University of Richmond
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Modern Literatures and Cultures
1993
Science and Gnosticism in "Lance" Yvonne Howell University of Richmond, yhowell@richmond.edu
Follow this and additional works at: h4p://scholarship.richmond.edu/mlc-faculty-publications Part of the Russian Literature Commons Recommended Citation Howell, Yvonne. "Science and Gnosticism in "Lance"" In A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov's Short Fiction, 181-92. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993.
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SCIENCE AND GNOSTICISM IN "LANCE"
Yvonne Howell
The concept of the "black hole," not to mention several newer cosmologies, was not yet in the air when Nabokov wrote "Lance" in 1952. For that matter, there were no sputniks or weather satellites in the air, either. As has been pointed out, one can admire Nabokov's artistic foresight in correctly depicting certain aspects of interplanetary travel. 1 This essay, however, will focus on quite a different aspect of the relationship between science and literature; one which Nabokov himself highlights in many of his early poems (see in particular, "Oculus") and other works: two ways of modelling objective reality and our subjective experience of it. Scientific theory and discourse provide one way of ordering and explaining the world; art provides a different set of organizational and explanatory metaphors. I think we have ample evidence that Nabokov considered art and science to be two sides of the same supreme human attribute: the imagination. For Nabokov, imagination-and therefore both true art and true science-is the redeeming quality of human beings which enables us, perhaps, to transcend death. Some of the structural features of science fiction as a genre lend themselves ideally to Nabokov's theme of self-transcendence. If the goal of selftranscendence involves escaping from the "vortex of the self,"-extricating oneself from all systems, stepping outside of each successive "frame," reaching a timeless vantage point from which the discontinuity of reality and its representation can be recognized and overcome . . . then, at that point, I suppose it doesn't matter: you have become one with God and can stop reading.
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If you continue to read, I would like to make two points about science fiction as a generic form which explain the choice of this form in "Lance" and are essential to a proper understanding of the work as a whole: (1) the romantic roots of the science fiction genre make it amenable to the depiction of a spiritual quest; (2) science fiction lends itself well to a spatial depiction of the discontinuity between reality and its representation. If the latter proposition is corroborated by an analysis of the relationship between "levels of reality" in "Lance," it will provide additional evidence for the hypothesis that science fiction is a preeminently spatial genre, rather than a literary form whose distinctiveness has to do with time (extrapolation into the futureV One way to approach "Lance" is to imagine a black hole, a concentration of ostensible nothingness so heavy that its gravity prevents any information-even light-from escaping it: hence, a black hole, a void which drains information. We know it exists only by the way it affects that which is sufficiently removed from its heaviness to be perceived. In other words, we can learn about a black hole only from the way it warps the surrounding reality-our "unbearable lightness of being," if you will. Nabokov is quite explicit about the presence of an absence, "a gaping hole, a raw wound in my story" (210). This gatrinvisible, unnamed, silent-is a concentration of enormous spiritual weight, around which bend each of the story's several levels of representation. The science fiction plot in "Lance" is very simple: young Emery L. Boke-the hero who goes by the name given in the title-is about to take part in the first expedition to Mars. Mr. and Mrs. Boke try to follow the course of their only son's interplanetary trek with a telescope from the balcony of their suburban home, a futile exercise which does not reduce their anxiety as they await his return. Lance's two pet chinchillas ("Chin" and "Chilla") are less affected by his absence, and even begin to breed. Finally, the expedition returns. One member has died, but Lance is fine, to be released from the hospital within a week. he says, "perfectly wonderful. I am going back in "It was November." He begins to tell of "the first thing I saw-", but is cut short by the nurse, and the sentence is never resumed. Mr. Boke, Lance's father, is described as "an old professor of history, a brilliant medievalist, whose white whiskers, pink pate, and black suit are famous on a certain sunny campus in the deep South, but whose sole asset in connection with this story ... is that his appearance is out of date."3 When Mr. Boke is located within one of the many
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narrative frames comprising this story, the picture we get of Lance's adventures consists of names and images from the medieval romance: If Boke's sources are accurate, the name "Lanceloz del Lac" occurs for the first time in Verse 3676 of the 12th cen. "Roman de Ia Charrete." Lance, Lancelin, Lancelotik-diminutives murmured at the brimming, salty, moist stars. Young knights in their teens learning to harp, hawk, and hunt; the Forest Dangerous and the Dolorous Tower, Aldebaran, Betelgeuze ... The field glass is not much good, the chart is all crumpled and damp, and: "You do not hold the flashlight properly"-this to Mrs. Boke. (204) An "out of date" narrator, whose relationship to the author is once or
