's unpublished essays “The Proletarian Novel” (typescript draft (incomplete) of classroom lecture notes, with his ms. revisions, signed and undated, unpublished material from the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, consulted 20 December 2006) and “Expatriates” (typescript draft (photocopy) of class lecture notes, signed and undated, unpublished material from the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, consulted 8 December 2006.), as well as his “Correspondence with Edmund Wilson” (unpublished material from the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, consulted 13 December 2006), are given with permission from the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. It is difficult to determine which American short story this might be, although Edgar Allan Poe's “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), which was particularly admired by Baudelaire, fits with Nabokov's dating and is a likely candidate.

11 In the manuscript the words “Sinclair Lewis or Hemingway,” though clearly legible, have been crossed out.

12 Bend Sinister, 9–10.

13 In the story referred to by Nabokov, the main character is an old, rich Jew who conforms to anti-Semitic stereotypes, having an “ancient, emaciated body,” which “looked as though it were already attacked by the corruption of the grave. The only expression he ever wore was cunning.” Maugham, Somerset, “Straight Flush,” in idem, The Complete Short Stories, Volume III (London: Heinemann, 1951), 1483–88. He has a “thin, high-pitched cackle” and “looked incredibly astute and malicious.” Ibid., 1488. Nabokov (Strong Opinions, 118) called Maugham a “mediocre performer” of “easy platitudes.”

14 One of the earliest “talkies,” it won several Oscars on its release in 1930, earned $100,000 for Remarque in rights alone, and, perhaps most importantly, underwent a revival in the USA during the Second World War as an emblematically pacifist story. Nabokov's impatience with pacifism during the war is suggested by his correspondence with Edmund Wilson, in which he writes (18 July 1941) of his “ardent desire that Russia, in spite of everything, may defeat or rather utterly abolish Germany – so that not a German be left in the world” (“Correspondence with Edmund Wilson”).

15 The irony of this position is that Nabokov himself performed both of these transitions in his own lifetime, importing versions of European and Russian literary culture into America, and adapting Lolita for Kubrick's film (1962). With Bend Sinister's commercial failure, and his own financial worries, Nabokov's attitude towards commercialism was to become increasingly savvy and pragmatic.

16 Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, 90–91.

17 Bend Sinister, 74.

18 Ibid., 73. Rampton, 42, also points to the critique of American middle-class consumerism in the cartoon, writing that Mr. Etermon “seems suspiciously like a vehicle for Nabokov's attack on the American middle class, casually imported into Paduk's distinctly European country,” and noting that “the tyranny is Fascist or Communist, but the vulgarity is American.”

19 Poshlost' is the actual transliteration of this Russian term, which, Nabokov explains, is suggested by such English words as “cheap, sham, common, smutty, pink-and-blue, high falutin', in bad taste.” Nabokov, Nikolay Gogol (1944) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 67.

20 John Burt Foster Jr., “Poshlust, Culture Criticism, Adorno and Malraux,” in Julian Connolly, ed., Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 216–35, 22–27.

21 Bend Sinister, 74.

22 Ibid., 38.

23 Nabokov's interest in French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) informs many of his works. In particular, Nabokov often draws on Bergson's notion of la durée, a pure, unmeasurable and intuitive form of time, to be set against le temps, which is measurable clock time. See Leona Toker, “Nabokov and Bergson,” in Vladimir E. Alexandrov, ed., The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Garland, 1995), 367–74, for a survey of Nabokov's interaction with him. Among numerous moments of engagement with Bergsonian time philosophy in Bend Sinister, the “pure Krugism” which insists on the dynamic unpredictability of the future (44–45) relates to Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910), 175–83. By contrast, the mechanized, homogeneous temporality associated with the regime is often expressed through the preponderance of watches, clocks, and hourglasses, often stopped or malfunctioning (Bend Sinister, 19, 38, 51, 105, 147, 203).

24 Ibid., 183.

25 Ibid., 186 and 188.

26 John Coleman, “Style and the Man,” review of Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov, Spectator, 25 March 1960, 444–45, 444.

