Este artículo examina la significación del simbolismo de la mariposa en
el relato de Vladimir Nabokov ’Navidad’ ('Christmas', trad. de
'Rozhdestvo', 1925), a la luz de una teoría interaccionista de la
interpretación. Se muestra cómo los elementos intertextuales emergen a
través de un proceso de debate crítico, relectura e interacción
discursiva, a medida que se van estableciendo gradualmente la
importancia y significación cultural de un texto. El enfoque crítico de
este artículo combina las percepciones del análisis del discurso, de la
hermenéutica narrativa y de la pragmática literaria.
Texto completo en SSRN:
English abstract:
This paper examines
the significance of the butterfly symbol in Vladimir Nabokov's story
'Christmas' (trans. of 'Rozhdestvo', 1925), in the light of an
interactionalist theory of interpretation. Intertextual elements are
shown to emerge through a process of critical debate, rereading and
discursive interaction, as the importance and cultural signification of a
work is gradually established. This paper's critical approach combines
the insights of discourse analysis, narrative hermeneutics, and literary
pragmatics.
Reference Info: SYMBOLISM: AN INTERNATIONAL ANNUAL OF
CRITICAL AESTHETICS, pp. 267-294, Rüdiger Ahrens and Klaus Stierstorfer,
eds., AMS Press, 2005
Date posted: June 13, 2010
https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1624262
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Cognition & Culture: Culture, Communication, Design, Ethics, Morality, Religion, Rhetoric, & Semiotics eJournal - CMBO CSN: Rhetoric & Semiotics (Topic) - CMBO CSN: Rhetoric (Sub-Topic) - CMBO
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También aquí:
_____. "Hindsight, Intertextuality, and
Interpretation: A Symbol in Nabokov's 'Christmas'." Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics (New
York: AMS Press), 5 (2005): 267-94.*
http://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/anglistik/Symbolism/
2005
_____. "Hindsight, Intertextuality, and
Interpretation: A Symbol in Nabokov's 'Christmas'." Academia.edu 12 June 2010.*
https://www.academia.edu/244103/
2015
_____. "Hindsight, Intertextuality, and
Interpretation: A Symbol in Nabokov's 'Christmas'." SSRN 12 June
2010.*
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1624262
2010
Cognition & Culture (…) eJournal 12
June 2010
http://www.ssrn.com/link/Cognition-Culture.html
2013
American Literature eJournal 12 June
2010.*
http://www.ssrn.com/link/English-American-Literature.html
2012
_____. "Hindsight, Intertextuality, and
Interpretation: A Symbol in Nabokov's Christmas."
Online PDF at Zaguán 6 June 2011.*
http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/6003
2011
_____. "Hindsight, Intertextuality, and
Interpretation: A Symbol in Nabokov's Christmas."
ResearchGate 3 May
2013.*
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228174133
2013
_____. "Hindsight, Intertextuality, and
Interpretation: A Symbol in Nabokov's 'Christmas'." Net Sight de José
Angel García Landa 4 Jan. 2023.*
https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/hindsight.pdf
2025
_____. "Hindsight, Intertextuality, and
Interpretation: A Symbol in Nabokov's 'Christmas'." In García Landa, Vanity
Fea 30 Sept. 2025.*
https://blogdenotasvanityfea.blogspot.com/2025/09/hindsight-intertextuality-and.html
2025
https://x.com/JoseAngelGLanda/status/1972961327405514801
2025
_____.
"Cognición retrospectiva, intertextualidad e interpretación." In Aggelos: Mi enviado—Blog de notas de José
Ángel García Landa (septiembre-diciembre de 2005) 20 Dec. 2005.*
http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/z05-3.html
2012 DISCONTINUED
2018 Online at the Internet Archive.*
https://web.archive.org/web/20181005040830/http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/z05-3.html
2020
https://www.flickr.com/photos/garciala/39910765843/in/dateposted-public/
2025
_____. "Cognición
retrospectiva, intertextualidad e interpretación." In García
Landa, Vanity Fea 20 Dec. 2005.*
https://garciala.blogia.com/2005/122001-cognicion-retrospectiva-intertextualidad-e-interpretacion-un-simbolo-en-navidad-de-nabokov.php
2025
_____.
"Cognición retrospectiva, intertextualidad e interpretación." Net sight de José Angel García Landa 13
Sept. 2011.*
http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/publicaciones/cognicion.retro.html
2011
_____.
"Cognición retrospectiva, intertextualidad e interpretación: Un símbolo en
'Navidad' de Nabokov." iPaper at Academia
20 Oct. 2011.*
https://www.academia.edu/1029917/
2015
_____.
"Cognición retrospectiva, intertextualidad e interpretación: Un símbolo en
'Navidad' de Nabokov (Hindsight, Intertextuality and Interpretation: A Symbol
in Nabokov's 'Christmas')." SSRN 22 Oct.
2011.*
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1946943
2011
American Literature eJournal 22 Oct.
