Nabokov and Shakespeare: sex, religion and socialism

by Rambler, 14 October 2014


I named this blog 'Spontaneous Combustion' about a year ago, and I don't know why, but got so immersed in Quake-speare Shorterly (QS) lookingforshakespeare.blogspot.com that I forgot about it. It's been lying dormant the whole time. Maybe the emphasis will be equally on Nabokov as well as Vere and Shakespeare. 'Vere' is Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford, and my number one candidate for the genuine author of 'Shakespeare'.

The hypothesis this time is that Nabokov was from time to time conveying the idea that sex and socialism had become substitutes for religion. At least in his novels.

At the start of chapter 4 of part 1 of Ada we learn that Van in very early adolescence had been briefly smitten by a young girl, Mrs Tapirov's daughter:

That was love, normal and mysterious. Less mysterious and considerably more grotesque were the passions which several generations of schoolmasters had failed to eradicate, and which as late as 1883 still enjoyed an unparalleled vogue at Riverlane. Every dormitory had its catamite [a boy kept for homosexual practices]. One hysterical lad from Upsala, cross-eyed, loose-lipped, with almost abnormally awkward limbs, but with a wonderfully tender skin texture and the round creamy charms of Bronzino's Cupid (the big one, whom a delighted satyr discovers in a lady's bower), was much prized and tortured by a group of foreign boys, mostly Greek and English, led by Cheshire, the rugby ace; and partly out of bravado, partly out of curiosity, Van surmounted his disgust and coldly watched their rough orgies. Soon, however, he abandoned this surrogate for a more natural though equally heartless divertissement.

I'm not certain why I got the impression that this passage alluded to Jesus Christ, the last supper, and the crucifixion. It was probably the words passions and cross and mysterious, as in the Christian 'mysteries' entailing the supernatural. Why Upsala? In this bilingual pun, Nabokov had the Italian sala as room, and the English up as up (I have no idea what the name of the Swedish town of Uppsala means). In the biblical account, the last supper is supposed to have taken place in an "upper room"; at least, that's the usual English translation of the location. 

Then there's "hysterical." (I'll look at the rest of the quotation later).

"Hysterical" would mean either (or all of) the quest for the 'Historical Jesus' (hysterical, historical) -- an analogy I believe I've used in the blog concerning the historical Shakespeare (anti-Stratfordians regard the traditional attribution as perfectly hysterical); or the condition of the people Jesus allegedly cured, suffering from hysterical "illnesses", e.g. blindness; or the mass hysteria Jesus himself whipped up.

An interesting fact is that in 1835, David F. Strauss published the first part of "The Life of Jesus Critically Examined", which initiated the 'quest for the historical Jesus' with typical German thoroughness, the multi-edition work running to 1500 pages. In Ada Nabokov writes 

"But as Judge Bald pointed out already during the Albino Riots of 1835 ...." (Part One, chapter 21).

Bald is often a Shakespeare-bust allusion, Albino typically stands for Francis Bacon, but there was no anti-Stratfordian book until Delia Bacon's (aka John Shade's Aunt Maud) in 1857. Perhaps Nabokov is conflating two historical quests. The more I think about it the more probable it is.  

But it's probably sheer coincidence that Ignatius Donnelly was born in 1835. It was he who in 1888 published a seminal anti-Stratfordian book, The Great Cryptogram : Francis Bacon's cipher in the so-called Shakespeare plays. 

It's probably less of a coincidence that Karl Marx died in 1883, and his theories ("grotesque") had been around for about forty years. Typically killing two finches with one stone, Nabokov uses "grotesque" to allude to the nineteenth century British historian and 'radical' George Grote who, like Marx, demonstrated an anti-clerical prejudice; in those days he would have been known as a 'freethinker'.

I don't know much about Nabokov's views on Marx, except that he ranked him as a social and economic theorist on about the same level as he did Freud as a student of the human psyche. I made the mistake of consulting a critic, who wrote that by attacking "the utopian aspects of Marxist thought", Nabokov chose a soft target; and that, on the contrary,

But Marx on the working conditions in the nineteenth century, the inequities of capitalism, the sources of proletarian discontent - this is the essential Marx, and what he has to say about these things now seem so obvious that no one would think of arguing against it.

-- Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels by David Rampton (CUP Archive, 1984) p. 58

You don't need to choose to be as unfamiliar with literature critical of Marx's prejudiced version of history as that critic. The alleged correctness of Marx's analysis is about as "obvious" as the obvious fact that we live in a geocentric planetary system -- all you need to do is to look at the sun 'going down'. 