twice removed, is necessary if the details of Lance's interplanetary travels are to be described. The author-("Boke" with the na and ov)-who remains outside this particular frame, calls Lance "a more or less remote descendant of mine" and insists that there is nothing extraordinary in the tendency to give to the manners and clothes of a distant day (which happens to be placed in the future) an old-fashioned tinge, a badly-pressed, badly-groomed, dusty something, since the terms "out of date," "not of our age" and so on are in the long run the only ones in which we are able to imagine and express a strangeness no amount of research can foresee. The future is but the obsolete in reverse. (202) We are made suddenly aware that the expression "out of date" has no time vector; it applies equally to the future and the past. Moreover, temporal metaphors can quite easily be converted into spatial ones-which is precisely what most of science fiction does.4 Time is projected spatially as geographical layers (Journey to the Center of the Earth), or as the distance between planets and galaxies. The interchangeability of time and space informs the characteristic structure of science fiction. This interchangeability is also the source of the genre's cliches and formulas, which Nabokov systematically pounds to a pulp: "Inhabitants of foreign planets, 'intelligent' beings, humanoid or of various mythic makes, have one remarkable trait in common: their intimate structure is never depicted. In a supreme concession to biped propriety, not only do centaurs wear loincloths; they wear them about
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their forelegs" (200).5 Science fiction at its worst is notoriously inept in its pretentions to give the alien, the nonhuman, the Other, a humanly imaginable form. Yet, as we shall see, Nabokov himself feels the need to name the unnamable, to give shape to the unimaginable (the invisible, silent black hole) in order to grapple with it, and overcome it. It is necessary to project a face onto that which we cannot otherwise face. Nabokov tries various approaches to the "black hole"; he bends at least three metaphorical systems around it. Simon Karlinsky has given a concise description of the tri-part structure of "Lance": "Within its brief span, the narrative of 'Lance' combines three distinct superimposed levels of reality: interplanetary exploration, mountain climbing, and medieval romance" (N/W 271n). I would argue that there is an additional metaphorical layer of gnostic imagery, a fourth "level of reality" not to be overlooked. Already in the second sentence he tells us that the planet Lance is going to "may well be separated from the earth by only as many miles as there are years between last Friday and the rise of the Himalayas." This simile contains in a microcosm the compositional and conceptual import of the whole. The interchangeability of time and space not only justifies the characteristic plot structure of science fiction, it is also the underlying theme of the story. "In the telescopic field of one's fancy," the first paragraph continues, "through the prism of one's tears, any particularities it [the planet] presents should be no more striking than those of existing planets." Therefore, old Mr. Boke's telescope on the balcony can be no more powerful than his own medieval-studies-warped imagination, and any description of adventures on the "brimming, salty, moist stars," are best given through the prism of his tears. The narrative focuses on the emotions of Lance's anxious parents, in order to convey by indirect reflection the unimaginable actualities of Lance's interplanetary trip. Presently, though, a new metaphorical system takes over. The transition from medieval romance metaphors to those pertaining to mountaineering coincides with the narrator's stepping out of one frame in order to occupy a larger, or "higher" frame. The switch to a frrst-person plural narrator (from "the Bokes" to "We") and the unmarked direct discourse ("Gone! Was it ... ?") would support Nicol's observation that "ultimately, the real subject of 'Lance' is the present" (13). Nicol has found a clue to the "real reason for the writing of the story'' in a letter Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson in 1951, in which he describes how his son Dmitri "was camping on Jenny Lake in the
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Tetons, in a small tent, and climbing mountains along their most difficult and dangerous sides. The thing with him is an extraordinary overwhelming passion. The professional alpinists there are really wonderful people, and the very physical kind of exertion supplied by the mountains somehow is transmuted into a spiritual experience." As Nicol points out, if we take Dmitri Nabokov as not only the probable model for Lance, but also the intended subject of "Lance," the author's statement that the story is about "a more or less remote descendant of mine" must be reread with much more validity attached to the "less" than the "more." Within this frame of reference, the meaning of the story coincides with his interpretation: it is about Nabokov's mixed admiration and apprehension regarding his son's confrontation with death during his mountaineering expeditions. I would see this as just one of the many levels of reality (or "pictures within a frame") whose depiction provides information about-but is not equivalent to-the central riddle, the "black hole." To illustrate this point, let us look at the way in which the spiritual content of Lance's-or Dmitri's-mountaineering exploits exerts a tremendous pull on the language and imagery used to describe the alpinists' climb: Ah, there he is again! Crossing through a notch between two stars; then, very slowly, attempting a traverse on a cliff face so sheer, and with such delicate holds that the mere evocation of those groping fingertips and scraping boots fills one with acrophobic nausea. And through streaming tears the old Bokes see Lance now marooned on a shelf of stone and now climbing again and now, dreadfully safe, with his ice ax and pack, on a peak above peaks, his eager profile rimmed with light. (206) What begins with a concrete sighting (still from the balcony) immediately passes into a different spatial (and spiritual) realm, as Lance "crosses a notch between two stars." This refers back, on the one hand, to Nabokov's earlier statement (198) reminding us of the self-referentiality of all art: "I ... debar a too definite planet from any role in my story-from the role every dot and full stop should play in my story (which I see as a kind of celestial chart) ...