Craft Essay #9
Laughter in the Dark
meets The Art of Fiction
It is interesting to follow up John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, published in 1984 and a product of the postmodern school of American literature (Barth, Gass, Gardner himself), with Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, originally published in 1932 and translated into English by the author six years later. Nabokov’s sad, funny novel seems both old-fashioned compared with the work of Gardner’s revered ’60s rebels and somehow just as modern.
First, let’s look at some of Gardner’s exhaustive list of “Common Errors” (Gardner, p. 97) and see how Nabokov stacks up. Few writers can hold a candle to the Russian when it comes to the “abstract vs. concrete” issue (Gardner, p. 98). On page 15 he concretizes the most abstract of ideas (“that hopeless sense of loss which makes beauty what it is”) with striking and specific images: “a distant lone tree against golden heavens; ripples of light on the inner curve of a bridge.” In this author’s hands, even the opposite process—transforming a concrete object into an abstract concept—is alchemical. When, on page 282, Albinus’s pistol is referred to as “the treasure-house of seven compressed deaths,” the gun somehow becomes even more menacing and concrete.
As for “sentence variety” (Gardner, p. 104), Nabokov again is reigning champ. Laughter in the Dark is written in what might be considered, compared with some of his later works, straightforward prose. The sentences are often short and simple, if tarted up with startling details. Then we get something like this generous description of a hockey match on page 151:
The crowd was roaring with excitement as nimble sticks pursued the puck on the ice, and knocked it, and hooked it, and passed it on, and missed it, and clashed together in rapid collision.
Notice how this sentence re-creates the movement on the ice, while also echoing the psychic violence being played out in the stands between Margot and Axel.
Many of Gardner’s other pet peeves—the use of the passive voice, infinite verb phrases, etc.—are beneath a writer like Nabokov, whose fiction is practically on fire, so let’s leapfrog to what Gardner calls “shifts in psychic distance” (Gardner, p. 111), which also brings us to the tantalizing concept of point of view.
Laughter in the Dark is told from the third-person omniscient POV, with a narrator who moves close to characters at will. (The narrator is much like Axel Rex’s idea of life’s stage manager: “an elusive, double, triple, self-reflecting magic Proteus of a phantom, the shadow of many-colored glass balls flying in a curve, the ghost of a juggler on a shimmering curtain” [p. 183].) On page 69 alone, the narrator leaps, flea-like, from the head of Margot to Albinus’s to Elisabeth’s. If the death of God brought about the end of the omniscient narrator, then God must have been alive and well in 1932 Berlin! Gardner warns that dramatic shifts in the psychic distance between narrator and character (and thus between the reader and the story) can be distracting. Nabokov’s narrator is so nimble, however, that the shift between God-like omniscience (e.g., the novel’s opening paragraph, in which the narrator famously sums up the entire story in one sentence) and close, or subjective, third person (“‘Oho!’ thought Rex. ‘So that’s why you looked so lugubrious.’” [p. 165]) feels seamless. Occasionally, the narrator goes even further, eliminating altogether the distance established by tags and quotation marks, as on page 95, when we move deep into Margot’s head: “Her house was quite near. Albinus might happen to look out the window. That would be a nuisance” (emphasis added). Like a great filmmaker—Hitchcock comes to mind—the narrator sometimes cuts from long shot to extreme close-up without drawing attention, not only supplying the reader with subtle yet profound psychological insight, but also manipulating us at will (for what is he doing in that scene but forcing us to empathize with the cruel, seemingly heartless Margot?). Interestingly, Nabokov will occasionally limit his omniscient narrator to one person’s POV for a long section rather than dip into the consciences of multiple characters. Throughout the party scene in chapter 16 (p. 126), for example, we are limited to Albinus’s POV while Margot is reintroduced to her former lover, Axel. Albinus doesn’t know their history, but we do, and by staying close to his POV, the author creates both suspense (What will Margot do when she sees Axel? Will Albinus figure it out?) and empathy for Albinus. This technique is repeated later on, in the bathtub scene (p. 204), when poor Albinus is being cuckolded right under his nose.
