the death masque of socrates: invitation to a beheading

To all appearances, Vladimir Nabokov is as unlikely a student of classical literature asone might imagine. A fierce modernist, possessed of even less knowledge of Greekand Latin than Shakespeare, and steeped in a profound hatred for Plato, how could hepossibly have written a virtual roman à clef based on a consistent set of intertextual al-lusions to a classical author in any of his works of fiction? But this is precisely what wehave in Invitation to a Beheading, one of Nabokov’s earliest novels (first published inRussian in 1935-6 and later translated into English in 1959). Invitation’s protagonistCincinnatus finds himself in prison awaiting his execution. His crime: “gnoseologicalturpitude,” evidently a crime against reality itself. From the beginning, his identityslowly stands revealed in all its spelaean clarity, while he just as slowly detaches him-self from the metaphysical distortions of the fictional universe that would shape hisworld. The novel is many things. But it is above all a reflection on the philosophicalconstraints of fiction itself, and a vivid object lesson in the uses of classical receptionin literature.

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

James I. Porter, Department of Classics, University of California-Irvine, 120 Humani-ties Office Building 2, Irvine, CA 92697-2000, UNITED STATES

International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 17, No. 3, September 2010, pp. 389-422.

* A shorter version of this essay, bearing the same title, was presented at the An-cients/Moderns session of the annual conference of the Philological Association ofthe Pacific Coast (PAPC) in Fall of 1985. The essay thereafter lay dormant until Ihad the chance to revisit it more recently. (Oddly, the situation in Nabokov stud-ies has remained virtually unchanged in the interim.) I wish to acknowledge thefollowing from UC Berkeley for comments on the shorter and longer versions atthe time: Robert Alter, Eric Downing, John Kopper, Alain Renoir†, and ThomasRosenmeyer†. Thanks now also go to Wolfgang Haase for his generous, detailed,and rapid-fire comments, which have been tremendously helpful, both in savingme from innumerable bêtises in the final version and in larger questions of pres-entation.

The Death Masque of Socrates: Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading*

JAMES I. PORTER

DOI 10.1007/s12138-010-0 -202 7

390 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / September 2010

Es ist alles drin mein Eigen, ohne Vorbild, Vergleich,Vorgänger. (“Everything in it [i.e., Zarathustra] is myown, without example, without compare, withoutpredecessor”)

Nietzsche, letter to Rohde, 22 February 18841

Je forme une entreprise qui n’eut jamais d’exemple, etdont l’exécution n’aura point d’imitateur. (“I am con-ceiving an undertaking that never had an exampleand whose execution will have no imitator.”)

Rousseau, Les Confessions, Livre 12

Nabokov seems, or else pretends, to be acutely allergic to the charges ofliterary influence. In the English foreword to Invitation to a Beheading(first English edition, 1959)—an early novel in Nabokov’s oeuvre

which first appeared in a Russian émigré journal in 1935-6 and then in bookform in 1938, both times under the title Priglashenie na kazn’ (literally, Invita-tion to an Execution)3—Nabokov brushes aside all such imputations with avengeful reaffirmation of his own fictional universe:

Spiritual affinities have no place in my concept of literary criticism. . . . One author, however, has never been mentioned in this con-nection—the only author whom I must gratefully recognize as an in-fluence upon me at the time of writing this book; namely, themelancholy, extravagant, wise, witty, magical and altogether de-lightful Pierre Delalande, whom I invented.4

The fictitious Pierre Delalande is attributed with a mock epigram, purport-edly taken from a work entitled “Discours sur les ombres” and appropriatelyadorning the blank page that precedes Invitation. As I would like to show, allof Nabokov’s hand-waving and gesticulating has two non-exclusive func-tions: to direct readers to an important allusive structure, and to divert themfrom that same (elusive) structure. By “allusive structure” I mean the sys-tematic exploitation of a set of allusions so closely interconnected as to justifytheir being considered jointly as a single allusion. The fact that criticism todate has barely taken any notice of Nabokov’s allusion, and that this allusion,which turns out to be drawn from the heart of the classical tradition, isnonetheless operative in Invitation to a Beheading and vital to its substance(supplying both central themes and structures), is an index of the successful-ness of Nabokov’s dual strategy of self-advertisement and self-effacement.But before turning to exegetical tasks, there is a second meaning to fictional al-lusion that needs to be brought out and clarified.

1. Nietzsche 1986, 6:479 (§490).2. Rousseau 1959-1995, 1:5.3. On the nuances of the title’s meanings in both Russian and English, see n. 40

below. 4. Nabokov 1965, 6. Subsequent references in the text will be by page number to this

edition, namely the English translation by V. Nabokov’s son Dmitri, in collabora-tion with V. Nabokov.

Porter 391

5. See Hollander 1981; Hinds 1998; Ricks 2002. 6. Nabokov 1944, 142; emphasis added.7. Nabokov 1970, xxvi.8. Ibid., xxii.9. Nabokov 1944, 148, and quoted with approval by Appel in Nabokov 1970, xxvi.10. Cf. “the fictional nature of reality” invoked by Appel in Nabokov 1970, xlix.11. Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekov “have all had their moments of irrational insight

which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worththe sudden focal shift. But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art”(Nabokov 1944, 140).