•" The protagonist is simply crawling across the author's celestial chart-an activity incapable of generating much meaning. On the other hand, though, the celestial chart and the "notch between two stars" suggest the Neo-Platonic cosmologies, in which ascendence through the successive astral. and planetary spheres is equivalent to shedding successive layers of one's
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constrictive, material body and approaching the pure, divine spirit, whence we all originate.6 The adjectives "sheer" and "delicate" lead to the "mere evocation" of something which is both terrifying and triumphant ("acrophobic nausea," "dreadfully safe"), and fmally, to the image of a divine being, "on a peak above peaks, his proflle rimmed with light." In this passage we see Lance climbing about on a celestial map, which is this story, but which also charts the gnostic journey through matter and Evil back to the source of divine light (gnosis). The mysticism breaks through the alpine imagery when Lance's proftle is said to be rimmed with light, as if he had acquired a halo. As Lance begins his perilous descent, Nabokov tells us that perhaps Lance "has swung over those high-angled wet slabs that fall vertically away into the abyss, has mastered the overhang, and is now blissfully glissading down steep celestial snows" (206). This passage seems to affirm my suggestion of a gnostic metaphorical level: the "pure spirit" sails over the abyss, and "blissfully glissades down steep celestial snows." The heavenly whiteness evoked by "celestial snows" certainly indicates yet another level of reality, a topography we have not yet encountered within the medieval or alpine or interplanetary metaphorical framework. 7 A short digression is necessary here in order to capture the importance of the heavily alliterated passages which appear in at several points in the story. Oscar Wilde once said: "What has actually occurred is insignificant." However, what recurs in writing is significant. The best way to explain the significance of Nabokov's seemingly random word play and alliteration in this story is to defme it as "noise"-both literally, and in the figurative sense "noise" has in the discourse of information theory. Essentially, "noise" is anything which impinges from the outside to muddle the transmission of a message. In a closed system, the more noise, the less information. However, living organisms-and, arguably, literary texts-are open systems. Moreover, they can be seen as autonomous, self-organizing systems, which means, among other things, that external noise, an ambiguous message impinging upon a complex system, may represent a loss of information along one channel, but a gain in the total information of the system.8 We have, I think, arrived at an intuitively satisfying conception of what the function of "noise" might be in the literary text. To paraphrase Atlan, randomness, or "noise" is in and of itself a kind of order, if it can be made meaningful within the totality of the system it impinges upon.9 All this being said, what information is imparted by
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Nabokov's use of alliteration? How does the "noisy" repetition of consonants in certain passages "self-organize" into a new pattern of information, as opposed to actively disrupting the transmission of information (as it certainly would in, say, a scientific report), or simply burdening that information with decorative overload (the impression a rather passive reader might get from a bombardment of Nabokovian word-play). The answer is perhaps more obvious in poetry, where alliteration, like rhyme, may be expected to point to an acausal relationship between two words. In the story "Lance," patterns of alliteration organize into patterns of meaningful coincidence, that is, relationships of cause and effect which may be valid in some other epistemology, but not in our normal "everyday" world. For instance, Lance has returned alive, with not much more than a nose-bleed; his parents go to visit him in the hospital: Mrs. Coover, the nurse, has blue eyes and no chin. A ripe silence. Then Lance: "It was wonderful. Perfectly wonderful. I am going back in November." Pause. "I think," says Mr. Boke, "that Chilla is with child." (211) Strictly speaking, the only reason Nurse Coover has no chin is that two sentences later Mr. Boke must announce that Chilla is with child. Or vice versa, the reason Chilla is with child is that Nurse Coover is characterized by the physical attribute of having "no chin." This reminder that another epistemology may be lurking behind the veil of our accepted notions of cause and effect seems more humorous than mystic. On the other hand, in the passage quoted above, overarching the abyss leads to the ability to glissade blissfully down steep celestial snows. Here the coincidence of the "ss" sound in both the word "abyss" and its opposite-the image of transcendence-serves to reinforce the religious-gnostic meaning lurking behind the surface, "science fiction" plot. In short, one system's noise is another system's beauty. The many varieties of gnosticism have in common an emphasis on the need to escape from the prison of the material world back to the original non-material (transmundane) source of the soul's divinity. The ascent should logically begin only after death, when the soul is at last freed from its corporal burden. However, the adept might rehearse the eschatological drama by performing certain religious exercises: "the external topology of the ascent through the spheres, with the successive divesting of the soul of its worldly envelopments and the regaining of