27 The range of allusions to modernist texts and instances of modernist formal techniques in Bend Sinister is beyond the scope of this paper. The novel's indebtedness to modernist experimentalism was noted as early as 1947, when Nathan Rothman wrote in a review, “Nabokov has mastered every kind of virtuosity that has been developed in this century. Naturally he owes a great deal to Joyce; it is there to be seen in the asides and the several (and simultaneous) depths of consciousness, in the bardic phrases, in the incessant literary recalls” (see Norman Page, Nabokov: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 72). Foster, “Bend Sinister,” 31–35, surveys some of the allusions to modernist writers and suggests their impact on the novel.

28 Nabokov, “Tyrants Destroyed” (Istreblenie tiranov, 1938), trans. Vladimir Nabokov (1975), in idem, The Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), 438–60, also tells the story of one man's attempts to resist the incursions of a farcical totalitarian regime into his life. The ambition of the regime is to take over and control not only the physical, but also the mental, space of its subjects. The narrator, for example, “soon had the feeling that he [the leader] … was penetrating everywhere, infecting with his presence the way of thinking and the everyday life of every person” (442). Such is the extent, in fact, to which the leader encompasses the lives of his subjects, that the narrator resolves to commit suicide in order to kill the dictator, “as he was totally inside me, fattened on the intensity of my hatred … grown huge within me, ousting, to the last sun-bathed landscape, to the last memory of childhood, all the treasures I had collected” (458). It is this last detail, in which space is transformed into time, in the form of memory, that I wish to foreground here, because although the leader's inexorable spatial expansion is striking, it is the attempted control over time which stands out as Nabokov's particular concern.

29 In addition to Coleman and Rothman, mentioned above, see also V. S. Naipaul, who described Bend Sinister as “bizarre, puzzling and difficult … too cerebral,” and Frank Kermode, who found the novel to be overly concerned with “a kind of thinking and pleasure which most readers have no hope of understanding or experiencing.” Page, 74, 76.

30 Nabokov, although claiming to be “indifferent” to Eliot, often criticized him, calling him, for example (Strong Opinions, 43), “not quite first-rate.”

31 Nabokov, Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, revised and expanded edition, ed. Simon Karlinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 210.

32 Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, 108.

33 In addition to his friendship with Tate (who later introduced him to I. A. Richards), Nabokov developed a friendship with Yvor Winters in Stanford in 1941, and with John Crowe Ransom in 1949. Ibid., 33, 141).

34 Evidence from the Nabokov archive in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library shows that Tate, who also provided a reference for Nabokov in his successful application for a Guggenheim fellowship, eventually resigned from Henry Holt due to what he regarded as commercial, conformist pressures compromising his patronage of genuinely experimental writing. Nabokov, “Correspondence with Henry Holt and Co.,” unpublished material from the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, consulted 17 December 2006.

35 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) (London: Dennis Dobson, 1968), 159.

36 Allan Tate, “The Man of Letters in the Modern World,” in idem, The Man of Letters in the Modern World: Selected Essays 1928–1955 (New York: Meridian, 1955), 11.

37 Donald Peterson Kent, The Refugee Intellectual: The Americanization of the Immigrants of 1933–1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 118.

38 Ibid., 239.

39 David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 15.

40 For a survey of American anti-Semitism during the late 1930s and early 1940s see Ibid., 9–15. On restrictionism and the failures of American immigration policymakers to take Jewish refugees during the holocaust see Saul S. Friedman's No Haven for the Oppressed (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973).

41 Bend Sinister, 200.

42 There is considerable evidence for Nabokov's continuing to probe connections between American anti-Semitism and the Holocaust during the postwar period. See, for example, Anderson's, Douglas claims (“Nabokov's Genocidal and Nuclear Holocausts in Lolita,” Mosaic, 29, 2 (1996), 73–90Google Scholar) that Nabokov encodes images of the Holocaust into the text of Lolita, and Alexander N. Drescher's similar claims about the short story “Signs and Symbols,” published in 1948 (see Alexander N. Drescher, “Arbitrary Signs and Symbols,” Zembla, 23 July 2007, available at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/forians.htm), about a Jewish couple and their son, newly immigrated to America. See also Michael Wood's discussion of Bend Sinister and “Signs and Symbols” in The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 55–74, especially his arguments concerning the pervasive presence of the Holocaust in Nabokov's fiction (Ibid., 62).