12. “In the most innocent descriptive passage, this or that word, sometimes a mereadverb or a preposition, for instance the word ‘even’ or ‘almost,’ is inserted in

Allusion in the sense used above signifies the “playing upon,” in fictionalcontexts, of objects not immediately present (the creation of a semantic hori-zon within a world of fictions).5 But allusion can at times have a powerful in-dexical force that seemingly penetrates beyond the horizons of fiction and intoan allegorical sphere of reference, a locus untrammeled by the fictions andtechniques that are capable of conjuring up this same locus of reality. Signifi-cantly, we also find this second usage in a Nabokovian text, in his study ofGogol where, resorting to spatial metaphors in order to reconstruct the three-and even “four-dimensional” effect he is after, Nabokov attempts to put hisfinger on the quiddity of Gogol’s artistic vision as it “breaks through” the sur-face of the text:

[Akaky Akakyevich, the hero of The Overcoat] is not merely humanand pathetic. He is something more, just as the background is notmere burlesque. Somewhere behind the obvious contrast there is asubtle genetic link. His being discloses the same quiver and shim-mer as does the dream world to which he belongs. The allusions tosomething else behind the crudely painted screens, are so artisticallycombined with the superficial texture of the narration that civic-minded Russians have missed them completely.6

The elusive, indeterminate quality of allusion clearly need not pertain tothe first sense only. Nabokov’s language is struggling to pronounce what issurely an ineffable vowel; and the distance that remains between his wordsand that “something more” is, we sense, immeasurable. Alfred Appel soughtto close the gap by referring the “more” back to the text which embodies theauthor’s self-conscious reflection, albeit at a remove of one level: “There arethus at least two ‘plots’ in all of Nabokov’s fiction: the characters in the book,and the consciousness of the creator above it.”7 The trouble with a readingthat converts all of Nabokov’s fiction into an “allegory of itself” (allégorique delui-même)8 is that it defuses the explosive payload of a statement like “all re-ality is a mask,”9 at the price of an uncritical assimilation of reality to fiction.10

It is precisely fiction’s possibilities for allusion, through the gaps and fissuresof its own illusions, to an “irrational” existential dimension surpassing bothfictional and everyday realities, that Nabokov isolates as the critical mark of“great literature.”11 Such allusions are invariably momentary glimpses,slightly blurred, and slanted. As breakthroughs, they are accompanied by ter-ror and uncanny insight.12 And, though these glimpses into the irrational are


achieved in and through fiction, their level of penetration takes us well pastthe ordinary levels of both fiction and reality. Were we to collapse the one intothe other, Nabokov would react,

But it is something much more than that. The gaps and black holesin the texture of Gogol’s style imply flaws in the texture of life it-self.13

The “beyond” to which Nabokov can only allude is meant to be a correctiveto both text and life, not a mere textualization of life.

At this point the two senses of allusion rejoin to participate in a similarstructure. Playful, textual allusion is marked by a certain elusiveness or re-fusal with regard to the ultimacy of a meaning: allusion in this sense is carriedout on a subtextual and even subliminal level of insistent suggestion and or-ganization. Parodic allusion in particular (which will concern us here) canachieve this elusiveness through sheer distortion, at times rendering the ob-ject of parody beyond recognition. We might speak of this structure of allusionas being a specular structure, a catoptric effect created out of the juxtaposi-tion of two reflective surfaces (since both text and subtext, and their respectiveworlds, are mutually affected in the course of the interaction), with meaningemerging as the measure of the resilience of the specular images that arecaught within this prismatic construct. There is something abyssal to this in-terplay.

Allusion in the second sense (as used by Nabokov with reference toGogol) likewise points to a bottomless structure, and may be assimilated to thespecular model (for example, as in a Platonic universe), but it may also takethe form of a complete suspension or collapse of the ultimacy of meaning, anopen-ended plummeting through layers, an infinitization of meaning with-out end. Here, the endless chain of meanings found in a text points preciselyto a parallel, if not identical, structure in reality. In Nabokov’s own words,

Reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, falsebottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable.14

Such a refusal ultimately to signify is not comparable to an author’s disavowalof all precedents; it is more like Nabokov’s underhanded reappropriation ofall the predecessors he so self-consciously disavows, and no doubt of othershe omits. In what follows, I shall pursue both models of allusive structure inNabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, which as we shall see neatly converge ina classical model of reality and mimesis—indeed, in a model of reality that isitself founded on mimesis, one that Nabokov’s novel both mirrors and dis-torts. But before proceeding, a brief synopsis of the plot will be helpful as away of situating the analysis to come.

such a way as to make the harmless sentence explode in a wild display of night-mare fireworks; or else the passage that had started in a rambling colloquial man-ner all of a sudden leaves the tracks and swerves into the irrational where it reallybelongs” (ibid., 142).

13. Nabokov 1944, 143.14. Nabokov 1973, 11.

Porter 393

Synopsis

As the novel opens, the protagonist, Cincinnatus, is being sentenced to deathby decapitation for an unspecified crime, which later turns out to be his inex-plicable opacity in a world of transparent individuals (“of souls transparentto one another,” 24)—in a word, for his “basic illegality” (30). Each of thetwenty chapters in the novel constitutes another day in Cincinnatus’ interimphase until his eventual beheading while he remains mostly confined to histiny cell with minimal furnishings (a bed, a table, and a chair) inside a mas-sive prison-fortress. Visits from wardens, family, and his executioner whotakes up quarters in a neighboring cell, in addition to wayward excursions ofhis fantasy in the present accompanied by flashbacks from the past, break upthe monotony of life on death row as the fated day approaches. Throughout,reality and dream-like illusion are in competition: could the whole scenario benothing more than a mental hallucination? As the final day arrives and Cincin-natus bows to the ax, the novel leaves the reader with an ambivalent conclu-sion: either Cincinnatus dies, or reality itself has been cleft in twain andCincinnatus lives on in another, higher reality unavailable to the world hemistakenly found himself in.

Skiagraphia

Nabokov once fleetingly compared writing (“the real life of [a given writer’s]books”) to a shadow-script (“the shadow of a train of thought”).15 The imageis doubly apt in the case of a novel whose text stands under the epigraphicalshadow of a “Discours sur les ombres.” Shadows proliferate in Invitation, asthey do in all of Nabokov’s novels, absorbed as he is with the optical effectsof the imagination and the epistemological side-effects of perception. But ifshadows are prominent in Invitation, they are this for specific reasons.

