Eva Brann
Eva Brann, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, is the longest serving tutor at St. John’s College.
More About this Author
Eva Brann, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, is the longest serving tutor at St. John’s College.
More About this Author
Eva Brann, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, is the longest serving tutor at St. John’s College.
More About this Author
Artists Sketching in the White Mountains, Winslow Homer, 1868
Packed away as an easily missed “parenthesis” in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955), a masterpiece of linguistic virtuosity by an ESL (English as a Second Language) writer who was also a moral ropedancer, there is a vanishingly short report of a fact: a crime of abduction and rape whose victim is a girl. Here it is:
Had I done to Dolly perhaps what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?
This actual event is fleetingly memorialized as a confession in a fiction in which a European intellectual is doing the same to Dolores Haze—“Lolita” to the perpetrator—who is the same age as Sally.
A book I had, quite fortuitously, bought just when I was thinking once again about the essence and modes of fictionality, Sarah Weinman’s The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World (2018) added a dimension to those lifelong inquiries.1
Weinman’s straightforward intention is to show that Nabokov was quite aware of the Horner abduction and, while holding himself harmless of deceit (hence the parenthetical acknowledgment) was ambivalent about admitting this use of the fact and unwilling to come clean about its extent, although the much-reported event had become a kind of armature for the novel—and at one point a “writer’s block” breaker.
I find the Weinman exposition completely persuasive and highly suggestive. For, implicit but not, as the locution goes, “thematized” was a tricky problem that opens up a deep question: Is underlying, or, if you like, “backgrounding” fact a contingent or a necessary element of fiction? Is factuality inevitably twinned with fictionality? Or, more internally, is memory a precondition for the functioning of the creative imagination? It is a question new to me, one that I owe to the Weinman book.
This question gathers interest from Nabokov’s above-mentioned ambiguity, well brought into the open by The Real Lolita, about acknowledging his debt to reality. For, while admitting his acquaintance with the fact, he disclaimed its importance, although it does seem to have saved Lolita three times, when his wife Vera had to snatch the unfinished manuscript from the fire to which he was consigning it out of despair about how to carry on. Thus reality seems to have been the circumstantial atmosphere breathing life into Lolita’s genesis, content, and culmination.
Even at my first reading, back in the last century, I was captivated by the book—not by the proudly willing love that we have for Homer or Jane Austen—for repulsion was an ever-accompanying element along with the enchanted mind. Yet there were aspects of simple charm—on the one hand. To me, the most memorable is Nabokov’s immigrant-love for America, the continent, that “lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country” of my own experience—mine and my Beetle’s.2
But there is, in Lolita, that other, sinister hand.3 This yet so unspoiled continent of the mid-twentieth century is the rolling venue of a crime: child molestation. Here’s a strange inversion: In the mid-twentieth century, the time when bland conformity was in its flaccid bloom, the novel was regarded as scandalous and surreptitiously pornographic—Nabokov had a hard time finding a publisher. Now the sex as sex wouldn’t raise an eyebrow, but as a rights issue it does raise the indignation of the “woke.” But again, there’s ambivalence. A contrary reading sees Humbert Humbert, the perpetrator, as a charming, sympathetic European with a pathology that is not to be imputed to him for vice but is to be pitied as an affliction. This, currently acceptable, view requires that prisons be fitted up as hospitals and people be reeducated not to see the ugliness of such desires.4
There is also an approach to Lolita that discerns in Lolita courage, even heroism. I am doubtful; her attempts at escape are feeble, in part from some complex reluctance but in part from outright fear. And when she does finally escape, it’s into the hands of a pornographer.
One more feature of the book that is remarkable: to me, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) is the book of books on my adopted country, the land to which I came, a refugee, as a teenager. It seems to me a masterpiece of anthropology at its nonprofessional best, the study of humanity as incarnate in communal settings. The French Tocqueville’s Democracy is almost the equal of The Persian Wars by that Greek grandmaster of ethnic insight, Herodotus.
Now, bizarre as it may seem, I think of Lolita as an updated addendum to the nineteenth-century book. To be sure, Nabokov indulges in sophisticated5 linguistic games that make reading Lolita in a spirit of trying to “get” it somewhat effortful—whereas Tocqueville writes, of course, without speech shenanigans, thus allowing more care to be devoted to his actual disclosures.6
Whatever more they can be, novels are entertainments, and so Nabokov has every right to be mordant and even supercilious. In that spirit, Lolita records a dismal joy ride across America, a little over a century after Tocqueville traveled on the continent. Humbert Humbert is a faux father, and his unfathered daughter, an abducted sex slave, is held to him in their aimless, furtive progress, now by bribery, now by intimidation. However, as I’ve intimated, there’s another aspect of the book, not for the two characters but for the reader. It is a lovingly observed as well as scathingly expressed description of the beautiful and banal, philistine and open-hearted land that Humbert exploits and abuses as he turns its ever-available motels into a brothel-complex.
And yet, were a citizen-in-waiting to ask me for books to read in preparation for “naturalization,”7 I might recommend, among others, Lolita, for the reasons just given, but particularly because Nabokov, who came to America from Europe when he was forty-one, caught on to what other, older Europeans in their culture-conceit often missed: the complexity of conscientiously American souls, the ambivalence glossed over by that American simplicity that is usually on display.
All the preceding is only a lead-in, and not even all that pertinent, to the question that The Real Lolita raised for me by its persuasive recollection of the factual crime at Nabokov’s disposal. Here are the elements of the question:
1. Let a fact be an accurate report of some discernible segment of reality. Then how do we grasp reality so as to articulate its parts? Articulate means, etymologically, “to cut at the joints.” For Plato it is a method, the “way of division (diairesis),” which depends on discerning the joints of the world. But the how of that method (Greek methodos means “a way to be followed”) is a project too long to tackle here.
