The Impact of the Italian Commedia dell'arte on Nabokov's Last Novel, Look at the Harlequins!
Olga
Partan
This paper will focus on the impact of the Italian commedia
dell'arte (often called the Harlequinade) and its aesthetic principles
on Vladimir Nabokov's last novel Look at the Harlequins!,
or LATH (1974). I reinterpret the novel by following
Nabokov's exhortation in the title, and suggest that the ancient
Harlequinade is a lath that, like the lath used by builders, helps
structure the entire novel. By writing such a work at the end of his
creative career, Nabokov was defining his work and artistic philosophy
as being part of the Western and Russian tradition of
Harlequinized art and literature
(this term is defined
in the paper).
LATH is a novel-game, traditionally defined as a
mock-biography
or a self-parody
of a
master who, at the end of his career, tricks his readers and critics
by creating a double of himself, called Vadim Vadimovi&chachek;, to
confuse art and life, imagination and reality
(D. Barton Johnson). There is a tendency in Nabokovian criticism to
decode the enigmatic meaning of LATH by focusing on the
parallelism between the fictional world of the novel and Nabokov's
real life and art (Boyd, Field, Grabes, Fraysse and others). I am not
the first researcher to notice the constant apparition of commedia
dell'arte motifs within the novel. In their large study, The
Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell'arte and the Modern
Imagination, Green and Swan discussed the influence of the
Italian commedia dell'arte on LATH. Nevertheless, while
Green and Swan point out that Harlequins, and other commedia
figures, appear throughout the book,
they do not conduct a
detailed textual analysis of the commedia's influence on the novel or
explore the broad range of ways that the commedia shapes the
novel.
My approach will be interdisciplinary, as I trace and analyze the
links between the commedia as a theatrical form, and the literary text
of LATH. First, I will discuss Nabokov's textual
allusions to the Harlequinade that are spread throughout the novel yet
have largely been ignored by literary scholars. For example, the
narrator calls his beloved women inamoratas, and his daughter's name
is Isabelle—both names belong to the Harlequinade, suggesting a
certain scenario of destiny and certain norms of behavior. The
narrator refers to his Russian and English novels as harlequins, and
the audience of a writer is compared to the theatrical audience of a
performer. The word lath is used within the novel not only as an
acronym, but also refers to the stick of a clown or mime. Several
scenes within the novel are described as pantomimes such as those
often used in the Harlequinade. Vadim, the narrator, is described as a
theatrical character with extravagant gestures and bizarre intonation,
like Harlequin. Second, I will discuss the role that key devices of
the commedia dell'arte play within the novel. These devices include
improvisation within a stable scenario or plot, playing the mask, the
interweaving of tragic and comic, extensive use of grotesque or farce,
self-parody, and the presence of doubles and mistaken identities.