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its original acosmic nature, could be 'internalized' and fmd its analogue in a psychological technique of inner transformations by which the self, while still in the body, might attain the Absolute as an immanent, if temporary, condition." 10 To return to our original question, now refmed a bit: how does Nabokov use the conventions of science fiction to untangle the paradoxes of self-transcendence? It is interesting to juxtapose a scene from "Lance" with an analogous scene in Invitation to a Beheading, where Cincinnatus actually divests himself of his body at one point: "He took off his head ... his rib cage ... his hips and his legs ... what was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly coloring the air. . . . fully immersed in his secret medium, he began freely and happily to ..." (32). The narrative breaks off here when Cincinnatus's jailor reenters the cell. Cincinnatus's "divestment" is described as a "criminal exercise."u In science fiction, the "external topology of the ascent through the spheres" is projected as interplanetary or inter-galactic flight. Lance does not divest himself of his own body, but the conventions of science fiction allow him to travel, bodily whole, through the concentric spheres of being, until, we presume, he reaches the same proximity to a state of divine ethereality as Cincinnatus: "It was wonderful. Perfectly wonderful," he says-but before he can whisper into his mother's ear what he saw, the narrative is broken off by the nurse, who reminds the near-criminal: "No contacts, doctor's orders, please" (211-12). In the fmal pages of "Lance," the narrator offers one more approach to the riddle of the "black hole"-a description of a recurring dream he had as a boy. This dream is the most direct evidence we have of the nature of the "absence" this story-and possibly all art-is ultimately about. It is also the most enigmatic scene in the story; proof, perhaps, of the commonly-held notion that "science fiction" is inherently trashier than "surrealism," or: projecting Time outward into cosmic space results in clumsier monsters than those produced when Time is projected inward, as psychological space. The dreamer sees a "non-committal," "nebulous" environment, "the indifferent back of a view rather than its face. -the nuisance of that dream was that for some reason I could not walk around it to meet it on equal terms" (210).12 The boy who is dreaming sits in his dream with something like a pail, which he keeps filling up with pebbles, and his nose is bleeding, but he is "too impatient and excited to do anything about it." Then an anonymous, rising shriek, which originates in the
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dream, and is prolonged by the waking boy, ends the dream. Nabokov suggests that "perhaps Lance and his companions, when they reached their planet, felt something akin to my dream-which is no longer mine." This is quite true. Lance the science fiction hero went to Mars, collected mineral samples, and got a nose-bleed. But it should be obvious by now that the affmity between the dream and the other "levels of reality" we have been confronted with is much more profound, much deeper than the surface plot. The impression the reader is left with from the entire collage of interpenetrating metaphors and frames of reference is that Lance has striven to transcend his material being and approach a spiritual ideal. By virtue of his physical courage, intellectual curiosity, and imagination, he has brushed with death-but also with the divine spark which distinguishes man from beasts. It is no wonder that he is not at home in the mid-twentieth century, which has put its faith in mass technology and mass social solutions. Nabokov's scientist or artist-hero descends from a different tradition, that of Man as Magus, striving for selftranscendence. He is best described as Asclepius' magnum miraculum, "a being worthy of reverence and honor. For he goes into the nature of a god as though he were himself a god; he has familiarity with the race of demons, knowing that he is of the same origin; he despises that part of his nature which is only human for he has put his hope in the divinity of the other part." 13 This type of hero, Lance, has faced the "gaping hole, the raw wound in my story," but what he saw is by definition inexpressible, incomplete. Lance's parents hurry out of his hospital room; through yet another topography of middle-class mediocrity, 14 and take the elevator down. In this most mundane contraption for ascension and descent the Bokes fmd themselves next to a girl with a baby, and with "the gray-haired, bent, sullen elevator man, who stands with his back to everybody." Thus the story ends. Nabokov has led us back out of the science fiction world, out of the world of chivalric romance, out of dream worlds and possible escape-and left us in an elevator with two symbols: of birth and of death, of time and eternity. There is nothing here that needs any more explaining than that provided by a line from William Blake: Eternity loves time.
