
The way I see it, if Hemingway is one pole of the towering influences for American writers, then Nabokov, lepidopterist pictured above, is surely the other--a near complete analog of Hemingway, with just as much sway over would-be authors. On the one hand you have sheer poetic simplicity (Hemmy), and on the other flowing poetic intricacy (Nabo). Both are deeply concerned with the language of their respective works, but Hemingway wants there to be some brute realism, while Nabokov seems to yearn for a world devoid of anything but language itself. His books aren't so much stories as they are examinations of the word, reminiscences on the sentence.
Nabokov is famously averse to any manner of symbolism, which makes it hard to take him as much more than an aesthete at times, dandily fawning over artful phrases. Invitation to a Beheading, on paper, sounds quite a bit like Kafka's 'Trial,' though in practice it is almost grotesquely different. It begins as our hero, Cincinnatus C., finds himself condemned to death by beheading for some manner of transgression. As with Kafka's Josef K., there is no indication of what that transgression is, and, as with The Trial in general, what follows is something of an absurdist take on the human condition (and another example for my theory of Arrest being the key element of 20th century literature). There are things that happen in the book, and there are things that don't happen. Nabokov very much likes to state the things that "another" Cincinnatus does which this Cincinnatus does not. This "other" Cincinnatus Nabokov describes as "the double, the gangrel, that accompanies each of us - you, and me, and him over there - doing what we would like to do at that very moment, but cannot..." For example, in an early attempt to appeal to some sense of reason from his captors,
Cincinnatus said, 'I obey you, spectres, werewolves, parodies. I obey you. However, I demand - yes, demand' (and the other Cincinnatus began to stamp his feet hysterically, losing his slippers) 'to be told how long I have left to live...and whether I shall be allowed to see my wife.Though these things don't actually happen it seems of little importance to Nabokov. The only thing that is important to him is what is on the page--real or not. For him the construction of the sentence is much more important than the construction of any manner of reality and, because of this, the construction of the sentence does manage to create some strange form of internal reality. Simply, it does not correspond with our own physical, fleshly world. It only corresponds with the world between punctuation and words. In a conversation with his mother, Cincinnatus is told of a once popular toy of sorts called
nonnons. The nonnon comes with a mirror, "not just crooked, but completely distorted:"
Well, you would have a crazy mirror like that and a whole collection of different nonnons, absolutely absurd objects, shapeless, mottled, pockmarked, knobby things like some kind of fossils - but the mirror, which completely distorted ordinary objects, now, you see, got real food, that is, when you placed one of these incomprehensible, monstrous objects so that it was reflected in the incomprehensible, monstrous mirror, a marvellous thing happened; minus by minus equaled plus, everything was restored, and the shapeless speckledness became in the mirror a wonderful, sensible image.Though he would hate this to become symbolic of his writing, it is impossible to allow the old curmudgeon every bit of ridiculous fantasy he holds about his writing. It is human nature to find symbolism in every aspect of life, and often it is because without signs and symbols we would have no name by which to know something and "that which does not have a name does not exist" (a quote from Invitation to a Beheading). So, if the events of Nabokov's stories are the nonnons--the shapeless, knobby things which seem to make no sense by themselves--and the words on the page his "crazy mirror," then what you get is a reflection of perfectly sensible things. Except in Nabokov's case the reflection is always language--reflecting through language images of things which we see but cannot know until they are named.
This is my fourth time in his strange world (Despair, Pnin, and Pale Fire being the other three) and, though I don't always agree with him or even always appreciate his foppish bits of wordplay (unlike Hemingway, he certainly
is the typical notion of a bookish, New England stuffed-shirt), I can't deny that his writing is singularly unique. His style may have been aped here and there by Updike, Banville and others, but his approach is much more difficult to copy simply because it is so chimerical and strange.
And, for what its worth, this has definitely been the best of his books I've read so far.