In the first place, Nabokov has arranged the physical setting of the novelsuch that it can only offer itself as a simulacrum of writing: topographically,the “scene” of the events in the novel is a virtual site of inscription. One thinksof the much cruder, because so much more physically immediate, apparatus-cum-stylus of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” (“It is a peculiar apparatus. . . .And now everyone can see through the glass how the inscription is made onthe body.”).16 But the mechanisms of Invitation are aligned along a more pro-nounced subjective, inward-looking axis. More precisely, the objective and thesubjective axes are skewed through an ambivalence in technique, as well as anambivalence toward technique—the studied indecision, for example, betweenan interior narrative monologue and a third person point of view, which hasthe effect of a creating a blur in the narrator’s consciousness and its represen-tation; or the camera-like apparatus that mimics this indecision both by sug-gesting, in classical, paradigmatic fashion,17 the commanding perspective of asubjective consciousness, and by rendering that consciousness inoperative,not simply by converting it into an object for lengthy and laborious emulsifi-cation, but what is more significant, through the very exposure of its opera-

15. Nabokov 1966, 288.16. Kafka 1970, 100, 106; my translation.17. See Baudry 1970. See further Judovitz 1987.


tions. In short, the visual and mental pulsions, responses and even repulsionsof the novel’s subject, Cincinnatus, have been writ large and projected intothe screening apparatus of his carceral environment: every event, and its set-ting, could be construed as an objective correlative of his mind and its con-tents. Cincinnatus’s punishment is a repetition of his crime: it is in this sensethat the parallel between Kafka and Nabokov “works,” or is at work; namely,insofar as the corpus delicti, imputed or implied without tangible evidence,materializes for the first time at the scene of punishment, as the scene of pun-ishment.

This scenario can be further specified. The protagonist’s prison cell is a lit-eral camera obscura, a rectangular enclosure with a single aperture onto theoutside, namely the highly perched and barred window tunnel through whichlight may enter but nothing may be seen: “You cannot see anything. I tried ittoo,” a scarcely visible inscription on the adjacent wall reads (29), simultane-ously establishing and breaking the limit between the visible and the legible,seeing and writing. A second aperture opens onto the cell from within thefortress, “a peephole like a leak in a boat” (12), thus creating a kind of sym-metrical relation between the two windows: two one-way mirrors, two sys-tems of registration (inscription), that are only deceptively heterogeneous—Cincinnatus is caught in the nexus of two systems of evidence, one thatposes as the natural, the other patently technical.

Clearly, for all its orthogonality this chamber is an exquisite “torture” cell.For one thing, it stands in an involuntary relation to light, which almost with-out exception either floods in through the window according to a rhythm thatonly improperly might be called “natural,” or else bursts on incandescentlyand, just as arbitrarily and abruptly, clicks off, plunging the cell and its occu-pant back into gloom. Moreover, the projection of light into the cell in turncauses images to be projected, like writing, onto the walls and ceiling.

The ugly little window proved accessible to the sunset; a fiery par-allelogram appeared on the side wall. The cell was filled to the ceil-ing with the oils of twilight, containing extraordinary pigments. Thusone would wonder, is that some reckless colorist’s painting there tothe right [ . . . ]? (Actually it was a parchment sheet hanging on the wall[which] provided the necessary materials for the evening illumina-tion.) Suddenly the place was filled with golden, highly-concentratedelectric light. (14; emphasis added)

And while the control Cincinnatus exercises over these lighting effects is evenin principle only slightly greater than his control over the source (a trick hemust learn, or a “concession” he learns to make [124; 155]), he has absolutelyno control over the degree of irreality these images impose; they represent forCincinnatus a derogation of reality which he is impotent to alter. Cincinnatusstands virtually helpless before his own visual apparatus; his only defense isto close his eyes.

“Tomorrow, probably,” said Cincinnatus as he slowly walked aboutthe cell [ . . . . ] A sunset ray was repeating effects that were alreadyfamiliar. “Tomorrow, probably,” said Cincinnatus with a sigh. “It wastoo quiet today, so tomorrow, bright and early. . . ” (32)

Porter 395

The thematic and stylistic repetitions of this passage capture the apathywith which Cincinnatus greets the tedious displays of a crepuscular reality.Surely, grade-B movies on a third viewing would elicit more interest. Thepenumbral performances are occasionally of a more gripping and imagina-tive kind—compare the pathos suggested by one of the more spectacular exitsof Emmie, his real or imaginary seductress (“Arching back her body [. . .] withthe appearance of a ballet captive but with the shadow of genuine despair,”106), before the languishing creature is “splashed” out into the corridor; orthe hallucinatory dervish-like dance of death that whirls out one particularlyweird figure (“the monstrous shadow of their shoulders and heads passedand repassed ever more quickly across the stone vaults, and the inevitablejoker who [ . . . ] cast on the walls the huge black zigzags of his hideousprance,” 156)—but these are, like all the rest, non-abiding and delusory: in-substantial “specters,” to use Cincinnatus’s language (36; 40; 70).