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NOTES 1. "Nabokov's description of the Earth as seen from space was prescient and brilliant, and remains accurate today," Charles Nicol, "Nabokov and Science Fiction: 'Lance'" 11. 2. See Fredric Jameson, "Science Fiction as a Spatial Genre: Generic Discontinuities and the Problem of Figuration in Vonda Mcintyre's The Exile Waiting," SFS 14.1 (March 1987): 44-59. The same problem is broached in his "Generic Discontinuities in SF: Brian Aldiss' Starship," SFS 1.2 (Fall 1973): 57-68. 3. Nicol suggests that Bake's appearance "generate[s] the chinchillas that appear in the next paragraph-'cinder-gray, phenomenally furry, rabbit-sized rodents (Hystericomorpha), with long whiskers, round rumps, and petal-like ears'" and that "the association with medieval romance causes the chinchillas to 'roll and kick most lustily' like Malory's Knights .... The Bakes seem temporarily transported to medieval times when a message is brought 'up the cobbled street' by a galloping horseman, and at this point they are directly compared to the chinchillas: 'the Bakes come tearing out of the house like two hystericomorphic rodents'" ("Nabokov and Science Fiction" 14-15). 4. " ... we normally conceive time as a medium analogous to space, freely substituting the one for the other, as when we say we have not seen someone in a 'long time,' or when we speak of one place as being 'ten minutes away' from another ..." Mark Rose, Alien Encounters: An Anatomy of Science Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981) 100. 5. Nabokov's criticism would soon be superseded by the achievements of Ursula LeGuin, Arthur C. Clarke, the Strugatskys, Stanislaw Lem, and Sinyavsky in "Pkhents"-authors who succeeded early on in depicting the "intimate structure" of alien-ness. 6. A good illustration of the Neo-Platonic cosmology is Robert Fludd's "Angelic Hierarchies, Spheres, and Hebrew Alphabet," reproduced in Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hennetic Tradition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964) Plate 10. 7. The imagery is strikingly similar to the second verse of Mandelstam's early poem ''Peshekhod": "Like an an ancient foot traveller I Above the abyss, on rotting bridges I I hear the snowy avalanche grow I And eternity beats on stone time . . ." Osip
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8.
9.
10. 11.
12. 13. 14.
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Mandelstam, Collected Workr (in Russian), ed. Struve and Filippov (Washington: Inter-Language Associates, 1964) I: 18. This poem in its entirety has been interpreted as a budding argument against Symbolism, whose complete reliance on the "ethereal music of another realm" would "save us from mortal fate," as if this world did not count. Nabokov, it would seem, is also suspicious of any attempt to locate all meaning either "here" or "there"; in this he would certainly have something in common with the Acmeist poet. See Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (New York: Random, 1984), and James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987). My argument is particularly indebted to William Paulson's book The Noise of Culture (Ithaca: Cornell, 1988). Henri Atlan, "Disorder, Complexity and Meaning," in Disorder and Order, ed. P. Livingston. Proceedings of the Stanford International Symposium (Sept. 14-16, 1984). Stanford Lecture Series, I (Stanford: Anma Libri, 1984). The following sentence above is also cited in Paulson 73. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1958) 165. Robert Grossmith cites the importance of this scene in "Spiralizing the Circle: The Gnostic Subtext in Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading' 57. N.B. Nobody has ever seen God's face. Moses caught a glimpse of his back. From the Egyptian "optimistic gnosis," the text of Asclepius. This passage is quoted in Yates, 35. The first is the cliched topography of bad science fiction, which Nabokov likens to "those 'assorted' cookies that differ from one another only in shape and shade, whereby their shrewd makers ensnare the salivating consumer in a mad Pavlovian world where, at no extra cost, variations in simple visual values influence and gradually replace flavor, which thus goes the way of talent and truth" (199). The second topography of kitsch is referred to in the narrator's remark, "how much easier writing must have been in former days when one's imagination was not hemmed in by innumerable visual aids, and a frontiersman looking at his first giant cactus or his first high snows was not necessarily reminded of a tire company's pictorial advertisement" (202). The fmal topography appears as the Bokes proceed down a corridor, "along its shoddy,
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olive-and-ocher wall, the lower olive separated from the upper ocher by a continuous brown line leading to the venerable elevators" (212).