Loving and Giving in Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift
by Jacqueline Hamrit
In the wake of my previous analysis of Nabokovian fiction through the prism of Derridean philosophy, I would like to reverse the point of view and wonder about the way Nabokovian fiction and literature in general questions, and complicates the philosophical stance.
I first wish to situate the problematic by recallinghow I have mainly so far applied Derridean analyses on literary notions such as structure or genre on Nabokov's novels (mainly Lolita) and how I have tried to show that one of the key-notions of Derrida's philosophy – undecidability – can help understand the moral impasse of Lolita and more particularly the issue of the double bind present in the novel. This corresponds to a critical stance which consists in applying a concept on literature. Literature becomes an example that confirms the validity of a concept, implying thereby that concepts precede the comprehension of literature, that philosophy is in a dominant position as regards literature
I now would like to show how fiction renews the impact, meaning and apprehension of concepts, how, thanks to literature, we can see and consider in a new light concepts such as, for example, love and the gift. Indeed, Nabokov has entitled his last novel written in Russian The Gift and in his preface to Bend Sinister he has declared that "The main theme of Bend Sinister, then, is the beating of Krug's loving heart, the torture an intense tenderness is subjected to."[1] Now, Derrida has written extensively on the gift in Given Time and The Gift of Death, for example whereas he has only briefly mentioned the issue of love. Moreover, my analysis could prolong previous studies by Nabokovian scholars such as Maurice Couturier's on desire and cruelty and Leland de la Durantaye 's on tenderness. Love indeed in Nabokov's fiction can be either pathological and cruel as in Lolita or paternal and tender as in Bend Sinister. In his book entitled Nabokov ou la Cruauté du désir published in 2004, Couturier considers that Humbert experiences jouissance in the first part of the novel but his jouissance is perverse, narcissistic and auto-erotic whereas, in the second part of the novel, Lolita becomes a mere provider of pleasure and not an object of desire. As for Leland de la Durantaye, Ellen Pifer considers in her review of his book[2]entitled Style is Matter. The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov and published in 2007, that tenderness is at the core of the problematic of his argument which, I think, is more appropriate in Bend Sinisterthan in Lolita. Indeed the novel stages the relationship between a father and his son, the love he feels towards him, a love which is described and characterized by the intimacy and banality of an everyday life.
I intend therefore to develop the human and ethical dimension of love in Nabokov's fiction by focusing on his last novel written in Russian, i.e. The Gift, attempting on one hand to identify the main characteristics of love and on the other hand, to show how love, being mainly a gift, can be, as a gift, the source of moral action.
To begin with, I wish to give some brief information about the novel. Nabokov himself, tells us, in the foreword he wrote in Montreux in 1962, that the greater part of The Gift (in Russian, Dar) was written in 1935-1937, in Berlin, its last chapter being completed in 1937 on the French Riviera. It was published serially by an émigré magazine in 1937-38, but with the fourth chapter omitted. The entire edition appeared only in 1952 in New York thanks to the Chekhov Publishing House. It was translated from the Russian into English by Michael Scammel and the translation was revised by the author who is responsible, he says, for the versions of the various poems and bits of poems scattered throughout the book. The novel is composed of five chapters and, as a künstlerroman, tells the story of a young Russian writer in the process of becoming a full-fledged author. The action takes place in Berlin in the twenties and includes the love story between the protagonist Fyodor and a young Russian girl Zina Mertz.
The issue of love is indeed at the core of the novel and I agree with the critic Alexander Dolinin who,in his essay on The Gift published in the Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov in 1995,concluded as follows:"In this sense The Gift itself can be called ' a kind of declaration of love' [Dolinin here quotes Fyodor addressing Zina and then goes on as such] – love of the creator for his creature, and of the creature for its creator, love of a son for his father, love of an exile for his native land, love for language and those who love it, love for the beauty of the world, and last but not least, love for its readers."[3] I, for my part, consider that love is dealt with in the novel mainly in three situations, the first one corresponding to what Nabokov calls 'the banal triangle of tragedy', i.e. the story between Yasha, the son of one of Fyodor's friends, Rudolf, a German young man, and Olya, a Russian girl, the second situation being what I call 'the virtuous triangle', the one formed by Fyodor, his mother and his father, and the third one corresponding to the duo of Fyodor and Zina.
