The image of Narcissus plunging towards his death in the
attempt to grasp the ungraspable phantom of life in relation to the image of
Ahab as a madman rushing towards his own destruction reminds me of the parade
of self-destructive madmen in Vladimir Nabokov’s novels and stories, where,
typically, the hero attempts obsessively to attain complete understanding of
and control over life or some aspect of it, destroying himself in the process and causing suffering
to others.
In Nabokov these characters can even be quite sympathetic,
like the chess genius in The Luzhin Defense, but their quests are always
exposed as impossible and destructive, resulting in madness, crime, and death.
What is consistently substituted for the quest for the
absolute is a purely contemplative attitude towards experience and reality
which combines the use of language as representation with a more abstract idea
of thematic links and aesthetic resemblances between seemingly unrelated
things (words and phenomena).
Such perceptions of resemblances and links provide for
Nabokov a sense of unity and meaning while avoiding the dangers of attempting
to attain absolutes. To perceive, for example, the various instances of keys
(house keys, car keys, hotel-room keys) as a pattern in Lolita was, for
Nabokov, “the key to it all,” a reason to intuit that a benevolent organizing
genius presided over all reality, including the minutest and most insignificant
detail of every-day life.
This theme is also usually related to sexuality and the
difference between cruelly-solipsistic and destructive conquest on the one hand
and the more spiritual approach to love which, grounded in the kind of artistic
imagination which can perceive random keys as a pattern of links, allows one to
transcend solipsistic tendencies and bond, emotionally and imaginatively, with others and other worlds.
I think that a similar idea – that of perceiving-imagining
disparate objects and patterns which unlock the gates to other worlds (other minds, other planes of existence) – exists
in Moby Dick, of which Nabokov was a great admirer.
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