It would be a gratuitous undertaking indeed to attempt to document the humor of Vladimir Nabokov. While such a study would be to the liking of the Charles Kinbote of Pale Fire, it might well invite Nabokov’s own injunction against the specter of the over-zealous critic: "by all means place the ‘how’ above the ‘what’ but do not let it be confused with the ‘so what!’"¹ So warned, this reader wishes to begin a more modest inquiry: to discover the position that humor occupies in several of Nabokov’s major novels. I suggest that Nabokov’s humor is effective because it is an expression of much more than mere cleverness or whimsy. For him, humor is in dead earnest. It is a statement about the artist’s endless struggle with time. It is, to quote the author only slightly out of context, "a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."²

An inquiry of this kind very quickly leads to an examination of the nature of humor itself. Is humor really nothing more than a flash of lightheartedness that softens the inevitable tragedy of existence? Does it, on the other hand, add to the perception of existence in such a way as to render the tragic admissible, even acceptable? Is the "humorist," in other words, a philosopher or merely a fool, a mystic or an idiot? In particular, can a writer especially addicted to parody, wit, the comic grotesque, word play—to the various techniques, of humor—present a profound version of existence, or is he limited to a superficial one? A brief look at four of Nabokov’s novels can answer the last question with certainty and provide an important insight into the nature of humor as well.

Pnin is one of a small number of Nabokov’s novels that is relatively free of the puzzles, word games, and "sleights of plot" that are so much a part of his later work. Professor Timofey Pnin is one of the most engagingly comic characters that Nabokov has created. The first chapter finds the "ideally bald" émigré blissfully unaware that his "Russian" penchant for "timetables, maps," and the "bracing pleasure of getting something for nothing" (p. 9)³ has resulted in his choosing precisely the wrong train to Cremona. This initial ineptitude is followed by an almost endless series of "catastroffs" (lost luggage, wrong paper, missed bus) that would strain the credulity of the most avid Chaplin devotee. This, the narrator is at pains to observe, is hardly unusual for the old Russian professor of Waindell College:

It is not merely mechanical objects that frustrate poor Pnin, but such common devices as lecterns and stairs. Consequently, his entrances are uncommonly dramatic:

This burlesque routine is repeated several times, each more ludicrous than the last. Though constantly in the path of grievous physical harm, Pnin remains miraculously free of injury and even retains his unflappable composure:

When Pnin drives, the car seems to be "manned by an idiot" (p. 112). His simple presence at a cocktail party is an almost endless source of amusement to his colleagues. However, though Pnin is something of an aberration in the staid world of academe, there is something grievously amiss there as well. When Hagen, the department chairman, decides to accept a "delightfully lucrative professorship at Seabord, a far more important university than Waindell,"

he realizes that "assistant Professor Pain must be left in the lurch" (p. 139). Pnin has been the only Russian instructor at the college, "employed by the eclectic German Department in a kind of Comparative Literature extension of one of its branches" (p. 139). In a desperate attempt to find his old friend a niche that will survive the inevitable new order, Hagen at last confronts Blorenge, chairman of the French Department. Pnin’s credentials, however, are not in order:

This is only part of the madness with which Pain must contend. His estranged wife Liza is a pathological psychiatrist who uses her former husband for everything from an immigration visa to a substitute father for her neglected son Victor. Pnin’s last meeting with Liza cruelly erases any delusions he may have nursed about a reconciliation with this woman with whom he is still hopelessly in love. His despair finally bursts out uncontrollably in a casual conversation with his landlady:

The painful persecution of fellow faculty members, even the cold, childish designs of his former wife, however, are not the true cause of Pnin’s sorrow. His argument with the world is much more serious. His past is not haunted by illusions of persecution, but by the specters of real Bolsheviks and Nazis. The frail, beautiful young woman who had been the love of his youth died in a German concentration camp. To live, Pnin must destroy that memory:

This above all has shaped Timofey Pnin’s response to life. By consciously detaching the reader from the main character of his novel to such an extent that laughter is possible, Nabokov has elicited precisely the response that will most effectively deepen our awareness of Pnin’s tragedy. T. Y. Greet maintains that this is the true function of any type of humor:

Humor states truth obliquely, leaving us to wonder if it means what it says; it flanks our defenses so that often it is only later, with a degree of shock, that we concede its point.⁴

Our laughter at the engagingly comic Pain is thus an assent that includes a host of ramifications that are not at once fully realized. Were it not for this flanking of our defenses, the deepest tragedies would be incomprehensible and Pnin, quite possibly, totally beyond our ken.