After all, isn't it obvious that the rural population abandoned its roots en masse and flooded the towns in an expression of masochistic ambition to experience the delights of slum living for itself?*

'Capitalism' is itself a smear-word invented by Marx, who was principally a propagandist and no economist; and 'inequities' is freighted with moral judgment, scarcely a proper word for a supposedly disinterested historian or economist (or critic) to use. 

I assume that by "the sources of proletarian discontent" Rampton means envy, derived from Marx's spurious development of the labor theory of value (LTV). Oddly enough, one of Marx's precursors in the promotion of that idea was a writer called Ravenstone, a pseudonym -- and that was one of Gradus' pseudonyms in Pale Fire. What finally did in the LTV was the work of the better marginal utility theorists.

I only mention this because "marginal utility" is one of the phrases that Pnin knows on his arrival in the United States:

A special danger area in Pnin's case was the English language. Except for such not very helpful odds and ends as 'the rest is silence', 'nevermore', 'week-end', 'who's who', and a few ordinary words like 'eat', 'street', 'fountain pen', 'gangster', 'Charleston', 'marginal utility', he had had no English at all at the time he left France for the States.

It must be significant that Hamlet's last words -- his "ends" -- are listed as Pnin's first.  My hypothesis is that this short catalog, the truly commonplace eat and street aside, relates to Shakespeare, i.e. the author, as well as Vere and/or Shaxper.

I suppose it's assumed that 'nevermore' alludes to Poe, but that's a bit of Nabokovian deceit. The words "never more" occur in the single solo speech given by Shakespeare in Hamlet to Voltemand when he's giving his report to king  Claudius. That the name of this messenger was important to Nabokov is revealed in Ada, because Van would use it as a pseudonym to camouflage his authorship of Letters from Terra. I've written in QS that Shakespeare is represented by Nabokov as electricity, probably because Vere was linked by his renaissance contemporaries with candlelight, and that the word "revolting" is a marker for that in Nabokov. In Ada, we see Voltemand.

"week-end" -- quite possibly the most famous single line in English literature is "To be or not to be, that is the question", the final syllable of which incorporates a so-called 'weak ending', an extra un-emphasized component. Hence, a literary "week-end" in Hamlet.

'who's who' -- in Lolita, the near-companion work to Pnin, we learn about the contents of the prison library:

 ..... but they also have such coruscating trifles as A Vagabond in Italy by Percy Elphinstone, author of Venice Revisited, Boston, 1868, and a comparatively recent (1946) Who's Who in the Limelight - actors, producers, playwrights, and shots of static scenes.

-- chap. 8

You won't have overlooked the Vere allusions to light and resplendence: "coruscating" and "limelight", which of course is green: vert, often a Vere allusion. The word "static" also may refer to electricity, as in the phrase 'static electricity'. That the Who's Who has theatre as its subject should come as no surprise.

Concerning "limelight", this wouldn't be a Rambler posting unless I included a key Vere-Shakespeare-Hamlet word component, this time 'amble' in 'shambled', from Bend Sinister:

Ember put down his pen again and sat lost in thought. He too had participated in that brilliant career. An obscure scholar, a translator of Shakespeare in whose green, damp country he had spent his studious youth - he innocently shambled into the limelight when a publisher asked him to apply the reverse process ...

 Amp, volt, electricity.

Nabokov introduces Italy because of the number of plays by Shakespeare which boast an Italian setting, including detailed topography and local knowledge, remarkable when you consider that Shaxper never, as far as is known, left England. Vere, on the other hand, spent about a year in Italy, including several months in Venice. Vagabond suggests the recurrent theme of exile in Shakespeare. 

Again from Pnin, where his son Victor daydreams himself to sleep:

"... paced a beach on the Bohemian Sea, at Tempest Point, where Percival Blake, a cheerful American adventurer, had promised to meet him with a powerful motorboat."

I think that each of Nabokov's Percys stands for Vere. Percy de Prey is a foregone conclusion. Percival Blake stands for Percy Blakeney, because in the following paragraph we read about

... a version of The Scarlet Pimpernel, recently staged at St Martha's, the nearest girls' school ...