2. Is a pure fiction, quite divorced from any fact and its reality, even conceivable? What would a fact-divorced narrative, devoid of spatiotemporal references, of “reals” (late Latin, realis), such as constitute our mundane experience, even be about? Such a pure fiction would be a tale of no-where, no-when, no-matter. Its fictions would be of nothing we experience through the senses, the images behind them of totally imaginary beings. I am trying here to imagine the essentially unimaginable—beings beyond the categories of existence.8
3. So then, if a factual armature is not an option at all but a required condition, a prerequisite of fiction, does that invalidate the artist’s vaunted claim to creativity—that is, to a share in a god’s, even in the God’s, power to make a world without a model, to determine its form or matter, to give it substance? For a form to immatter and the matter thus to inform is just what a creator-god doesn’t need,9 but a mere mortal probably does.
I’ll take a shot at answering my three questions. Or rather just the second one, since I’ll set aside the first question as involving too deep a delving into ontology, and since I’ve answered the third question in asking it. In any case, I couldn’t care less about the kudos of creativity, and while Nabokov was evidently not eager to acknowledge his debt to fact, he needn’t have worried. Judging by myself, I think that most lovers of fiction admire writers for snaffling a piece of the factual world and fitting it up for imaginative use, especially since fiction can exceed reality in realism.10
So that question, to me a newly discovered perplexity, concerns the need of a factual armature for a robust fiction—a perplexity aroused by reading about Nabokov’s skittish use of a real parallel, a pedophiliac crime. This is how I frame for myself not the evidential problems concerning actual practice, but the philosophical question concerning the nature of art: Do the artful feignings of literary fiction (or probably all the products of the fine arts) require the extensive support of existential fact—why and how?
I’ll begin with the observation that there is a genre that seems, perforce, to do without factual background stories—namely, fantasy literature. In fantasies, things occur and events happen that don’t turn up in reality. To agree to that proposition, it isn’t necessary to believe that the natural world (almost always a part of the primary setting) is ordered by prescriptive natural law; it’s enough to agree to Hume’s “constant conjunction”—that is, to concede that, without imputing any unobservable causal connection to a series of events, they do seem to us always to occur in the same serial orders: if I punch, say, a metal ball, a very short time afterward a ball lying contiguous to it will roll away from the direction whence came my attack.
In fantasy fiction or depiction, however, it doesn’t need to happen. Many such fictions, chief of them Alice in Wonderland, begin with a prelude showing its human character transiting into a strange realm, perhaps by dropping, safely unaccelerated by the natural Law of Free Fall, down a vertical rabbit hole.
The New Novel, Winslow Homer, 1877
To me, fantasy is palatable only if the author appears to be well-enough versed in the rules of logic, the propositions of mathematics, and the laws of physics to contravene them wittily. An author unconstrained by such knowledge is, as the Germans say of a childish tantrum, ausser Rand und Band, “beyond borders and bonds”—and so goes terminally boring. The relish of even the most intelligent fantasy tends to turn into tedium, for me at least, unless it is conscientiously antinomian—that is, devised against a background of reality, with antithetical necessity.
So then, why is there always such a factual reality, oddly like a saving grace? Well, to begin with, this presence gives engaged readers a chance to reconvert the tale to the real world and so to make it significantly applicable to their own lives. Moreover, if there is some resonance of real reportage in the fiction, some remains of “breaking news,”11 then the narration gains in tension, in a surviving frisson.
But back to the question. It seems that fictions are willy-nilly fact dependent. To be sure, much serious imagining is magical. By “serious” imagining I mean the production of mental images that are, so to speak, not just a kind of pseudovisual vociferating but coherent and sustained “works.”
So they may be magical, but their magic depends, just to be distinguishable as magic, on a backdrop of factuality—where facts are, if they are anything, among possibles, things that might be. When you are facing facts, you may be puzzled by the how of their being, but the whether of their existence is no longer in question.
So fictions subsist in an environment that is in some basic structural way continuous with the natural, the given, world. But they are also in more specific ways factual, insofar as the most powerful images tend to be most truthfully—and here I need to concoct a locution—most veritably adjectivized: attributes are expressed by adjectives, and something property-rich might well be called “well-adjectivized.”
Aristotle says somewhere that attributes come in two categories: essential and accidental. Essential properties belong to, are constitutive of, a human being’s (or any being’s) very being; accidental properties are contingent and circumstantial. When I evaluate a fictional writing for myself,12 I first look for the author’s ability to balance and place persuasively essential and accidental properties.13
Adolescents tend to be world abstracted, even when, or especially when, they are impassioned world reformers.14 That is why their touching attempts to write the great American novel so often issue in grandiloquent manifestos rather than promising first fictions.
All the above is prelude to my recent discovery—new news to me, but very likely old news to veterans of fiction making—of the question that raised itself for me: Does a fiction need to originate in, and rely on, a fact of reality? The answer seems to be: Yes.
I set aside, as merely circumstantial evidence,15 the fact that all the grand fiction I’ve lived with is indeed incited by?, based on?, parallel to?, twinned with? a reported reality. For example: James Joyce’s Ulysses is based on Homer’s Odyssey;16 Thomas Mann’s greatest novel, Doktor Faustus (1947), is based on the life of Nietzsche; Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (1966 on), my favorite twentieth-century fiction, was inspired by Scott’s service in India.