2011.*
http://www.ssrn.com/link/English-American-Literature.html
2012
Political Theory: Political Philosophy
eJournal 22 Oct. 2011.*
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?npage=9&form_name=journalBrowse&journal_id=1006897&Network=no&SortOrder=ab_approval_date&stype=desc&lim=false&selectedOption=6
2013
_____.
"Cognición retrospectiva, intertextualidad e interpretación: Un símbolo en
'Navidad' de Nabokov." ResearchGate
3 May 2013.*
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228174184
2013
_____.
"Cognición retrospectiva, intertextualidad e interpretación: Un símbolo en 'Navidad' de Nabokov." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 22 Feb. 2016.*
http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2016/02/retropost-662-20-de-diciembre-de-2005.html
2016
_____.
"Cognición retrospectiva, intertextualidad e interpretación: Un símbolo en
'Navidad' de Nabokov." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 20 Dec. 2005.*
https://blogdenotasvanityfea.blogspot.com/2025/12/cognicion-retrospectiva.html
2025
https://x.com/JoseAngelGLanda/status/2002307776576426414
2025
_____. "Retrospective cognition, Intertextuality,
and Intepretation." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 17 April 2026.*
https://blogdenotasvanityfea.blogspot.com/2026/04/retrospective-cognition-intertextuality.html
2026
—oOo—
Hindsight, Intertextuality
and Interpretation:
A Symbol in Nabokov’s
“Christmas”
José Angel García Landa
Universidad de Zaragoza
In
retrospection, I see I came to realise the importance of hindsight in narrative
analysis through the reading of Jonathan Culler’s “Story and Discourse in the
Analysis of Narrative,” Michael André Bernstein’s Foregone Conclusions, and Gary Saul Morson’s Narrative and Freedom.
These are key works for any discussion of the
hindsight bias, which is one of the main engines of narrative dynamics — a perspectival phenomenon so
intrinsic to narrative representation as to deserve the name of ‘the narrative
fallacy.’ These works provide a cautionary critique of
the hindsight bias (although they do not actually use this term, nor that of
‘narrative fallacy’). Culler leaves the issue in a state of balance between the
narratological equivalents of philosophical realism (a preexisting story is
articulated or expressed through a narrative discourse) and idealism (it is the
hindsight at work in the production of the discourse that generates the story
in the first place). Morson and Bernstein more explicitly mistrust the insights
resulting from hindsight. They argue in favour of a “prosaics” of
representation which would defuse the hindsight bias and its attendant
fallacies, in favour of “sideshadowing” — a perspectival self-discipline aimed
at recognizing the fullness of the present and the indeterminacy of the future.
This emphasis on presentness would apply, too, when analyzing the past (the
past-as-present). Morson and Bernstein argue therefore against the pervasive
tendency to “backshadowing” which makes us see the past as a foreshadowing of
the present, creating the illusions of destiny, omens, foregone conclusions.
These perspectives are both
illuminating and stimulating, and I highly recommend the books by Morson and
Bernstein, not to mention Culler.
Still, I want here to further argue in favour of the legitimacy of hindsight,
in order to moderate to some extent the “pro-prosaic” claims of Bernstein and
Morson.
Many modes of action, both real and symbolic, rely on hindsight, and hindsight
does provide insight (“after all”).
Hindsight is not merely a bias; it is the harvest of time’s productivity, as we
might say in Paul Ricoeur’s vein.
Reader-response criticism provides a rich field for this inquiry. The time
which passes between the writing of a work and its reading is productive in a
number of ways, and only hindsight allows us to recognize the transformations a
work has undergone through the hidden influence of other texts and events on
what was (apparently) fixed in writing on the page. If hindsight is an
illusion, it is a necessary illusion, then — one more instance of the kind of
illusionism which sustains, Atlas-like, the theater of the human world.
In this paper I will look into some
interactive consequences of hindsight, especially when it comes to the
intertextual expansion of a text. Intertextuality is a key dimension to be
taken into account in the study of textuality, so much so that, according to
Robert de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressler, “the whole notion of textuality may depend upon exploring
the influence of intertextuality as
a procedural control upon communicative activities at large.”
Still, intertextual relationships are so varied that they seem to defy
systematization. Moreover, a closer look on intertextual processes often
unearths complexities which escape a more cursory approach. I intend here to
examine some of these complex intertextual dynamics in the field of literary
hermeneutics.
In some intertextual
processes, intertextual traces are established retrospectively, through an
interpretive act which involves a reinterpretation of the texts being connected
by a critic through a postulated link. Borges and T. S. Eliot already noted as
much in developing new definitions of “precursors” and of “tradition”,
respectively. Borges, perhaps recognizing in Kafka one of his precursors,
writes as follows:
Yo premedité alguna vez un examen de los precursores de Kafka. A
éste, al principio, lo pensé tan singular como el fénix de las alabanzas
retóricas; a poco de frecuentarlo, creí reconocer su voz, o sus hábitos, en
textos de diversas literaturas y de diversas épocas. [...]
En cada
uno de esos textos está la idiosincrasia de Kafka, en grado mayor o menor, pero
si Kafka no hubiera escrito, no la percibiríamos; vale decir, no existiría. . .
. El hecho es que cada escritor crea
a sus precursores. Su labor modifica nuestra concepción del pasado, como ha de
modificar el futuro. (Borges 1984: 107, 109).