Although repetition signifies, on one level, the stutter of a self-reflexiveconsciousness, from another perspective, the repetitive nature of spectral im-ages has less to do with their affective quality than with the essential onto-logical constitution of sensible objects generally. This is a large claim thatcommits us to more than the text, on the face of it, ever allows. But I think itis a justified way of setting in order the incoherent and jumbled perceptionsthat Cincinnatus gives expression to, though, to be sure, without always com-prehending the deeper significance of the role to which they and he have beenassigned. It is not insignificant that Cincinnatus, while leafing through datedequivalents of “Life” magazine, should drift associatively into speculationsof a metaphysical cast, or, at any rate, into thoughts with decidedly meta-physical implications:

“But then perhaps” thought Cincinnatus, “I am misinterpreting thesepictures. Attributing to the epoch the characteristics of its photo-graph. The wealth of shadows, the torrents of light, the gloss of atanned shoulder, the rare reflection, the fluid transitions from one el-ement to another—perhaps all of this pertains only to the snapshot,to a particular kind of heliotypy, to special forms of that art, and theworld really never was so sinuous, so humid and rapid—just astoday our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way ourhastily assembled and painted world.” (51; emphasis added)

To read the final remark as an indictment of the way in which technology fab-ricates, hence contaminates, the apprehension of reality—to construe “world,”in other words, as the historically most recent avatar of socially constructed re-alities—would be to dull the edge of doubt that has been implanted in Cincin-natus’s anguished mind. It would also be to shelter a single coherent thoughtfrom the illogic of the entire passage, an illogic that grows apparent as soonas we begin to realize that “our hastily assembled and painted world” ex-presses the condition of the world tout court, regardless of epoch; the thrust ofthe statement is not in the direction of the technological, but the ontological.What is more, the truth, which is the source of all illogicality, does not residewithin the ordered frames of a syntax, but only in a partial, fragmentary con-dition, as an incomplete revelation, and as an incomplete representation:


“But then perhaps” (Cincinnatus began to write rapidly on a sheet ofruled paper) “I am misinterpreting . . . Attributing to the epoch. . . This wealth . . . Torrents . . . Fluid transitions . . . And the worldreally never was . . . Just as . . . ” (ibid.)

“And the world really never was . . . Just as . . . ”—these bits and pieces of alarger, more coherent picture contain precisely the truth Cincinnatus can nevervoice, face, or fathom. He is on the precipice of a radical skepticism; all thatstands between Cincinnatus and this extreme position is his even more ex-treme and unshakeable faith in his own reality. One more step and the ap-paritional nature of the world will be dissolved and dismantled before theinner tribunal of the self—Cincinnatus’s self—like so much spray to “irrigate”the “stone captain” (74), until the day arrives when the bolt strikes and the axfalls, the statue of Somnus cleaves in twain (“Captain Somnus,” ibid.), andCincinnatus’s better self goes off to meet kindred spirits in a newly awakenedreality.

Far from weakening or softening under the oppression of his internment,Cincinnatus’s self-certainty gathers together and hardens into a punctual forcethat no terrors, no matter how horrible or how transparent, can dispel.Nabokov gives Cincinnatus occasion to act out a Cartesianesque phenome-nological reduction on two separate occasions, but no scene in the novel ismore explicitly derivative of Descartes or more radical in its results than themeditation with which Cincinnatus begins his eighth day of imprisonment, atthe start of Chapter Eight. Perhaps this double configuration of figure-eights(a charged symbol in Nabokov’s fictive world)18 is meant to signal the mo-ment when Cincinnatus for the first time coincides so formally and perfectlywith himself and discovers, in the shadow of impending death, intimations ofimmortality:

“Today is the eighth day [ . . . ] and not only am I still alive, that is,the sphere of my own self still limits and eclipses my being, but, likeany other mortal, I do not know my mortal hour and can apply tomyself a formula that holds for everyone: the probability of a futuredecreases in inverse proportion to its theoretical remoteness.” (89-90)

In the sequel, “I do not know my mortal hour” will be given the full force ofits literal sense: “I have no mortal hour.” The possibility of an absolute uni-versalization of the self is the first cut-off point from all time, and a prelude toan essentialized existence (“my being”). This gives the basis for Descartes’split between empirical and transcendental selves—a possible clue that wehave finally reached the novel’s philosophical core. Cincinnatus goes on torecount, in the vivid present, his experience of the night before, in which hehad discarded, layer by layer, the inessentials of his identity until reaching anec plus ultra, what Descartes had termed his thinking substance (res cogitans):

“I know this: through the process of gradual divestment I reach thefinal, indivisible, firm, radiant point, and this point says: I am! like a

18. The lemniscate figures prominently in Canto Three of Pale Fire. See further Alter1975, 189.

Porter 397

19. Hintikka 1965. For an analysis of the rhetorical character of subjectivity and self-representation in Descartes, see Judovitz 1988.

pearl ring embedded in a shark’s gory fat—O my eternal, my eternal. . . and this point is enough for me—actually nothing more is nec-essary.” (90)

One might think that with this reduction of Cincinnatus to his quintessentialself we had also reached the fundamentum absolutum inconcussum of the allu-sive layers of the novel. Even the reference on p. 92 to the irrational “thirdeye” (“Soon, I think, I shall evolve a third eye on the back of my neck, betweenmy brittle vertebrae: a mad eye, wide open [ . . . . ] Keep away!”), might con-firm that we had reached the essential nexus of the novel: the allusion (de-flected by the reference to fascinating evil eye) is to the organ of the corpuspineale (“l’oeil pinéal”) which Descartes describes as the invisible juncture ofbody and soul in his Traité de l’homme (1648).