Percy Blakeney was on the surface a dissolute layabout yet hid a second identity beneath a foppish exterior, a proxy for Vere-as-Shakespeare. The only reason I can suggest for the name Elphinstone is that both Percy de Prey and probably his Vere equivalent in Pale Fire, Harfar, baron of Shalksbore, sport monstrous private parts. In Lolita, does Percy Elphinstone have elephantine "stones"?

The reason that I even dare to suggest that is because Nabokov writes about Van aboard ship:

The steward brought him a Continental breakfast, the ship's newspaper, and the list of first-class passengers. Under 'Tourism in Italy,' the little newspaper informed him that a Domodossola farmer had unearthed the bones and trappings of one of Hannibal's elephants, and that two American psychiatrists (names not given) had died an odd death in the Bocaletto range: the older fellow from heart failure and his boy friend by suicide. After pondering the Admiral's morbid interest in Italian mountains, Van clipped the item ....

-- chapter 5, part three of Ada

Since Percy Elphinstone's earlier book was A Vagabond in Italy, the newspaper column headed 'Tourism in Italy' is directly related to his subject. Domodossola, a border town, is in the area where Hannibal crossed the Alps, and the general was accompanied by about forty elephants, so there is indeed a connection in Nabokov's mind between Elphinstone and elephants. 

Given that we have the name Hannibal, and 'hān' in anglo-saxon meant 'stone', we may infer that he had balls of stone. Having visited the absurd, is it too ridiculous to note in "bones and trappings of one of Hannibal's elephants" the von Trapp family of The Sound of Music fame, who may or may not have traversed the Alps? The hills are alive with allusions.

So much for "who's who". For Nabokov the problem was always 'who's who in "Shakespeare"?' 

'fountain pen' -- the Latin for spring is ver, hence a spring or fountain. In other words, the pen wielded by the "fountain", Vere, recalling Percy de Prey's "everlasting stream" and Thomas Nashe's "copious carminist". But something better would be nice.

"gangster" -- that would be Shaxper. This idea seems to have become less repugnant to critics in recent years, owing perhaps to the publication of Katherine Duncan-Jones' Ungentle Shakespeare in 2001. Although she failed to mention the scene from Shaxper's life involving Langley and Wayte (online search only; I've not read the book), that hasn't stopped others from pursuing this trail. Here's a link to a 2011 article from the Smithsonian magazine online; as far as I know the author isn't an anti-Stratfordian http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/william-shakespeare-gangster-129238903/. The title, conveniently, is 'William Shakespeare, Gangster'.

"Charleston" -- I have to assume that this is the town and not the dance. Charleston, South Carolina was named for king Charles II of England. In Pale Fire king Charles is the victim of a revolution but not the beneficiary of a restoration. In English history, Charles I was beheaded during the English Revolution in 1649, and his son regained the throne after an eleven year interregnum. (Recall the episode in Pale Fire when Charles notices a headless statue of Mercury whilst escaping from his castle: this alludes both to English Charles and to a mercurial English playwright who'd 'lost his head' to Shaxper, a.k.a. Sogliardo in Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour, whose crest was a "boar without a head, rampant". Vere's family crest was the boar, verres in Latin.) Ultimately Pnin's Charleston is about the restoration of credit for being 'Shakespeare'.

'marginal utility' -- has nothing to do with the economic concept of marginal utility. The word "marginal" in Pnin refers to marginalia annotated at the margins of printed pages; and "utility" means whether or not they are useful. The Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey, enemy of Vere and Thomas Nashe, was a copious annotator, and his marginalia have been collected and published at least twice that I know of, in 1913 and 1979. In his copy of Speight's 'Chaucer' he mentioned Hamlet as being amenable to "the wiser sort", but nobody knows exactly when he scribbled his note, except that the book he owned was published in 1598. That's a "too early" date for Hamlet from the orthodox perspecive, in which case the utility of that particular marginalium is marginal, i.e. peripheral as regards the dating of the play. 

Come to think of it, "marginal utility" does have a socio-economic element in Pnin's lexicon, since it represents his jettisoning of antediluvian Marxist theory, as represented by the LTV, and adoption of more advanced, transatlantic modes of economic thought in the USA. 


Didn't really get to sex and religion yet. 


Thank you for reading.


*The best short treatment of the subject would be Capitalism and the Historians (U. Chicago Press, 1954, 1963) edited by F. A. Hayek, which includes an introductory essay by Hayek as well as individual chapters by T. S. Ashton, W. H. Hutt, etc.