Let us first begin with the triangle of tragedy. It is about a group of friends whose relationship is going to evolve as Yasha falls in love with Rudolf, who falls in love with Olya, who is in love with Yasha, so that, the narrator goes on, "the geometric relationship of their inscribed feelings was complete, reminding one of the traditional and somewhat mysterious interconnections in the dramatis personae of eighteenth-century French playwrights where X is the amante of Y ('the one in love with Y') and Y the amant of Z ('the one in love with Z').[4]Hence, it is the case of an impossible, unrequited love which generates from friendship but differs radically from it as the narrator describes as follows:
Yasha kept a diary and in those notes he neatly defined the mutual relationship between him, Rudolf and Olya as a 'triangle inscribed in a circle'. The circle represented the normal, simple, 'Euclidian' (as he put it) friendship that united all three, so that if it alone had existed their union would have remained happy, carefree and unbroken. But the triangle inscribed within it was a different system of relationships, complex, agonizing and slow in forming, which had an existence of its own, quite independent of its common enclosure of uniform friendship. This was the banal triangle of tragedy, formed within an idyllic circle, and the mere presence of such a suspiciously neat structure, to say nothing of the fashionable counterpoint of its development would have permitted me to make it into a short story or novel. (46)
Here, Fyodor uses two figures to represent the two proximate but different feelings that friendship and love are. The circle of friendship represents perfection, union and harmony whereas the triangle of love is associated to disharmony. Love corresponds here to a certain kind of relationship which the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot may help us to delineate. Blanchot, indeed, in his book entitled in French La Communauté inavouable (1983) tackles the issue of love through the concept of the community by resorting to texts written by Georges Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas and Marguerite Duras. He first quotes Bataille who wrote "A la base de chaque être, il existe un principe d'insuffisance…"[5], meaning that there exists in each person a principle of insufficiency, of incompleteness which does not strive to be completed through reunion and fusion but which, on the contrary, is intensified as it is being completed. This induces a vision of an impossible love based on a fundamental dissymmetry which Blanchot finds in Duras's book entitled La Maladie de la mort and which he associates to that of Levinas who pinpoints the presence of a dissymmetry in the non reciprocal ethical relationship between me and others. Love, from that perspective, is lost before it appears, because the I and the other do not live in the same time, are never together, are separated, even when united. The world, Blanchot goes on, disappears, falls apart, as in Tristan and Isolde who said:" Nous avons perdu le monde, et le monde nous." [6] [we have lost the world and the world has lost us.] This kind of love is in keeping with the one Fyodor describes when he mentions Yasha's which is a desperate and tragic one as Yasha commits suicide. Yet, it seems that Nabokov does not subscribe to this kind of love, not because it is a homosexual one, but because it does not reach the pure, authentic one that passion could have given birth to. Fyodor comments it as follows: "I would have refused to see in Yasha's case an incorrigible deviation had Rudolf been to the least degree a teacher, a martyr, or a leader; and not what he really was, a so-called 'Bursch', a German 'regular guy' (46) Yasha's love is thereby degraded and becomes the vulgar one for 'a regular guy' all the more so as Yasha was, he wrote in his diary, 'fiercely in love with the soul of Rudolf…its harmonious proportions, its health, the joy it has in living…this naked, suntanned, lithe soul ...fiercely in love with his soul- and this is just as fruitless as falling in love with the moon." (46). His love is merely imaginary and verges on delusion, losing authenticity and legitimacy. Such a love corresponds to the first type Fyodor gives account of in the narrative thread of the novel.
