The Prison-House of Language: Nabokov, Derrida, Bataille and the Sovereignty of Words

In an essay on intentionality, American philosopher John Searle regards the use of language as primarily an act or a performance rooted in a set of prescribed intentions. Language users abide by those intentions, which are normally conveyed through a text’s semantic content, connotative implications, and communicative structure. Searle is especially interested in a less readily apparent intention – the representation intention, which, according to Searle, posits an “intention to represent something as being the case.”1placeholder In other words, a representation intention is an act within the language act – more accurately, an act intended to generate or to highlight a certain aspect or function of the language act.2placeholder

To illustrate the intricate workings of this representation intention, modern literature, with its experimental use of language, offers an instructive case study. Vladimir Nabokov, of all writers of the period, seemed, in my opinion, to exemplify the master art of deploying the layered intentionality of language. His use of parody, which invests some of his most famous novels with a wry density of style, can be seen as approximating the representation intention by subverting a work’s fundamental textuality. Consider the parody of double in Lolita (1955). The characterisations of Humbert Humbert, the book’s narrator and protagonist, and Clare Quilty, Humbert Humbert’s nemesis, challenge the traditional good versus evil duality – a hallmark of 19^th century doppelgänger story – in that both are equally culpable from the outset of their exploitation of teenage girls, and equally sharp-witted and droll in their turns of phrase. With each passing chapter, it becomes increasingly clear that Humbert Humbert and Quilty are, in essence, two sides of the same coin – in a climactic showdown between the pair: “I [Humbert] rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.”3placeholder The contest yields no clear winner, hence no pat conclusion, as in a typical doppelgänger tale, of the good triumphing over the evil (or vice versa). According to scholar Alfred Appel Jr., the dénouement was intended as a parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839). While Allan Poe’s story marks a reversal of the Double convention by making the eponymous hero the villain who ultimately kills his good, moral self, Nabokov takes this a step further with an elaborate twist: Humbert kills Quilty after pledging his undying love for Lolita and resolving to leave her for good – a seemingly benevolent gesture that suggests the transcendence of ego and obsession. The murder thus stands out as almost an excessive afterthought and anticlimax given the story’s logical progression. Deprived of meaning and symbolic resonance, the parody in this episode completes a double target: the thematic structure of a traditional doppelgänger narrative and its demand of a moral lesson.4placeholder

In practice, parody arbitrarily confounds representation with self-presence. Theoretically, parody never represents, but distorts and appropriates. In Nabokov’s novel, the subversive force of parody is paralleled in the author’s – and, by extension, the character(s)’ – desire to overcome the constraints of language. In his analysis of parody in Lolita, Thomas R. Frosch argues that Nabokov’s “verbal playfulness” establishes language as “an objective presence, [and] not merely as a vehicle.”5placeholder The narrator of Nabokov’s novel Despair (1936) gives a lively account of how he achieves his verbal playfulness: “I liked, as I like still, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them unawares.”6placeholder Three years prior to the book’s English translation, Nabokov gave an interview (The Listener, 1962) where he averred that his exile from Russia had almost forced him to abandon his “rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English.”7placeholder A recurring theme in Nabokov’s novel, translingualism implies the general artificiality of physical spaces, which in turn evokes evolving cultural identities and, on a deeper level, the boundless nature of human imagination. The skill of transitioning between languages, on the other hand, indicates not only the author’s linguistic proficiency but also, as George Steiner suggests, the absence of a unifying language pattern. This is especially pronounced in Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1964), a tome-like work Steiner describes as employing a “monadist” approach to language due to its meticulous and extensive style. Literary monadism, in Steiner’s definition, works against linguistic hegemony and upholds that “real translation is impossible.”8placeholder Such limitation can be significantly reduced by the creation of unique perspectives and insights that transcend the parameters of common expression. In Nabokov’s first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), for example, the linguistic shift results in a doubling of perspectives, mirroring the characters’ experience of exile and the psychological split it engenders. Tamar Steinitz, in his book on language and identity, contends that Nabokov’s translingualism is built on the premise that the presumed link between language and the world is increasingly ruptured, perhaps even inherently fallacious.9placeholder Nabokov’s own approach to language is marked by a seemingly willed tendency to break divisions: according to biographer Brian Boyd, Nabokov frequently and unapologetically exploits the “special conditions of written language to smudge or sharpen the line” – the line “between absence and presence, self and the world” – which consequently creates the illusion that we, the readers, “feel nothing could be simpler than to step over to the other side and back – if life could only allow us the freedom we find here in language.”10placeholder

Throughout his life, Nabokov was fascinated by the elusive nature of words. In an unpublished parable, “The Word” (1923), a dreamer finds himself in heaven, wishing vainly to recount all the beauty and the misery of his former life. An angel, sympathising with his struggle, divulges the open-sesame word that encapsulates the ultimate truth of human existence. The dreamer utters the word and awakes. And: “Oh Lord – the winter dawn glows greenish in the window, and I remember not what word it was that I shouted.”11placeholder This futile pursuit of an all-explanatory word is also at the centre of the poem “Fame” (1942). In it, Nabokov conjures up an ideal world where a universal language succeeds to traverse all national borders:

“I kept changing countries like counterfeit money,
hurrying on and afraid to look back,
like a phantom dividing in two, like a candle
between mirrors sailing into the sun.
[…] my word, curved to form an aerial viaduct,
spans the world, and across in strobe-effect spin
of spokes I keep endlessly passing incognito
into the flame-licked night of my native land.”12placeholder

In his fictional works, Nabokov often probes the less benign aspect of linguistic facility, especially its connection to power. In Invitation to a Beheading (1935), language is weaponised by the totalitarian government to solidify its oppressive rule. Cincinnatus C., the hero of the novel, is ridiculed in his youth for his reservoir of obscure expressions: “Those around him understand each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or a catapult with wondrous consequences.”13placeholder During his imprisonment for the crime of “gnostical turpitude” – an absurd condition that resembles a thoughtcrime – Cincinnatus becomes aware of his incompetence in accurately making sense of the bizarre events around him:

“[…] I feel once again that I shall really express myself, shall bring the words to bay. Alas, no one taught me this kind of chase, and the ancient inborn art of writing is long since forgotten – forgotten are the days when it needed no schooling, but ignited and blazed like a forest fire […] I myself picture all this so clearly, but you are not I, and therein lies the irreparable calamity. Not knowing how to write, but sensing with my criminal institution how words are combined, what one must do for a commonplace word to come alive and to share its neighbor’s sheen, heat, shadow, while reflecting itself in its neighbor and renewing the neighboring word in the process, so that the whole line is live iridescence; while I sense the nature of this kind of word propinquity, I am nevertheless unable to achieve it, yet that is what is indispensable to me for my task, a task of not now and not here.14placeholder

Thereupon the prison seems to be morphing into a “prison-house of language.” That term is derived from an epigram widely attributed to Nietzsche: “We have to cease to think if we refuse to do it in the prison-house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.”15placeholder If there is a word that describes such limit – the limit beyond which further words are excessive – how might we find it if not within the prison-house of language itself? Nietzsche points out the main issue that with words “it is never a question of truth, never a question of inadequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages…”16placeholder Language, born of the need to facilitate and to universalize communication, provides humankind with an essentially constricted framework for understanding the world – what cannot be expressed by language fails also to be apprehended by human knowledge.17placeholder “We obtain the concept,” Nietzsche remarks, “as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.”18placeholder