43 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung, 1944), trans. John Cumming (1972) (London: Verso, 1979), 200–2. For more of Adorno's writing on anti-Semitism during his American period see one of the sections he contributed to the massive work Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper Brothers, 1950), 605–53, based on research conducted during the mid-1940s in America into potentially fascist personality types.

44 Bend Sinister, 72.

45 Nathan H. Hale Jr., The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 76–77.

46 Ibid., 75, 277.

47 Bend Sinister, 200.

48 Hale, 7, 277, describes Franz Alexander as “one of the major figures in American psychoanalysis,” whose “missionary efforts” to promote Freud were hugely influential.

49 Bend Sinister, 11.

50 Henri Peyre, “The Study of Literature,” in W. Rex Crawford, ed., The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), 27–81, 62–65.

51 Nabokov often took the opportunity, especially with his American students, to discourage satisfaction with generalizations. See, for example, his polemic lecture against commonly held opinions, “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” in idem, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1980), 371–80, and his earlier Russian-language piece, “On Generalities,” ed. Alexander Dolinin, Zvezda, 4 (1999), 12–14.

52 Peyre, “The Study of Literature,” 59.

53 Two scholarly articles have previously read Adorno and Nabokov side by side. Foster, “Poshlust, Culture Criticism, Adorno and Malraux,” 232–33, compares Adorno's cultural critique in The Dialectic of Enlightenment with Nabokov's concept of “poshlust” as asserted in his book Nikolay Gogol, arguing that, despite superficial similarities, Nabokov “swerves away from mass culture in itself to condemn second-rate literature, especially when it mimics and usurps the first-rate.” Anna Brodsky, “Nabokov's Lolita and the Post-war Emigré Consciousness,” Kultura Russkoi Diaspory: Vladimir Nabokov 100 (Tallinn: TPÜ Kirjastus, 2000), 371–90, argues that Nabokov should be viewed alongside Adorno, Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt and Ernest Bloch as part of an intellectual group which fled from Hitler “and made the disturbing claim that confidence, conformity, cheerfulness – qualities they found abundantly in America – lay very close to the springs of evil from which totalitarianism had sprung.” She then goes on to read Lolita through this critical lens.

54 From 1938 to 1949 he stayed in the United States, mainly on the West Coast at Max Horkheimer's Institute for Social Research, and later as codirector of a research unit at the University of California, Berkeley. The result of his collaboration with Horkheimer was The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, revised 1947), in which the seminal notion of “the culture industry” was developed under the influence of American mass culture.

55 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Shierry and Samuel Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 97–98.

56 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 82–83.

57 Bend Sinister, 15–16.

58 Ibid., 23. Nabokov singles out radio as a focus for his critique in both of these quotes. Adorno also refers to it repeatedly, asserting, for example, that “it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same” (Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 121).

59 Bend Sinister, 24.

60 Beverly Gray Bienstock, “Focus Pocus: Film Imagery in Bend Sinister,” in J. E. Rivers and Charles Nicol, eds., Nabokov's Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on His Life's Work (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 125–38, 126–27; Barbara Wyllie, Nabokov at the Movies: Film Perspectives in Fiction (London: McFarland, 2003), 180–83.

61 Bend Sinister, 203.

62 Adorno and Horkheimer, 126.

63 Wyllie, Nabokov at the Movies, 3; idem, “Nabokov and Cinema,” in Julian Connolly, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), 215–31, 215.

64 Adorno and Horkheimer, 129.

65 Ibid., 167.

66 Ibid., 125.

67 Ibid., 121, 130.

68 See note 41 above.

69 Adorno and Horkheimer, 121.

70 Ibid., 126–27.

71 Ibid., 137.

72 Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, 101.

73 Adorno, The Culture Industry, 58.

74 Ibid., 65.

75 Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 134.

76 Nabokov, “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible” (Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable, 1937), trans. Dimitri Nabokov, New York Review of Books, 31 March 1988, 38–42. In this essay, for Nouvelle revue française, Nabokov voices concerns over the state of the literary scene in France – “we are floundering so far as literature is concerned” (42). Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, 91.

77 Nabokov, Selected Letters 1940–1977, ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 50.

78 Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 135.

79 Nabokov, “Expatriates,” underlining in the manuscript.

80 Adorno, Prisms, 97–98.