Let us recall that for T. S. Eliot (to whom Borges alludes as well),
cultural tradition causes history to be retroactively altered, instead of
simply moving forwards:
The existing monuments [that is, great literary works — a curiously
funerary conception of literature on Eliot’s part is apparent here] form an
ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new
(the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before
the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty,
the whole existing order must be, if
ever so slightly, altered. [… The past is] altered by the present as much as
the present is directed by the past.
Playing with
this idea, David Lodge makes one of the characters in his novel Small World write a thesis on “the
influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare.”
As these examples suggest, there is a wide spectrum of such retroactive
intertextual effects. Some are unintended, and may fall under the general
characterization given by C. S. Lewis: “Every
work of art that lasts long in the world is continually taking on these new
colours which the artist neither foresaw nor intended.”
My main concern here, though, is with those retroactive effects which may
clarify a deep intention,
a symbolic design which is not fully available to the original readers of the
work, perhaps not even to the author himself, but which may emerge through
intertextual interaction as the work of reading and critical interpretation
unfolds. The study of intertextuality in the light of the narratological
accounts of retrospection underscores the fact that intertextuality is an
interactive process of discourse
production, not a pre-defined network of static textual relationships. In this
sense, my analysis ties in with de Beaugrande and Dressler’s proposal for a
procedural approach to the study of texts in communication.
This view of intertextuality is a further consequence of conceptualizing
discourse as process as opposed to text as structure.
The study of the effect of hindsight on the discourse of criticism follows,
therefore, from a more general shift towards the study of the processual nature
of discourse, being an analysis of specific processual qualities of written
discourse in a specific interactional situation. In Strategies of Discourse Comprehension van Dijk and Kintsch note
that from the 1970s onwards, there was a recognition among many linguists that
“actual language use in social contexts,” rather than “abstract or ideal
language systems [. . .] should be the empirical object of linguistic
theories.” This
led to the development of discourse analysis as an interdisciplinary field with
contributions from linguists, psychologists and other students of communicative
processes. Van Dijk and Kintch’s “interactionist assumption” is that discourse
analysis must take into account the whole interaction process among speech
participants, including “verbal and nonverbal interaction.” The “situational
assumption” is that this communicative interaction is “part of a social
situation” in which interactants may have specific “functions or roles,” and
special “strategies” and “conventions” may apply.
The tradition of critical commentary of literary works is one among such
discourse situations, but it constitutes a discursive continuum with other
situations — with literature-as-discourse, and in the last analysis with the
authors’ own communicative and experiential processes.
In
order to illustrate the interactional articulation of intertextuality and the
specific role of hindsight in this process I will focus, as a test case, on a
short story by Vladimir Nabokov and the ways it has been read — yielding a
number of interpretations which are always intertextually mediated.
Nabokov is well known as a literary
trickster, an author who delights in setting interpretive puzzles for his
readers to solve — arguably for the readers’ complicit delight, or, many
suspect, solely for the author’s Olympian satisfaction as the readers are left
at sea. Nabokov’s text is heavily overdetermined. Several intentional layers of
meaning may underlie apparently innocent passages, and many more may underlie
obviously puzzling ones. Intertextuality is, understandably, one of the primary
means used to produce this textual plurisignification. Maurice Couturier
masterfully analyzed the inner logic of Nabokov’s poetics as a bid for
dominance in the game of narrative interaction. Writing is compared by Nabokov
to the devising of chess problems: both require a “sublime insincerity.” As in
chess problems, Couturier notes, the conflict in creative writing is not played
between the black and white pieces, but between the author and the readers. The
problem is devised and solved by the author, and the ideal reader’s role is
well defined — the real reader’s role is almost superfluous. Readers undergo a
process of apprenticeship, learning to become artists by following the writer’s
footsteps. The writer is the ideal reader, and good readers fight as best they
can with the text. Writing appears thus as the interactive projection of
narcissistic self-love. The author constructs an ideal textual self, and this
is felt as an exclusion by the real reader, who perceives in an imperfect way
the author’s desires and claims through the poetic veil. Readers are provoked
into trying to discover the real author, but their reading and analysis will
only allow them access to the ideal author. All the while, though, readers will
be constructing themselves as ideal readers through their confrontation with
the text. The real author constructs an ideal reader, and the real reader
constructs an ideal author. Nabokov thus blurs, according to Couturier, the
frontiers between the outside and the inside of the text, and forces his reader
to do the same. These identity projections are the precondition for the intense
poetical effect of his text: the reader experiences the impression of producing
the text together with the author.
And, to some extent, we could argue
that readers do produce the authors’
text. Puzzle-solving tends to become infectious, and new puzzles are created by
the readers for the readers to solve where the author intended none; faced with
a problematic passage, the critics’ ingenuity devises elegant solutions which
may improve on those intended by the author — provided they are available at
all, since for the most part both the puzzle and the solution can be retrieved
only through interpretation. Thus, Nabokov cranks a hermeneutic engine which
keeps semiosis circulating and prevents puzzles from ever being finally solved
(which might be the danger of a writing with “solutions” to it). A practical
example, in the field of intertextuality, is afforded by the kind of analysis
provided in John Burt Foster’s Nabokov’s
Art of Memory and European Modernism,
a critical study in which lines of intertextual connection between Nabokov and
other modernist writers range from clear allusions to the kind of speculation
which is non vera, sebbene ben trovata — all
of them being the product of the same intertextual logic. If a classic may be
defined as a work in which the meaning of the text is inseparable from the
tradition of critical interpretation it generates, Nabokov devises a built-in
mechanism to weave texts and interpretations into a seamless continuum — a self-begetting classic.
