Beside the Point: Places in Nabokov's The Gift

Peter John Thomas

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/N28B26

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Beside the Point: Places in Nabokov's The Gift

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Beside the Point: Places in Nabokov's The Gift Peter-John Thomas This dissertation is devoted to the habits of thought embodied in Vladimir Nabokov's last Russian novel, The Gift. Nabokov is famous for creating intricate verbal structures which, however, resist conversion into rigorous propositions. Two major categories of critical response have ensued. One holds that Nabokov is simply not a novelist of ideas, at least not in the sense familiar to readers of nineteenth-century Russian literature. This absence of ideas is judged to be either a serious defect or a mark of originality and good literary taste, depending on the critic. The second line of interpretation, more popular in recent decades, asserts that Nabokov really is a novelist of ideas (concerning the transcendent, creative freedom, ethical action, and the like), but that those ideas emerge only after prolonged and repeated engagement with the novels in which they are encoded (or even encrypted). Both kinds of critical response get at certain undeniable features of Nabokov's work, but they share a dubious fascination with something that is not there, or seems not to be there. This essay explores the notion that a Nabokovian literary structure (in this case The Gift) is in an important sense a sustained exercise in thought in its own right and on the page. That thought is discreet, local, bound up in the place where we find it. Neither annotation nor interpretation can help us to better understand this thought, because it is essentially experiential, not abstract. Commentaries, footnotes, and glosses are movements away from the immediacy of what Nabokov is thinking at a given moment on a given page, since that thought is an activity, not a collection of ideas and certainly not a system. I will argue that what is most salient about Nabokov's prose is in fact the thought that is concerned with the radical individuality of a given experience. That thought is present on the page, both in the style and in the content of Nabokov's prose.

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