Pnin’s ordeal is a struggle to wrestle himself free of the destructively vivid implications of the past, of human memory. He escapes into what Page Stegner has called "a private Eden of Russian literature, into his Gogol and his Pushkin, into his "scriptorium in the stacks’ of the college library."⁵ The purpose of this research is incidental; Pnin will not write his proposed history of Russian culture. The escape that permits a day to day existence is all that is important.

This fascination with time—with man’s response to his past and the implications of the future in a haunted present—is woven with increasing complexity into Nabokov’s succeeding novels: Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada. The artistic rejection of the traditional distinctions of time is also one of the subjects of Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory:

It is this invitation to falter over traditional values that is the heart of the Nabokov labyrinth. Through the complexities of artistic composition, through irony and parody, Nabokov seeks to merge himself with this "contrapuntal genius" that worries one and "humors" another. The horror that he is attacking is explained in Speak, Memory:

Parody is one of the instruments that Nabokov uses to invite the participation of "time and space" in the emotions of mortal love. This is especially evident in Lolita. Through the delusions of the imaginary editor John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., and the pseudo-analytic Humbert Humbert, Nabokov seeks to expose the "horror" of a complaisance that views the world in rigid conceptual terms. It is thus, as Stegner points out, a way for Nabokov to "trip up his readers, and to involve them."⁶ Ray is the perennial academic catastrophe who asserts that Lolita is a "case history" that will certainly become "a classic in psychiatric circles" (p. 7).⁷ The use of the word "circle" is especially evocative, since this is the precise motion that

Nabokov ascribes to all of the "psychoasinine" characters who invariably infest his major novels.

It is Ray himself, however, who unwittingly poses the problem of psychic health when he observes that had "our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psychopathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book" (p. 7). This is the threat that Nabokov sees in the "Viennese delegation": perfect mental health implies the silence of memory and imagination and thus the death of art. Humbert seeks to remind us of this at the close of the novel:

The implications of this are serious indeed. The subtle irony of Lo’s Headmistress who explains that her school prides itself in thinking in "organismal and organizational terms" (p. 179) about each of its students, the fake "‘primal scenes’" that Humbert used to deceive a "displaced" sanatorium psychiatrist "known for his knack of making patients believe they had witnessed their own conception" (p. 37) provokes the assent of laughter before the reader is fully aware of the consequences. The reader is encouraged to enjoy the artistic result of Humbert’s "classic" ill health, to laugh at the "Mann Act as lending itself to a dreadful pun, the revenge that the Gods of Semantics take against tight-zippered Philistine" (p. 157). The fact that a 12 year-old-girl has been made into a "cross-country slave" by an aging pervert is not allowed to dominate the prevailing technique of the author. Even ART is described as the "American Refrigerator Transit Company" (p. 159) before it is linked to Humbert’s diary.

Humbert’ s fascination with Lolita is an attempt to defy time and space and recover his lost pubescent love, "Annabell." He wishes to suspend himself in that brief period of pre-adolescence that is immune to the physical and emotional implications of time. His madness is all but matched by Charles Kinbote, the demented explicator of the last poem of a dead poet, John Shade. Using the conventional Foreword, Commentary, and Index, Kinbote torturously labors to turn "Pale Fire" into his own personal autobiography.

He wishes to recover a past that is completely imaginary, entirely illusive. We learn, in the bargain, that he is a pederast, a peeping Tom, and a pedant.

Pale Fire is thus the epitome of academic paralysis: a bad poet with a lunatic for a commentator. It is a parody of both the self-deceiving poet and the ambitious critic. In his attempt to find himself and his kingdom in the poem, Kinbote succeeds in recounting the fantastic suspense of his narrow "escape" and eventual exile from his Zembla. Like Humbert, he wishes to use art (in this case another’s art) as a means to achieve immortality and thus evade the consequences of time. The result is a concoction of riddles, word games, and absurdities that gradually involve the reader in a serious attempt to discover the "truth" of the Zembla intrigue.