Like
many authors, Nabokov develops his own patterns of favourite images, motifs and
stylistic patterns which serve, beyond their immediate aesthetic function in
the context, as authorial watermarks. These become part of the author’s
hide-and-seek game of identity. Arguably, Nabokov is more conscious than most
authors about such patterns: they are lovingly tended and skillfully
varied. Therefore, these patterns tend
to become self-reflexive. A variation on a motif harks back to an earlier use
of a similar motif; authorial watermarks become the occasion for the author’s
intertextual play behind the scenes. The author thus adds to the solidity and
coherence of his œuvre, by reworking and bringing to a satisfactory level of
aesthetic performance some elements which were there from the start — or rather only partly so, as quite
often such patterns become visible only when fully developed in later works.
Their presence in earlier works may be already meaningful, but it becomes more
meaningful in retrospection, perhaps even in retroaction: part of the aesthetic
performance of those patterns in their latter-day versions is retroactively
communicated to their early avatars. The embryonic significance of the early
motif develops thus not only in later works but in the early work itself as it
is reread by the later works (and by critics). The hindsight bias is thus
exploited artistically by making earlier works reverberate with the echo of
later ones. Thus, for example, Nabokov’s metafictional comments on the use of autobiographical
motifs in “Mademoiselle O” adds a new dimension of reading to the works in
which those autobiographical motifs were used (e.g. the governess, the colored
glass in the veranda, the pavilion in the garden in The Defense and other works). The autobiography Speak, Memory and the interviews in Strong Opinions open up the
autobiographical dimension of the earlier works, intimating levels of reading
which disclose the author’s more diffident revelations about his own experience
in the overtly autobiographical writings. The works thus communicate, between
the lines, elements of experience which acquire their full meaning when they
are read as projections and transformations of the author’s personal
experience, and not merely as the experience transmitted by an “intrinsic”
reading of the work, aesthetically satisfactory as that reading may be.
‘Reading the novels as autobiographies,’ as Anatole France might put it,
is at least as interesting as that reading of an autobiography which reveals it
to be, compositionally, a novel — a
reading one must always try on autobiographies. What is at issue here, though,
is not a matter of curiosity or of “extrinsic” scholarly interest in the
author’s personal life, but an interest in his poetics: his experiential
poetics at its fullest reach, beyond the more immediately available aesthetic
design of the work as a perfectly controlled mechanism — the latter being a level at which Nabokov’s writings strike some
critics as perhaps a trifle too perfect indeed. Beyond the conjurer’s tricks
and the cleverly dissimulated traps set for the reader, Nabokov’s works also
move in a dimension in which the author communicates with himself, tentatively,
perhaps not always consciously; a dialogue which in any case takes place behind
both the narrator’s and the implied author’s backs.
There may be no sense in drawing any sharp distinction between “biography” and
“fiction” in Nabokov, as memory and fiction interact in his work in a way he
was fully aware of. “He always claimed that ‘using’ something or someone in his
fiction effectively made it fictional in his memory.”
And in some of his works he explored the aesthetic possibilities of this
confrontation between the author’s actual life and his “other lives” in fiction — a road also taken by Joyce, Proust,
Gide, and more recently by Paul Theroux and Javier Marías.
This confrontation with the author’s
extraliterary self is conscious in some works, but it reaches that point only
after a preliminary hatching at a more inchoate level, in which the author’s
use of autobiograpical material is not controlled by a deliberate plan; it is
significant, but it is not part of the author’s design for public
communication. Communication takes place here at a more private level, and it
has to be interpreted as non-verbal communication or “body language”
accompanying the articulate language of the work’s conscious design.
We can, then, speak of a double level of communication in Nabokov’s poetics:
bodily versus controlled communication; or private versus public communication — although these terms are not always
coincident, or equally adequate to all instances, as descriptions of this
additional dimension of reading.
I will here focus on the interpretation
of a symbol of rebirth and on the reuse of autobiographical elements in
Nabokov’s story “Christmas,” with particular attention to the intertextual
dimension of Nabokov’s poetics of self-communication.
To begin with, the story is set in
pre-Revolutionary Russia. Priscilla Meyer provides a convenient account of the
role of such Russian scenes in Nabokov’s imaginary:
Nabokov’s Russia, as he describes it in Speak, Memory, is the site of an ideal past. Nabokov associates it
with colored glass, rainbows, butterflies, and the pavilion where his first
love poem began, the space-time of a perfect childhod rooted in the love he
shared with his parents. The loss of all this is presented in Nabokov’s work as
a kind of echo or parody of the separation from that ideal realm which we leave
when we are born and which we regain when we die, casting our splendid earthly
abode as a pale reflection of the eternal one — a two-world cosmology in which we die into life.
