| Doubling and Discovery: Vladimir Nabokov's Literary Games explores the function of this writer's doubling games, fictional and otherwise. Throughout his novels, the various editions of his autobiography, even his interviews, Nabokov creates parodic doubles of characters, other writers and works, of the reader, and, perhaps most notably, of himself--or, in any case, of the extraliterary persona he has cultivated. Many regard these doubles as a comic device or a manifestation of the control Nabokov wishes to exercise over the reader and the texts of his predecessors. However, I find these games actually require us to exercise our own control over the text, to perform it by undertaking the interminable search for the source of the over-determined doubles we perceive there, which make us question their source by leading us in many directions at once.; In the process of playing this "game of authorship," we perceive that the text mirrors not "Nabokov," but our own predispositions and assumptions, and beyond this, a network of "thematic design" in our own world. By creating networks of resemblances in his works, Nabokov has constructed a model of the design he perceives in his life and the natural world, exemplified by the fantastic excesses of biological mimesis present among lepidoptera. Nabokov's ludic models produce the effect of experiencing such design firsthand; readers must become, in a sense, manifestations of the author, assembling him out of the network of resemblances they discern in these texts. In doing so, we double Nabokov's own reenacting of the force responsible for the "thematic design" he senses in the universe. By engaging in Nabokov's games of doubling, readers "become" this force, playing out a model of the universe as ecosystem, a "very large mental (system) ... within which the mentality of the single human being is a sub-system."{dollar}sp1{dollar} ftn{dollar}sp1{dollar}Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1988): 135. |