It is necessary not only to unravel these "tricks" in order to solve the "puzzle" of Zembla, but the reader also finds himself studying the most pretentious explications for the next important "clue." Kinbote’s commentary to lines 131–132 ("I was the shadow of the waxwing slain! by the feigned remoteness of the windowpain"), for example, seizes on the "image of Gradus, eating away the miles and miles of ‘feigned remoteness’ between himself and poor Shade" (p. 135).⁸ Both Gradus and Shade will meet "a reflection that will shatter" them:

Humor of this nature occasionally provokes laughter, but more importantly succeeds in directly involving the reader in an increasingly transparent fraud. His assent to this critical abortion is elemental. The worse it gets, the more engaging the game. At only one point are the implications of this assent fully apparent. The end of the commentary (and the book) reveals that all along Kinbote has been conducting a lecture. The poem does not exist. Zembla does not exist. The book itself cannot exist. Thus the reader has become the key instrument in the ultimate violation of space and time: he has

read absolutely nothing. The humor and the suspense have lured him into assenting to the worst abominations of verse and criticism only to realize that he has become a parody of himself.

Nabokov’s recent novel, Ada, opens with a parody of the traditional beginning of the novel: "All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike. . . . That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle. . ." (p. 3).⁹ It closes with a parody of dust-jacket journalism:

Once again the "magic carpet" superimposes "one part of the pattern upon another." Van Veen, another sexually overwrought narrator, is fascinated with the implications of space and time:

The novel itself is not so much a "family chronicle" as it is the presentation of the interstices of time: the future is constantly presiding over a present haunted by the past. Van, Ada, Marina, Lucette are at once many ages; the "story" evades chronology in favor of concept.

It is in relation to this conception of "time" that much of the humor occurs. The collapse of Aqua Veen is not described in terms of time or space, but via her own personal metaphor:

The incestuous love affair of Van and Ada becomes immortal and is fittingly recorded in a burst of word play: "Romantically inclined handmaids, whose reading consisted of Gwen de Vere and Klara Mertvago, adored Van, adored Ada, adored Ardis’s ardors in arbors" (p. 409). A suicide note opens not with "Farewell," but with "Aujourd’hui (heute-toity!)" (p. 29).

The parody of the psychoanalytic method that was central to the theme of Lolita emerges intermittently in witty word play. Nabokov is thus content to banter names and reputations, not ape the method itself:

In the same vein we also hear of a "Dr. Sig Heiler whom everybody venerated as a great guy and near-genius in the usual sense of near-beer" (p. 28).

It is in this way that the preoccupation with time so central to Ada is constantly laced with the humor that is so much the fragrance of memory. The laughter, the pleasant recognition of a clever plot partially deduced, the enjoyment of the wit—all these are integral parts of the reader’s awareness that this absurd "chronicle" is no more false than the traditional contrivances of time. The humor is far from a lighthearted addition posing as a relief to the seriousness or innate tragedy of the novel. It is a necessary ingredient. Humor makes possible a gradual, almost imperceptible assent to Nabokov’s vision of the tragedy of man’s rigid, stereotyped conception of his surroundings. The spiraling, almost involuted nature of time and space, the crux of the Nabokov method, thus is not debated, but

accepted, even believed. In this way the various techniques of humor in the hands of a master can and do indeed cooperate in presenting a profound version of existence. It is through them that the common, intense tragedies of human life are rendered admissible, perhaps even acceptable.

DETROIT COLLEGE OF BUSINESS

NOTES

    ¹From an interview with Alfred Appel quoted in The Portable Nabokov, ed. Page Stegner. (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. xxii.
   ²Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1967). All subsequent citations from this autobiography are from this edition with page numbers noted in the text.
   ³Pnin. (New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1957). All subsequent citations from the novel are from this edition with page numbers noted in the text.
   ⁴"The Theme and Structure of Faulkner’s The Hamlet," in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery. (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960), p. 347.
   ⁵The Portable Nabokov, ed. Page Stegner, p. xvii.
   ⁶Ibid. p. xxi.
   ⁷Lolita. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1955). All subsequent citations from the novel are from this edition with page numbers noted in the text.
   ⁸Pale Fire. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962). All subsequent citations from the novel are from this edition with page numbers noted in the text.
   ⁹Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1969). All subsequent citations from the novel are from this edition with page numbers noted in the text.
    This quotation also has little if anything to do with the novel "quoted:" Anna Karenina. The opening lines of Tolstoy’s novel are the reverse of the lines that open Ada: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Modern Library edition, Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova, eds., Constance Garnett trans., 1965.)