In his chapter on “Plotting” (p. 165), Gardner lists the three typical plot designs: a traditional story or action drawn from life, working backward from the climax, and working forward from an initial situation. Laughter in the Dark seems a combination of the second and third designs in that the opening sentences paraphrase the entire story, including the fact that Albinus’s life ends “in disaster” (i.e., it begins with the climax), while also preserving enough mystery about the coming disaster so that we must work forward, albeit with a sense of dread, from the initial situation (Albinus falling for Margot).
Gardner goes on to delineate the three major types of novel technique: energeic, juxtapositional, lyrical (p. 185). Laughter in the Dark is clearly an energeic novel in that it presents a sequence of causally related events: A happens, which leads to B, which leads to C, etc. Gardner organizes the energeic novel into three sections: exposition, development, denouement (p. 187). Following Aristotle’s recommendation, Nabokov begins his story in media res, with his protagonist, Albinus, in crisis (“I’m going mad and nobody knows it,” he thinks on page 13). The author then backs up for two chapters of exposition, one each for Albinus and his mistress-to-be, Margot. By chapter four we are all caught up and the pathetic tale of Albinus’s courtship of Margot begins in earnest. From there Nabokov follows Gardner’s template with a series of complications: the discovery of Albinus’s affair by his wife; the return of Axel; Irma’s death; the periodic intrusion of Margot’s thuggish brother; Albinus’s discovery of Margot and Axel’s affair; and, the crowning complication, the accident that leaves Albinus blind. This last, violent crisis would normally be the climax—Albinus has paid an appropriately dear price for his imbecility—but Nabokov has more up his sleeve: Albinus now believes Margot has been faithful all along, and she thanks him by carrying on with Axel under Albinus’s unseeing eyes. Not even when his brother-in-law, Paul, comes to the rescue (p. 275) does the novel reach its apex, for the disaster predicted on the opening page has not yet arrived. No, Nabokov saves the climax for the final page, when Albinus is shot by his own gun while struggling with his mistress. His death, referred to obliquely by the narrator in a list of “stage directions” (again that stage manager!): “Chair—lying close by dead body of a man in a purplish robe and felt slippers”—serves as the denouement, which, however brief, falls “like an avalanche” (Gardner, p. 190).
Gardner writes eloquently of the novel’s “chief glory, its resonant close” (p. 192). Because Laughter in the Dark begins with such a concrete outline—Albinus “loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster” (p. 7)—the bloody climax cannot but resonate. There is also the matter of the gun, which, like Chekhov’s, must be used once it is introduced. But, as Gardner points out, “what rings and resounds at the end of a novel is not just physical….We are moved by the increasing connectedness of things” (p. 192). He goes on: “The writer must rise above his physical plot to an understanding of all the plot’s elements and all their relationships, including those that are inexpressible” (p. 194). There may be no better representative of this concept than Nabokov. John Banville writes in his Introduction to Laughter in the Dark: “Nabokov was fascinated by pattern, in nature and in art, and regarded the establishment of pattern as the primary task of the literary artist” (p. viii). Consider the novel’s title, which on one level is a reference to the cinema that Nabokov so loved. See how the elements connect: when Albinus first meets Margot, she is working as a cinema usherette; Albinus approaches Axel, an artist, to create an animated film based on classic works of art; when Margot’s film debut is premiered, there is derisive laughter from the audience. But the title works on another, more disturbing level: as poor blind Albinus recovers from his accident, Axel and Margot snigger in the “darkness.” These patterns, whether consciously or unconsciously recognized, cohere in a way that powerfully affects the reader.
When Gardner speaks of the “connectedness of things,” he adds that we are ultimately moved by “a connectedness of values” (p. 192). For me, the values of Laughter in the Dark are inextricably linked with the point of view. As Banville writes, Nabokov firmly believed in “a creator, who, having fashioned the world, crept nimbly away with his hand over his mouth, leaving his creations to cudgel their poor brains over the enormous enigma of being here” (p. viii). Like this creator, Nabokov’s omniscient narrator, or stage manager, moves at will into and out of even the most insignificant of his characters’ heads, freely commenting on their foibles and habits, all while floating above it all in such a powerful, consistent, and, yes, God-like way, that we are left with the feeling that we have witnessed something truthful.
No comments:
Post a Comment