The recurrent
symbols mentioned here — colored
glass, rainbows, butterflies — operate as windows to the otherworld, symbols
which allow a glimpse of transcendental perfection. This dimension of Nabokov’s
personal mythology has been studied by Alexandrov, and more recently, with
reference to the stories, and more specifically to “Christmas,” by Shrayer.
Our reading requires a focus on both the story and on previous critical
readings by Naumann, Boyd, Shrayer and
other critics as an intertextual continuum.
Here follows an account of the story’s central symbolism by Boyd:
A father decides to commit suicide after his son’s death, rather
than face a life “humiliatingly pointless, sterile, devoid of miracles” — when at that very moment an Attacus moth his son had cherished, now
warmed by the nearby furnace, cracks out of its cocoon and walks up the wall,
its wings swelling and breathing.[...] For all its pain, the world overflows
with joys.
And Naumann
summarises the plot of the story as follows:
In Part I, in the evening, Sleptsov, blind with grief, looks at the
funeral wax on his fingers. In Part II, the following morning, he goes outside
and recalls his child, whom he has just buried. In Part III, he visits his
child’s grave, only to be further saddened. In the evening he goes to the
child’s room and breaks down in tears. He gathers a few of the boy’s belongings
into a drawer. In the final section, the father brings these treasures into the
heated wing of the house and examines them. The poignancy of these momentoes [sic: moments+mementos, perhaps?] causes
him to reject life altogether. At that instant, someting snaps and the father
opens his eyes. In the warmth of the room, a beautiful butterfly has broken out
of his son’s treasured cocoon.
The butterfly symbolism in Nabokov’s
writings has been studied by a number of scholars, including Boyd himself in
his biography (esp. ch. 4, “Butterflies”, of The Russian Years) and in Nabokov’s
Butterflies. A
butterfly is of course a natural symbol of rebirth, or rather of life after
death, because of the similarity of its life cycle (larva, cocoon, butterfly)
to the soul’s transmigration from the body through the tomb into the
otherworldly life.
In his non-fiction Nabokov uses the image to refer to his own afterlife
(perhaps suggesting too a literary afterlife) when he speaks of the butterfly
hunts he wants to carry out “before I pupate.”
A genetic reading of Nabokov’s story
“Christmas” opens up additional dimensions of symbolic meaning in the butterfly
symbol, a less public side of Nabokov’s symbolism. “Public” is related here to
“intrinsic”: an aesthetic reading of the story (the reading the story invites)
keeps the more personal symbolic associations secret, or at least dormant — before they hatch. A genetic reading
thus violates an aspect of the story’s construction (its intended reading) in
order to open up additional dimensions of meaning. But the symbolism on which
an immanent reading of the story rests is not destroyed; instead, it acquires
further resonances as a more complex network of symbolic associations is woven.
In order to introduce this genetic
reading of “Christmas,” let us juxtapose now to the story a text drawn from
Brian Boyd’s biography. The moment is a crucial one. V. D. Nabokov, V. V.
Nabokov’s father, was the leader of one of the main democratic parties
supporting the Kerenski government. As a result of the October revolution and
the Communist takeover, V. D. Nabokov sends his family away from home, on what
was to prove (with hindsight) a permanent exile. A memorable event at the time,
then, and one whose momentousness was only to grow in retrospect. Observe the
intense play of foreshadowing and anticipated retrospection in the first
paragraph of Boyd’s account:
On November 2/15, his last day in Petrograd, Vladimir wrote his last
poem in northern Russia, dedicated to his mother and mourning the fact that she
might never wander among the birches of her beloved Vyra again. At the
Nikolaevski station, V. D. Nabokov saw his sons off, filling the moments of
waiting by writing busily at the station buffet — an editorial for Rech’
or an emergency proclamation, another desperate volley in an increasingly
hopeless battle. After making a sign of the cross over his sons, he added
casually that he might never see them again, turned round, and strode off into
the steam and fog. []
The boys traveled
first class on the Simferopol sleeper. Vladimir had with him the little
manuscript albums of his verse, recent and current, and a pile of his white
booklets of Symbolist poets. The heat was still humming on the train, and a
hawkmoth pupa he had kept in a box for seven years hatched in the unaccustomed
warmth. []
Nabokov alluded
to this episode in a lecture manuscript only recently published:
This pupal stage [of butterflies] lasts from a few days to a few
years. I remember as a boy keeping a hawmoth’s pupa in a box for something like
seven years, so that I actually finished high school while the thing was asleep — and then finally it hatched — unfortunately it happened during a
journey on the train, — a nice case
of misjudgment after all those years.
