Nabokov and the Repulsive.

In The Gift Nabokov makes a critic of the protagonistʼs book on the life of Chernyshevsky say these words: “The author … has a talented pen—certain ideas he puts forward, and juxtapositions of ideas, are undoubtedly shrew; but with all this his book is repellent. Let us try to examine calmly this impression” (Vintage International Edition, p. 305). But Nabokov the author does not permit the critic to explain this fact. We should then try to do it.

First of all, the repulsion is not on the work of art. Nabokovʼs art is luxurious, poetic, beautiful, funny, shrew, naughty, surprising, a pleasure to the senses. The repulsive side is not on the work, but on the protagonist. Why is he so repulsive? Nabokov does not answer this question, nor does he center the question on that point. He skips this aesthetic (moral) question. Why does he prefer characters who are repulsive, instead of other more charitable or kind?

We do not know. In Mashenka the protagonist can be repulsive, but he is passing through some kind of depression at the beginning of the novel. We can understand that feeling of repulsion, then; but in King, Queen, Knave the woman protagonist is repulsive, and the nephew a marionette. In The Luzhin Defense the protagonist is a repulsive maniac of chess and you have to struggle to feel some kind of sympathy for him all along the novel. The author does not help much on this. In The Eye, the same thing happens: the protagonist is repellent, and the rest of characters say so. In Glory, the female protagonist the male protagonist is in love with cannot be endured. In Laughter in the Dark, the female protagonist is repulsive and the plot is a chain of sadomasochistic turns on the male protagonist. In Despair the same: the protagonist is quite repulsive. In Invitation to a Beheading Nabokov tries some kind of allegorical-surreal plot but he is not Strindberg and the work is unbearable, from the director to the prisioner-protagonist. In The Gift we have a metamorphosis of the male protagonist who we see in Mashenka but he has evolved even more repulsive and negative. The same happens from The Enchanter to Pale Fire and the rest.

There must be a reason, an aesthetical (moral) reason for this selection of protagonists in the author, and one can be spotted in The Gift. At one moment, the impersonal, omniscient narrator says this of one writer: “One blamed him of being derisive, supercilious, cold, incapable of thawing to friendly discussions—but that was also said about Konchoyev and about Fyodor himself [the protagonist], and about anyone whose thoughts lived in their own private house and not in a barrack-room or a pub” (p. 321). This is the reason, then. Nabokov needs repulsive protagonists in his novels to defend individuality, to defend genius, to defend the individual against the mass. Is this enough to avoid the feeling, to justify the feeling of repulsion in the reader, an aesthetic (moral) failure without any doubt? After all, repulsion is a negative feeling tout court.

Now, I know what Nabokov is talking about, for Santayana, one of my most cherished philosophers, is the paragon of individualistic minds in the history of philosophy. I can tell you that Santayana never sounds repulsive. On the contrary, the more individual and alone he is, the more charitable and comprehensive, kind and friendly to other minds he is. He said in Soliloquies in England that the more alone we are, away from social life and propaganda, the less banal and the less negative. Alone we are fragile. Alone we can be human. And show kindness. Now, when Nabokov justifies a repulsive character before the reader as showing an original, individual mind that is a blatant error, not only shown by Santayana but many others, like Montaigne, Darwin, Einstein, etc. It is an error because it is morally, aesthetically a negative feeling the reader is offered. And the most important rule in art is, as Nabokov and Göngora knew very well, pleasure, the pleasure of reading. As Nabokov was not an idiot, the conclusion that one gets is this: he felt pleasure in that kind of negative, repulsive characters. They offered him evidence that individuals, not matter how repulsive, are precious and society (and politics), no matter how good, rubbish. I admit that this could never have been his principle unless something important had happened to him, for Nabokov has the power, the great power, to offer beauty and charm, pleasure and poetry. And that thing, that social thing that made him think that repulsive individuals are justified aesthetically (morally) was the Russian Revolution, who made of him an exile, a wanderer, a man without a country, without a social environment.

This conclusion, nevertheless, does not justify the fact that repulsion is a negative feeling in the reader. Nabokov chose it. And tried, in my opinion without philosophical reason, to defend it. He loved madmen, bad men and women, characters who go their own way. Brian Boyd says that Nabokov shows in Despair that Hermann is a narcissist without empathy for others, and for that reason he is a bad artist. We could say the same thing for his creator. If you show a repulsive mind talking about love something is wrong. The reader in me cannot justify this fact, this negative fact. I do not see it in Santayana nor in Montiagne nor in Joyce. The only artist who chooses repulsive minds as a channel of a beautiful prose is Nabokov. This aesthetic (moral) error cannot be justified with words in the lines of: “Well, you are not a modernist, my friend; you do not understand the centaur of the repulsive-beautiful that Nabokov mixed.” Well, I understand mixtures, like Göngoraʼs aesthetic fusion of the burlesque and the lyrical. But Göngora does not have repulsive characters in his work. Göngora and Santayana (and most writers) do not go against natural (evolved) feelings in human readers. No amount of modernist or post-modernist theory will ever justify that the reader enjoys feeling repulsion for a character..., to attain the more “higher” feeling of empathy for that repulsive character. It is not sane, it is not healthy, it is not human. You can defend artistic invention as the reason to compose dodecaphonism or atonality in Schönberg, no matter how ugly to human ears it can be. But that the tonality of Mozartʼs music sounds beautiful to our human ears is a fact, an evolved, natural, biological fact that artistic elitism cannot redress. Repulsion is a negative feeling, in music and in literature. Nabokovʼs love for the repulsive character goes against evolved, natural feelings in the human reader. In our species that is how it is, no matter how individual Nabokov gets as a theoriser.