Nonetheless, there is a romantic component to Cincinnatus’s psychic pro-file that eventually disjoins him from the eminent figure of Descartes. Fromthe moment Cincinnatus takes off (three pages later) in a flight of sublime rap-ture equal, if not in complexity then at least in tendency, to any Romantic vi-sionary ecstasy, he leaves behind the Cartesian experiment and so toocomplicates the structure of the allusion we have been retracing. Speculatingon writing as an ideal process of self-induced “iridescence” (“word propin-quity” that generates, mirror-fashion, reflexive “sheen, heat, shadow” out ofcommonplace words), Cincinnatus concludes that such a writing lies beyondhim, and beyond everything: it is “a task of not now and not here” (93). Nega-tion of the “here” gives over to the oft-quoted yearnings for the “there”:

There, tam, là bas, the gaze of men glows with inimitable under-standing [ . . . . ] There, there are the originals of those gardens wherewe used to roam and hide in this world; there everything strikes oneby its bewitching evidence, by the simplicity of perfect good; thereeverything pleases one’s soul [ . . . ]; there shines the mirror that nowand then sends a chance reflection here . . . ” (94)

The vocabulary and the thrust of this passage take us well beyondDescartes’ range. For Descartes, the here and now was a methodologically in-dispensable property of the self; these indexicals supplied the grammaticalground for the proposition of his existence, which he posited in the self-vali-dating, or existentially self-verifying performative, cogito ergo sum.19 Tied ex-clusively to the linguistic utterance, Descartes’ identity, once secured, becomesthe foundation for all knowledge, which is to say, for reconstructing the wholeof the phenomenal world according to axioms and criteria that have the sameobjective truth value as the self. Descartes, in other words, is committed tosaving appearances, not to jettisoning them. By contrast, Cincinnatus’s self-certainty is the expression of a wavering anxiety that ultimately desires andrequires an alibi for existence. He has not, so to speak, learned to master thelinguistic conditions of his identity. We might say that he has failed to learnhow, so to speak, to perform himself. “I mean much more besides, but lack ofwriting skill, haste, excitement, weakness [ . . . ] I know something. I know some-


thing. But expression of it comes so hard!” (91; emphasis added). Cincinna-tus’s other-worldly passion is couched in terms that are neither scholastic norCartesian. “It exists, my dream world, it must exist, since, surely there mustbe an original of the clumsy copy” (93). The allusion contained in his words—his “only bookish words” (95)—takes us back to “that primordial palpitationof mine, that first branding contact, the mainspring of my ‘I’ ” (90), a doublegemination that has been inscribed in the interval between a pair of figures:not Descartes or some unnamed Romantic, but Socrates and Plato, whosepresence can be determined through their shadows alone.

The clinic and the cave: heliotypy

If, accordingly, we can assume that the world Cincinnatus alludes to is a Pla-tonic one, then Nabokov has staged a cruel but obvious joke: Cincinnatus is awarbling but pathetic Socrates who has become trapped in Plato’s cave.20 Thedetails of a literal reading of Invitation that argue such a picture may be re-counted in a somewhat schematic fashion:

(i) The crime, the sentence, the execution. Betrayed by unnamed “in-formers” (25), evidently accused, amidst an open meeting and by fel-low “citizens,” of some “strange, almost forgotten word” (32), andsubsequently arraigned in public, Cincinnatus is to be executed, welater learn, for “gnostical turpitude” (72), whatever that may be,though we are assured it is “the most terrible of crimes,” utterableonly euphemistically. Incidentally, to read the radical of the word“gnostical” in anything but its etymological sense is to becloud the

20. I should stress that the picture of Socrates to be presented here represents the re-constructed image of Nabokov’s own making and/or adaptation. Nabokov’s crit-ical stance toward Plato and Platonic ideals has its ancestry, most likely, inNietzsche, whose oeuvre is in many respects a concerted campaign against the Pla-tonic heritage. (On this, see Porter 2006.) This aggressive iconoclasm naturallytouches Socrates—not the historical person, but the dialectical image that we meetin the dialogues, and in later doxography. For a relatively recent philosophical at-tempt to identify the historical character of Socrates, see Vlastos 1971. This ismerely one further instance of the literary indebtedness of Nabokov, despite all hisprotestations to the contrary. It is further astonishing how long this chain of allu-sions has gone undetected. The only examples of scholarship known to me that ob-serve the Platonic reference are Zimmer in Nabokov 1990, 262, 266-7; Kozlova2001; and Moudrov 2007. Zimmer correctly identifies the Phaedo (but only thePhaedo) as an intertext. Kozlova (7) claims that the novel is, “in essence, a poeticparaphrasing of Plato’s Timaeus,” while Moudrov includes the Republic; all threemerely scratch the surface of the available Platonic subtexts in the novel. Otherscholarship goes off hunting in bizarre directions (Christianity, Gnosticism, polit-ical allegory, mathematical set theory—anything but Plato). See, e.g., Shapiro 1996;Connolly 1997 (the one collection devoted to the novel); Shapiro 1998 (the onemonograph on the novel); Langen 2004; Connolly 2005, 142; and below. Nabokov’sreply to his mother, when she proposed a symbolic reading of the novel, is apthere: “You shouldn’t look for any symbol or allegory. It’s extremely logical andreal, it is the simplest everyday reality and doesn’t need any special explanation”(cited in Boyd 1990, 419).

Porter 399

meaning of the crime, and the allusion as well. “Gnostical” bears norelation to “gnostic,” as a great many readers of the novel haveheld—as though through a kind of interpretive parapraxis, viz., byreferring to a misremembered “gnostic [sic] turpitude.”21 Any lin-gering doubts may be quelled by reference to the Russian: gnose-ologičeskaja gnusnost’, “gnoseological vileness.”22 Cincinnatus’s crime isvaguely epistemological, and decidedly un-Manichean, let alone re-ligious.