Exile, the
moth’s metamorphosis and the father’s farewell (a farewell he would not be able
to say when death actually and unforeseeably came at last) are associated in a
crucial experiential moment which is reworked in creative writing in later
years — as the full significance of
this moment becomes apparent only retrospectively. Similarly, it is only in the
introduction to Nabokov’s Butterflies
that Brian Boyd notes the (previously unmentioned) connection between the
autobiographical motif and the story:
At the end
of 1924 his first story about Lepidoptera, “Christmas,” drew on his early and
very late memories of northern Russia: the collection he had been forced to
forsake at Vyra, and the one exception, the Hawkmoth pupa that he had kept in a
box for seven years and that hatched in the overheated railway carriage taking
him from Petrograd down to Simferopol. Nabokov knew he could not overload and
unbalance his fiction with entomological detail, but in “Christmas,” the Atlas
moth that unexpectedly emerges crowns a very human story. A father, presumably
a widower, cannot cope with the death of his only child, a son, the little
lepidopterist who yearned to see that moth emerge. Just as the father decides
life is no longer worth living, the glorious moth cracks open its cocoon, and
its huge wings dilate in a sign of hope, perhaps even of resurrection.
The reading of
the ending of the story as a symbol of hope, immortality of the soul, or
resurrection is of course widespread — being (as I take it to be) the
intended symbolic meaning necessary to construct the story as an artistic
composition — the communicative level
of the story insofar as it is a text
belonging to the short-story genre. However, the text can also be read
symptomatically, and this level of reading the meaning of the symbol is
somewhat modified and expanded. The interpretations alluded to restrict
themselves to the communicative/intrinsic meaning of the story, with no
suggestion that the ‘hope’ alluded to might refer to any situation beyond the
fictional world of the story. That is, these critics, perhaps as a belated
effect of the modernist ukase against the personal heresy, do not attempt to
extract any further significance from a biographical interpretation of the
story. Only the displacement of biographical motifs is noted by critics,
perhaps in order to signal the process of distantiation and objectification
undergone in making art out of biographical materials.
The distancing exists, but it also involves also a bringing together of
elements which may be analyzed intertextually, and which contributes its own
share of significance under different protocols of reading.
The story’s source as a displacement of
autobiographical elements is recognized
by some critics, e.g. Kuzmanovich:
Similarly, in writing his first Christmas story, shortly after his
father had been killed, Nabokov chooses to focus on the father’s rather than
the son’s grief, choosing the death of a child as the enabling event.
For Meyer, too,
The stories written in the 1920s may also be read as transpositions
of Nabokov’s thought about his father. [. . .] The stories present variations
on the pain of loss of a beloved person, with an indirect allusion to the
original loss that generated them.
This kind of
symbolic reading rests on a global interpretation of Nabokovian strategies,
made possible only after the author wrote a number of works and critical
appraisals of them were circulated. As a reading of “Christmas,” therefore, it
is inherently intertextual (in the sense of relying on comparison), as shown by
the “similarly” I have kept in the quotation from Kuzmanovich.
More recent readings of the story, however, have not chosen to explore the
autobiographical connection. Dillard’s reading, in his paper on “Nabokov’s
Christmas Stories” is largely intrinsic, drawing on the (for him deliberate)
Christian symbolism of the story — a
‘friendly reading,’ therefore, which remains within the bounds of the story’s
compositional and communicative
intentionality.
In other words (and going back to Lewis’s formulation in The Personal Heresy), it is true that Nabokov, as the “poet,” “is
not a man who asks me to look at him; he
is a man who says ‘look at that’ and
points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly
see of him” — but insofar as critics are literary
pragmaticists they may well be interested in the pointing as a semiotic action,
and not merely in the object being pointed at. A critical reading, while not
necessarily ‘unfriendly,’ cannot accept the work’s reading of itself as a
guideline to the critic’s analytic project. The dichotomies established by Paul
Ricœur between a ‘hermeneutics of the retrieval of meaning’ and a ‘hermeneutics
of suspicion,’ and by Judith Fetterley between ‘assenting’ and ‘resisting’
readers, are other ways of addressing the same basic issue in interpretive
theory I am concerned with here.
We need to go, therefore, beyond the consciously articulated meaning of the
symbol in the story, to examine its significance in wider contexts and
interpretive frames.
Besides the general spiritual symbolism of butterflies alluded to
above, a fully contextualized interpretation of the butterfly symbol in
“Christmas” must take into account the personal symbolic value of butterflies
as a symbol of personal development and paternal identification in Nabokov. As
a child, his father had been a keen butterfly hunter and collector, and his son
often used butterflies as an symbolic
identity theme which, among other functions, connects him to his father
through, as it were, a metamorphosed symbolic continuum.
In the 1920s Nabokov wrote poems about his father’s death in which the
butterfly is the sign of symbolic resurrection (Field, VN 86) — here poetry may
be seen as a more direct expression of the personal grief, using the image in
closer relationship with lived experience, a relationship which is further
displaced in the story.
The butterfly motif is multifunctional:
it connects Nabokov to his father, but it performs many other functions as
well. And the function of connecting Nabokov and his father is also performed
by other means — for instance, in the
novel The Gift, one of Nabokov’s
autobiographical fantasies, the Nabokov-figure Fyodor writes a biography of his
father, a famous lepidopterist and naturalist who had disappeared during one of
his expeditions in Central Asia, “and in recounting the expeditions gradually
includes himself in the party, at last even taking over his father’s voice”
(Boyd, “Nabokov, Literature, Lepidoptera”
7). The butterfly/paternal connection was to be retaken in a projected
continuation of The Gift, of which an
existing chapter was left unpublished by Nabokov.