On the other hand, if we turn now to what I have called 'the virtuous triangle', the case is different. In the second chapter, Fyodor depicts the love of his parents, the love by and for his parents. Let us begin, as he does, with his mother. The passage which best epitomizes the tenor of their love and which is worth quoting is the following one:
She had come to him for two weeks, after a three-year separation, and (…) her face twisted with the pain of happiness, was clinging to him, blissfully moaning, kissing him anywhere –ear, neck – it had seemed to him that the beauty of which he had been so proud had faded, but as his vision adjusted itself to the twilight of the present, so different at first from the distantly receding light of memory, he again recognized in her everything that he had loved: (84) [bold characters mine]
Here is rendered the meeting of two persons who love each other after a separation. It is, to use Roland Barthes's expression, a 'festivity' (in French, 'une fête') which he develops as such:
The Festivity is what is waited for, what is expected. What I expect of the promised presence is an unheard-of totality of pleasures, a banquet; I rejoice like the child laughing at the sight of the mother whose mere presence heralds and signifies a plenitude of satisfactions: I am about to have before me, and for myself, the 'source of all good things.[7]
Nabokov describes indeed there the delight, the pleasure, the plenitude and the exultation of the mother as well as the obvious certainty of the son as regards his love for his mother.We notice how Nabokov insists on the intensification of the look. Love here sharpens vision as the son becomes even more aware of the beauty of his mother ("the pure outline of her face, the changeful play of [her] green, brown, yellow, entrancing eyes", he says) whereas the mother, un blinded by the excitement of the meeting, looks at a grotesque scene in the street, enveloping it in an surrealist aura. But the meeting is at the origin of an ambivalent feeling: it is a happiness, a bliss(we notice here the use of one of Nabokov's favourite notions) but it is also at the same time, a pain, perhaps because, as he was to say in Speak, Memory, "In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much"[8] but mainly because love appears therefore as a sort of pharmakon, a fortunate thing as well as a poison, a joy and a suffering.
If we go on now with the father, we notice something different although the love the son describes begins with the sensation of bliss. The narrator declares:
How to describe the bliss of our walks with Father through the woods, the fields and the peat bogs, or the constant summer thought of him if he was away, the eternal dream of making some discovery and of meeting him with this discovery – How to describe the feeling I experienced when he showed me all the spots where in his own childhood he had caught this or that (…)
And what fascination there was in his words, in the kind of special fluency and grace of his style (…)
What a truly enchanting world was unfolded in his lessons!(104)
It seems obvious here, through the lyricism of the tone, the intensity of the emotion, and the stylistic choices, that Fyodor tries here to describe and express his love for his father which is not only characterized by the happiness it produces but by the almost idolatrous admiration it is connected to The father is idealized as the loved one is by a lover, according to Stendhal who calls this process 'crystallisation' which consists in transforming a real object into a perfect, ideal, brilliant object. And, indeed, Fyodor mentions later all the qualities his father was endowed with: his self-control, his sense of humour, etc. But Fyodor also declares:
In and around my father, around this clear and direct strength, there was something difficult to convey in words, a haze, a mystery, an enigmatic reserve which made itself felt sometimes more, sometimes less. It was as if this genuine, very genuine man possessed an aura of something still unknown but which was perhaps the most genuine of all.(109)
Fyodor describes here a secret, an enigma, an ineffable 'je ne sais quoi' as Vladimir Jankélévitch would say, which shows that there does exist something inaccessible in love, a genuine solitude recalling Blanchot's analysis of love. Yet, love can be considered as a moral precept as, here, the fact of loving and being loved by his father allows the son to become aware of ethics as the father transmitsnot only knowledge but moral qualities, rejecting for example hypocrisy or cowardice, and endowing life with "a kind of bewitching lightness" (110)
It seems now appropriate to broach the love story between the protagonist Fyodor and Zina Mertz. Most critics have insisted on the fact that Zina appears only in the middle of the book, mainly in the third and fifth chapters as the fourth is devoted to the biography Fyodor writes on Chernychevski. This is true but Zina has been indirectly introduced from the very first chapter as she is connected to the couple Fyodor describes in the very first pages, the lady having given her drawing lessons in St-Petersburg. Besides, there exists all through the novel the continuous, subterranean thread of allusions to the colour 'blue' which is condensed at the end of the second chapter when Fyodor decides to rent a room in the house where he perceives "a gauze dress, pale bluish and very short" (135) which he wrongly imagines belongs to Zina as if chance, fate and necessity were fighting each other in their story.