These details closely match the circumstances of Socrates’ trial, whichmust be gauged from the reports of Xenophon and Plato. Although threeplaintiffs are mentioned in the Apology,23 they are symbolic of larger entities(they happen, curiously enough, to correspond to a typology familiar from

21. So, for instance, Alter 1970, 43, who curiously writes “gnostic turpitude,” thoughhe construes it in a more general sense: “‘gnostic turpitude’ consists, after all, inimagining the world as an artist and in wanting to become what the world he ex-ists in cannot by its nature tolerate, a writer.” As I hope to show, writing constitutesonly a temporary outlet that must be discarded along with the rest of the materialworld it represents. Cincinnatus, moreover, fails the test of a writer less on exter-nal grounds than on an inner incapacity, to which he himself openly admits.Cincinnatus’s failure to write is connected with his failure to master the linguisticconditions of his identity: to analyze exhaustively what these are will require afull view of exactly what his identity amounts to (from several perspectives, notleast of which are the narratological and meta-fictional). But his Socratism sup-plies the most immediate answer. “Artistic imagination” certainly belongs some-where among these, but it is too loaded a predicate to be left unqualified. JulianMoynahan, on the other hand, places all his bets on a fairly literal reading of what“the heresy-crime of ‘gnostic turpitude’” (sic) ) could mean (Moynahan 1967, 14).It is difficult to judge what a “simple and unhistorical” understanding of “thegnostic” might amount to, but in any case Moynahan manages to adduce somebasic tenets of Gnosticism and to apply them with success to Invitation. The gnos-tic attitudes which he singles out apply, I would argue, only to the extent that theyare Platonic in character (as undoubtedly much in Gnosticism represents a devel-opment from Platonic theses: see, e.g., Turner and Majercik 2000).

22. The translation is Robert Hughes’ (Hughes 1970), 290: “Cincinnatus’s crime of‘gnostical turpitude’ is in Russian the resoundingly more infamous gnose-ologičeskaja gnusnost’ (‘gnosiological vileness’).” His n. 5 apologizes for the literal-ness of the translation, but we should occasionally be grateful when someone errson the side of precision. Passing back and forth between the Russian original andthe English translation can generate problems of a delicate order, as D. BartonJohnson’s article on iconic imagery in Invitation illustrates (Johnson 1978). Johnsonsees in the substitution of “equivalent Greek letters” for the Slavonic “alphabeticicons” of the original a misleading imbalance: Slavonic liturgical and ecclesiasti-cal associations are lost. Lexical associations will no doubt be lost; iconic ones willreturn the reader to Greek sources (the Old Church Slavonic alphabet was basedon the Greek alphabet). Capturing Slavonic flavors will not prevent misappre-hension of the text; Barton is yet another example of critics who talk about Cincin-natus’s “gnostic (sic) knowledge” (353).

23. Subsequent quotations from Plato are drawn from the following sources: The Apol-ogy, Theaetetus, and Phaedo are from Hamilton and Cairns 1961; The Republic is fromCornford 1942.


the Socratic dialogues: poets, artisans, politicians and orators, Ap. 23e-24a);and these in turn diffusely represent the citizen-body of Athens in a long-standing gripe against the “gad-fly” Socrates: “I have already been accused inyour hearing by a great many people for a great many years” (ibid., 18b).Compare with this the fact that the charge, informants, and Cincinnatus arevirtually contemporaries who “mature” together over time (25); Cincinnatusis unthinkable apart from his crime; the indictment against him strikes at thevery ontological root of his being. The trumped-up charges of refusing to rec-ognize the State gods and of corrupting the youth (cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia1.1.1 for a convenient capsulation) are just Athens’ way of stating Socrates’own, inarticulable “basic illegality” (Invitation, 30) of knowing “too much.”Cincinnatus’ association with youth, though complicated by the distortingmechanisms of parody, is brought out nonetheless by his being “transferredto a kindergarten as a teacher in division F” (30). The nefariousness that lies,however distantly, behind that association is hinted at on the very last pagesof the book, in the deputy city director’s pre-execution proclamation to thespectating public: “Townspeople! One brief remark. Lately in our streets a ten-dency has been observed on the part of certain individuals of the youngergeneration to walk so fast that we oldsters must move aside and step intopuddles” (220). Two announcements later follows the reminder “that tonight,there will be given with sensational success the new comic opera Socrates MustDecrease” (ibid.). Perhaps Cincinnatus’ own childishness, referred to repeat-edly in the book, plays a twisted, reflexive role in this association (Cincinna-tus as his own corruptor; cf. “I have been my own accomplice,” 90). Whateverthe case may be, in the language of the censor juvenility is a code-word foradulthood: Cincinnatus is well capable of injecting his wardens with his ownbrand of infectious disease, namely truth (“I infect them with truth,” 138).24

(ii) Biographica. In the Theaetetus Socrates introduces the famous anal-ogy between his philosophical art and midwifery (149a). He claimsto have acquired the skill from his mother Phaenarete, by professiona midwife, but whose name also happens to mean “one who bringsvirtue into appearance.” The conceit, whether historically accurate ornot, has a paradoxical, self-undermining ring to it: if, as Socratesplayfully insists, a midwife must be barren in order to help othersconceive, then Socrates is invoking the unstable notion of a barrenmother, thereby with one gesture providing himself with a maternalorigin and sterilizing it (matricide), definitively and self-defininglycutting himself off from it and from the natural processes of engen-derment. Socrates’ adoption of the maieutic function is informed bya similar ambivalence: barren of wisdom, he can at best discriminate

24. It is worth noting that the delay between sentencing and execution that gives riseto the novel in the first place can only bring to mind a parallel delay in Socrates’case, which gave rise to two dialogues, the Crito and the Phaedo. In Socrates’ case,the delay was caused by a ritual ship’s travel-time to Delos and back, whichXenophon states took thirty days in 399 BCE (Mem. 4.8.2). In Cincinnatus’ case,the delay takes twenty days and as many chapters, but for no apparent reason—apart from the executioner’s, M’sieur Pierre’s, need to get to “know” his victim in-timately, which seems absurdly premised, given Cincinnatus’ innate opacity.

Porter 401

between the truth or falsity of the mental progeny of other minds:“the highest point of my art is the power to prove by every testwhether the offspring of a young man’s thought is a false phantom(eidōlon) or instinct with life and truth“ (150c).