In retrospection, additional
significance may be detected in Nabokov’s use of the butterfly symbol together
with the displaced context of mourning in “Christmas.” Death
is often an intrusive guest, and the murder of Nabokov’s father was in a way
doubly unexpected, as he was not even the intended victim of the Fascist
killers who shot him. But the death of the father had been imagined before, and
that experience is reworked in a number of stories and autobiographical
episodes. In one
sense, the father’s farewell at the moment of exile took on a symbolic
significance, coinciding the way it did with the moment of exile. Butterflies, too, acquire an additional
significance as the possibility of life in exile, the continuing possibility of
life in a metamorphosed shape, which may lead to higher spiritual insight.
Nabokov had to abandon his beloved butterfly collections twice because of
exile, first in Vyra and then in Yalta, which is another reason why the motif
of the pupa left behind by the dead son in the story may be connected with the
experience of exile.
A Russian poem, “Moths,” written some years before “Christmas,” provides a more
directly autobiographical treatment of this topic. The poet recollects his nocturnal
moth-hunting expeditions in Russia. Then he addresses his collections left
behind in Russia:
[. . . ] Years upon
years have gone by
and you have thawed with the warmth and flared up again.
I have experienced an inexplicable love,
dreamily bending over your rows
in fragant, dry glass drawers,
like the thin leaves of big, faded Bibles
with faded flowers placed inside . . .
I don’t know, moths, maybe you have perished,
mould or larvae have got in, small worms have nibbled at you,
your little wings and feet and antennae have broken,
or rough hands the sacred cupboard opened
and crunched the glass — and you have turned into
a colored handful of sweet-smelling dust.
I don’t know, tender ones — but from another land
I look into the depth of a melancholy garden;
I remember evenings at the start of fall,
and my oak on the meadow, and the honey smell,
and the yellow moon over black branches —
and I cry, and I fly, and in the twilight with you
I soar and breathe beneath the gentle foliage.
Here, exile,
memory, writing and the spiritual “afterlife” symbolized by the butterfly are
inextricably linked. The butterflies have already been aesthetically reworked
and have acquired a symbolic dimension, although the autobiographical
experience is mediated to a lesser extent than in “Christmas.” In another poem,
written after his father’s death, Nabokov likens hunger for earthly life to a
caterpillar’s preparing a fuller life as a butterfly:
No, life is no quivering quandary!
Here under the moon things are bright and dewy.
We are the caterpillars of angels; and sweet
It is to eat from the edge into the tender leaf.
Dress yourself up in thorns, crawl, bend, grow strong —
and the greedier was your green track,
the more velvety and splendid
the tails of your liberated wings.
In this way, butterflies function
throughout Nabokov’s life and work as a multimodal symbol, whose manifestations
exceed the boundaries of “intertextuality” as conventionally described, and
even those of a revamped “interdiscursivity.” If we absolutely need to coin a
term, or to recoin one, “intersemioticity” or just “semiotic chain” would do
nice — but I prefer to stick to
“intertextuality” with the proviso that the “texts” here are semiotic
constructs whose manifestations may range from the behavioral text or the
memory trace to deliberate artistic symbolism and literary allusion.
That is, at a given level of analysis (in life or literature) it is irrelevant
whether the signs or “texts” being connected through interpretation are written
or not, verbal or not, and intertextuality is best understood as a local
variant of more general semiotic processes involving sign-making and
interpretation. There is a tendency for successful analytic concepts, like
“politeness” or “relevance” in linguistic pragmatics, or “intertextuality” in
literary semiotics, to develop a kind of disciplinary esprit de corps, and to lose their moorings in general semiotics — whereas what makes the study of
“intertextuality” interesting in any given case may also be equally well served
by focusing on semiotic phenomena which are contextually related to
intertextual phenomena, and interact situationally with them, but should not
themselves be described as “intertextual.”
A similar web of multimodal connections
radiates from another biographical motif in the story, this time involving the
title. The story’s title “Christmas” is of course justified in keeping with the
subject matter — a Christmas story
published on (the Russian orthodox) Christmas day. But there is a further
meaningful echo in the name which makes sense only through a genetic reading — a double allusion to Nabokov’s luxury
villa of Rozhdestvenno and to its church of the the Nativity (although here it
is the Virgin’s, not Christ’s nativity that is being referred to). The name of
“Rozhdestvenno” is also connected to the Russian word for Christmas
(“Rozhdestvo”), the title too of the story in Russian. The vault of the Church
of the Nativity of the Virgin at Rozhdestvenno, where his maternal uncle
Vladimir, dead young from consumption, was also buried, is described in the
story, reused by Nabokov as the burial place of Sleptsov’s son. Nabokov had
just inherited Rozhdestvenno from his uncle; it was associated in his mind to
his discovery of love (the “Tamara” motif in Speak, Memory) and it surfaces in “Christmas” in the form of the
son’s first love discovered by Sleptsov as he reads his diary. The villa, that
is, suggested in an especially forceful way to Nabokov the unrealized
possibilities of the past, the ‘what might have been’ which is such a harrowing
motif in “Christmas” — a possibility
forever buried in the past, the way his cousin and namesake Vladimir, dead
young, was buried in the manor’s vault. Through the name of his cousin,
Vladimir, shared by Nabokov and his father as well, a subtle connection between
father and son and the Rozhdestvenno tomb described in “Christmas” is
established.