Yet, as a love story, it has a beginning and Fyodor describes their first meeting rather soberly although he mentions her 'graceful languor' (148) and her sullenness. But when his desire grows in him, it is with an anxious hope and expectation that he waits for her, as he writes "Waiting for her arrival. She was always late – and always came by another road than he." (164), going on as follows: "She always unexpectedly appeared out of the darkness, like a shadow leaving its kindred element." (164) We note the repetition of the experience, the surprise of the appearance, but mostly here, contrary to the meeting with his mother, the obsessive pain of a frustrated desire due to her absence. What characterizes indeed the love Fyodor feels for Zina is neither friendship (as with Yasha), nor mere idealization (as with his father) but desire, his lack of being. Yet his love is also one of benevolence as philosophers call this love which consists in wishing the good and happiness of the loved one as the narrator explains: "both of them, forming a single shadow, were made to the measure of something not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding them." (164). This love is a gift, a gift of lifeas, Fyodor exclaims: "it was good to be alive" (166)
I wish now to tackle the issue of the gift as, first, it is the title of the novel, as, secondly, the name Fyodor means 'a gift of God' and maybe also as Brian Boyd considered that Fyodor had a double gift, his love for Zina,on one hand, and his literary talent, on the other hand, which explains my intention to study this notion from the perspective of first, love, then, writing and, finally, being. Now, Webster defines the gift, first, as "something that is voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation" and, then as a "capacity, a talent, a faculty." But Derrida complicates the notion and, deconstructing Marcel Mauss's analysis, considers that, in a sense, there is no such thing as a gift as each time you give somebody a gift, you and the other person are inscribed in an economy of exchange. You feel good about yourself for giving, and he or she is grateful to receive. At that very moment, the gift disappears. Giving should therefore preclude any exchange, the pure gift consists in giving without getting anything back, without receiving anything, and this, according to Derrida, is not merely 'impossible' but 'the impossible', implying that giving necessitates an infinite and demanding desire. This can be applied to the notion of love, and whether it is Barthes, Blanchot or Lacan, they all associate love to giving. Barthes, for example, declares: "I love the other, not according to his existence; by a movementone might well call mystical, I love, not what he is, but that he is.(…) so, acceding to the other's thus [in French, "le tel"], I no longer oppose oblation to desire."[9] And we all know Lacan's formula: 'loving is giving something one does not have to somebody who does not want it'. These sentences tend to claim that loving is not a question of having but of being, that there is something infinite and inexhaustible in love. In our novel, it seems that such is the love Fyodor feels for his parents, and chiefly for his father (we indeed remember how he could not express in words his emotion) and maybe not for Zina. His love for Zina is particular and Zina herself is particularly strange. Most critics have noticed how she is a ghostly, shadowy figure in the novel She rarely participates in the novel and when, at the end of the novel, Fyodor declares his love, he does it very tentatively, not in an assured and vigorous way. Thus, when Zina asks him if he loves her, he answers: "What I am saying is in fact a kind of declaration of love', to which Zina replies "A 'kind of ' is not enough." (332). Zina is in fact more a guide or a muse as she has a rival: Fyodor's vocation as a writer. The narrator explains: "he was incapable of giving his entire soul to anyone or anything: its working capital was too necessary to him for his private affairs." (165)