When Cincinnatus’s mother, Cecilia C., intrudes briefly into his life for athird time, she is the portrait of domestic and maternal efficiency: “Sheplopped down her midwife’s bag, nimbly pulled the black cotton gloves offher small, mobile hands, and, stooping low over the cot, began making thebed afresh” (130). If Cincinnatus has inherited his mother’s qualities (“all herfeatures were a model for those of Cincinnatus, which had emulated them intheir own way,” 131), he does so in the way that Socrates could be said to haveimitated his own mother, that is, paradoxically by inventing and dispatchingher existence: Cincinnatus presently turns his own maieutic discriminatorypowers against his mother, who he insists is just a phantom, “a clever parodyof a mother,” “a fraud,” “votre mère, paraît-il,” Rodrig Ivanovich, his warden,had introduced her (129; emphasis added). And in general, to the degree thatCincinnatus can pierce through shadows with his intellect, he is fulfilling thisquintessentially Socratic purpose.

Equally important to both Nabokov and Plato, however, are the (oftenself-reflexive) ends of writing fiction, of engendering and propagating effectsthrough discursive devices. A question that naturally arises out of the above-named parodic and paradoxical logic when it is pushed to its literal extreme,namely to what degree both Cincinnatus and Socrates present allegories ofself-invention, is a crucial one. In the case of Socrates, ultimately there is no dif-ference between inventing a maternal figure and matricide: by eliminating hismother, Socrates has engendered himself. Clearly, Socrates’ self-invention isclosely bound up with his philosophical tasks, especially his conception ofrigorous ethical self-determination, and only secondarily is it a reflex of Plato’snarrative inventiveness. The corresponding part played by self-invention inthe case of Cincinnatus must be reserved for discussion below. But it is worthnoting that he clams to have seen his mother “only [ . . . ] once in my life” be-fore she enters his cell, and he declares the woman who enters (Celia C.) to bea “fraud” and “as much of a parody [“of a mother”] as everybody and every-thing else” (130; 132).

From this same interview with his mother emerge facts about Cincinna-tus’s anonymous and faceless male parent, whom Cincinnatus likewise re-jects, as he runs through the possible scenarios that would determine hisfather’s occupation: a runaway sailor, perhaps a “sylvan robber,” or else “awayward craftsman, a carpenter . . . ” (133). “He was also like you,” his motherconfides, blushing. How, we do not know, though the mention of craftsman-ship, the fashioning of idols and forms, is not insignificant. “At fifteen Cincin-natus went to work in the toy workshop” (27). As for Socrates’ relation to hisfather Sophroniscus, Guthrie gives a good account:

His father is said to have been a stonemason or sculptor, and refer-ences in Plato to Daedalus as his ancestor [ . . . ] do something to con-firm this [ . . . . ] The justification for the mythical genealogy is thatit was regular Greek practice for a craft to be handed on from fatherto son. Accordingly it was said that Socrates himself was brought up


in the sculptor’s craft, which he may have practiced in his earlieryears [ . . . ] ‘before he deserted it for paideia [culture]’ as Lucian laterput it.25

Finally there is Marthe, dutiful wife to Cincinnatus, concerning whosetemperament we are spared no details:

whence the malice and obstinacy that suddenly . . . So soft, so amus-ing and warm, and then suddenly . . . At first I thought she was doingit deliberately, perhaps to show how another in her place might havegrown shrewish and stubborn. Can you imagine my amazementwhen I realized that this was her real self! [ . . . ] ‘Your little wife looksso quiet and gentle, but she bites, I tell you’ . . . and the base thing isthat the verb was not being used figuratively . . . (63).

The tales in antiquity that sprang up around the figure of Socrates’ wife Xan-thippe were legion, and not a whit less damning than Cincinnatus’s depictionof Marthe. She was the proverbial shrew, already recognized in Socrates’ dayas “the most troublesome woman of all time” (Xenophon, Symposium 2.10),Socrates’ first and most formidable sparring partner. Xenophon’s Memorabilia(2.2.7) relates how in an intimate moment with his eldest son Lamprocles,Socrates patiently had to endure the catalogue of complaints that his wife hadspawned, thanks to what may be summarized as her chalepotēta, her difficultdisposition and wicked temper. The following dialogue ensues: (Socrates)“What in your opinion is more difficult to bear, the savagery of a wild beastor that of your mother?” (Lamprocles) “I think that of a mother such as thisone.” “Did she ever injure you by biting or trampling upon you, the waymany have suffered from beasts?” The answer which Lamprocles gives is“Yes.”

(iii) “A Socratic death.” In his commentary on Pushkin’s Eugen Onegin,Nabokov makes the following remark concerning an allusion, whichhe duly notes and corrects, to the Julie of La Nouvelle Héloïse. Juliedies, he says,

in one of the least credible scenes of the novel. Her death isvery Socratic, with long speeches, assembled guests,and a good deal of drinking—indeed she all but getsintoxicated during those last hours.26

As this is a key exhibit in the present chain of argument, not for the verifica-tion it supplies, but for the layers of interpretation it paradigmatically opensup, we shall need to linger over Rousseau a moment longer. One instantly re-coils at the thought of a conflation that mistakes intoxication for toxication,and transposes the dying Socrates into the convivial setting of the Symposium.But this is, in essence, what Rousseau appears to be doing at the end of hisnovel, by overlaying two dialogues in order to achieve troubling and discor-dantly doubled and equivocal effects. The moment of transition, or rather ofimbrication, occurs during Julie’s last day (“and the last day of her life was

25. Guthrie 1971, 58-59.26. Pushkin 1991, 2:340; emphasis added

Porter 403

also the most delightful”27) when, seated at table, Julie suddenly requests thatsome “foreign wine (vin étranger)” be imported into the otherwise familiar set-ting (ibid., 731). The wine is sent for, none arrives:

One tried hard to look for the key to the Cave, but to no avail . . . . I [M.de Womar] broke down the door of the cave and declared that hence-forth everyone should have as much wine as they liked. (731)