One of the functions of our Nabokovian
test case was to illustrate the relationship between hindsight and
intertextuality. I have already pointed out a few possible variations played on
this relationship. In some cases, the interpretive work of critics gives an
explicit expression or brings to consciousness what was a subliminal or
unconscious influence. Critical readings, especially New Critical readings and
later aesthetic readings influenced by the New Critical attention to close
reading and image patterns, underline the coherence of textual patterns and
help establish a stronger semantic coherence by linking through an interpretive
metatext elements in the literary text whose initial connection was too tenuous
to be significant for most readers. Note that this activity of critics is to
some extent continuous with the author’s own self-reading, the revisionary
exploitation of characteristic motifs and stylistic patterns mentioned above.
As there is a metatextual element in the author’s own text, it is perhaps only
natural that later texts will evolve towards explicit metatextuality (as in
Nabokov’s own comments on his work in Speak,
Memory) or towards highly
self-conscious metafiction, of which Nabokov’s last novel Look at the Harlequins! is a prime example.
In this novel, Nabokov presents a parodic alternative version of his own life — the life of the novelist he might
have been, or the one some people think he is. The novel begins with an
alternative-world list of the author’s works and consists of playful and
hilarious variations on situations which appear in Nabokov’s earlier novels,
playing them off precisely against a fictional autobiographical reading — a strategy which can be seen as one
more episode in the author’s project of simultaneous self-concealment and
self-revelation (Couturier’s analysis is, as always, highly relevant in this
case). Look at the Harlequins! is a delight to read — for those readers who grasp the author’s game and are willing to
play. Many readers have found the novel infuriatingly narcissistic and
themselves at sea, which is again not surprising. Look at the Harlequins! is indeed a new type of confrontation with
“sister-texts” as Couturier calls them, that special subspecies of intertextual
relationships displayed within an author’s œuvre, but it works on a strand in
Nabokov’s poetics whose potential significance can now be more clearly
appreciated in the earlier writings.
Intertextuality has an interactional
value, as different modes of intertextual relationship are activated through
later texts in order to recontextualize elements and bring out a clearer
significance, or (there is a continuum here, not a clear-cut frontier) to
rewrite the past in order to bring it closer to present desires and make it
usable again. Relevant contexts in literature/criticism — slash-joined, for literature and criticism are a symbiotic pair — are not defined in advance. In part
we create a relevant context through the juxtaposition of texts, making them
act on one another. Admittedly, critics read meanings into the author’s texts,
and as we watch later interpreters reread and sift the interpretations of
earlier critics we may find that once the bathwater has been thrown away, the
baby kept by the interpreter has swallowed part of the bathwater, as babies are
wont to do. But that is part of the paradoxical relationship between criticism
and literature. The text of literature is not woven once and for all. There is
a visible pattern in the carpet, but every time we look new patterns emerge,
and others may fade — not least
because the critical look on a literary work requires that the work pass
throught the intertextual loom once again.
I am not sure whether critics would be justified in applying for a percentage
of authors’ revenues, but they should at least be exempt from paying copyright
fees — for literary communication is
not a one-way street; rather, it is interactional through and through.
A preliminary
approach to this position, and a complementary analysis of hindsight, can be
found in my chapter “Catastrophism and Hindsight: Narrative Hermeneutics in
Biology and in Historiography,” in Beyond Borders: Redefining Generic and
Ontological Boundaries, ed. Ramón Plo-Alastrué and María Jesús
Martínez-Alfaro (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002) 105-119. A classic study of the
effects of hindsight upon perception and judgement is B. Fischhoff’s “Hindsight
/ foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgement under uncertainty,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human
Perception and Performance 1 (1975): 288-299. The
hindsight bias has been the subject of numerous studies in recent years,
especially in the fields of cognitive psychology, medical diagnosis and
management analysis. See for instance the bibliography in the University of
Mannheim’s interdisciplinary research project “Sonderforschungbereich 504”, on
non-standard explanations of behaviour and decision-making in business. http://www.sfb504.uni-mannheim.de/glossary/
William Edmiston’s
Hindsight and Insight (University
Park [PA]: Pennsylvania UP, 1991), a study of focalization in
eighteenth-century French novels, differentiates between the insight produced
by hindsight — the “logical” knowledge of the first-person narrator — and the
additional “insight” produced by the author’s breach of the realistic
motivation of first-person narration, giving his narrator the privilege of
omniscience through an infraction of the mimetic rules.
Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative (3 vols; Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1984, 1986, 1988).
Robert de
Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressler, Introduction
to Text Linguistics (London: Longman, 1986) 206.
Teun A. van Dijk
and Walter Kinsch. Strategies of
Discourse Comprehension (New York: Academic Press, 1983) 1f, ix. I follow
Robert de Beaugrande’s account in Linguistic
Theory: The Discourse of Fundamental Works (Online edition, 2002 http://www.beaugrande.com/)
Paul Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on
Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1970); Judith Fetterley, The Resisting
Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1978).