Julie discretely asks for a diluted “tablespoonful” of wine. “The doctor gaveit to her in a glass and wanted her to drink it undiluted (pur).” (ibid.). Thewine, “pure” and doubled in dosage (not wine plus water but wine minuswater, hence wine plus wine), in turn precipitates her final convulsion—a clas-sic case of the pharmakon effect,28 since the potion Julie takes is a highly un-stable literary composite of hemlock and wine, poison and medicine, despiteevery pretension to a purity of substance and of essence that absolutely per-vades this last scene, which reeks of apotheosis. In a last-minute “entretien,”Julie re-examines her life from the perspective of the deathbed (“le lit”):

Then, tracing the thread of events, she made a brief recapitulation ofher entire life in order to show . . . that, by degrees, she had achievedthe pinnacle of happiness that is permitted on earth, . . . right up tothe point of the separation of goods and evils. (723; emphasis added)

By “separation of goods and evils,” Julie is referring to the prospect ofshuffling off this mortal coil, and with it the world of the senses, as the con-tinuation of the same “thread” four pages of entretien later makes plain:

While pursuing the thread of her ideas on what of her could remainwith us, she spoke about her old reflections (de ses anciennes ré-flexions) about the state of souls when separated from the body (727,emphasis added)

Discounting the received motives for the visitations of “Revenants,” Julie un-furls her “ancient” metaphysical tenets:

How could a pure Spirit act on a soul locked up in a body and which,in virtue of this union, could not perceive anything except throughthe intervention of its organs? . . . For finally . . . what good would thesenses be when they would have nothing more to do? (727-28)

So convincingly does Julie play her Socratic part, virtually quoting lines outof Socrates’ own final bedside discourse, in the Phaedo, on the immortality ofthe soul, that the internal narrator/“editor” of the novel feels compelled toadd a lengthy explanatory note, which serves a double, contradictory func-tion. The note is something of an uneasy apology, out of deference to thesource from which Julie so heavily borrows. But it is also something of a signintended to add to the pedagogical gravity of the occasion, and so it actuallyreinstates the authenticity and purity of Julie’s ethical position: “Plato says [inthe Phaedo, e.g., 67b-d, 69d-e, 82c-d, 113d-3, 114b-c] that upon death the souls

27. Rousseau 1959-1995, 2:730; translation mine.28. See Derrida 1981.


of the just, who have incurred no stain on earth, free themselves from matterin all their purity” (727).

To conclude the discussion of Rousseau, let us note that the equivocal-ness that surrounds Julie and her behavior is applied consistently until theend of the novel. Julie’s death is traversed by a series of deflated expectations:she never is what she seems, she raises hopes where there are none, and thusshe assumes a certain phantasmal identity. As the author of the last letter (herhusband) says, recalling his dashed hopes of finding Julie alive, “Everythingwas disguised, altered, changed” (735; emphasis added). The “actual” Julie,like the key to the cave, is missing because she belongs to the Cave of fiction,to Plato’s Cave.

The relevance of the last scenes of La nouvelle Héloïse to Invitation, includ-ing the element of disguise (standing for the elusive quality of transmuted fic-tions) should already be partly apparent. Seen from the vantage point ofInvitation, it is less as an allusion than as a paradigm that the case of Rousseauis interesting. In the first place, Julie illustrates how powerfully the mecha-nisms of allusion, essentially an intertextual phenomenon, operate at the in-terstices of texts, at a distance from texts. Rousseau, the editor of the Pléiadeinforms us, “did not read Plato in the original but knew his works well.”29 Ex-actly the same is true of Nabokov, who had one further advantage: he waswell aware of Rousseau’s use of Plato.30 Beyond this, the Rousseau-Plato con-figuration provides a model for a curious intertextual phenomenon, wherebytwo discrepant source texts (e.g. the Phaedo and the Symposium) are conspicu-ously conflated and superimposed on a third (Julie). Nabokov described thisconflation as “one of the least credible scenes of the novel.” I would like toargue that he has, in turn, made a calculating use of the very same31 techniquein Invitation, thus rendering not just one or two scenes incredible, but thewhole novel.

If we are to pursue the Cincinnatus-Socrates configuration further, thenext step is to consider the dramatic context of the novel. This lands us backin the Phaedo again. But the Phaedo is not the whole story. The penultimatechapter of the novel briefly interposes a symposiastic scene that results, pre-dictably enough, in unspeakable grotesqueries (“Afraid, aren’t you? Here,have a drink on the brink,” 184). The formally discordant effects are trebled bythe sudden physical infusion of crowded bodies in the midst of the otherwise

29. Rousseau 1959-1995, 2:1807 (note to p. 727); annotation by Bernard Guyon.30. See n. 46, below, on Nabokov’s knowledge of Plato.31. By “same” I do not mean to imply that Nabokov consciously alluded to the tech-

nique that can be found in Julie. On the other hand, I do not mean to preclude thepossibility of an unconscious suggestion that is at work interstitially within a tra-dition founded by Plato, one example of which is found at the end of sec. §13 ofNietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy: “[Socrates] went to his death with the calm withwhich, according to Plato’s description, he leaves the Symposium at dawn, thelast of the revelers, to begin a new day, while on the benches and on the groundhis drowsy companions remain behind to dream of Socrates, the true eroticist” (Ni-etzsche 1967, 89; emphasis added). For an analysis of how Nietzsche understoodthis dream image to have left its impact on Plato in the form of the myth ofSocrates, which will be of some importance in what follows below, see Porter 2000,111.

Porter 405

solitary and disembodied presence of Cincinnatus. The crowning incident ofthe banquet affair is M’sieur Pierre’s symbolic sprinkling of wine on Cincin-natus’s and his own heads (185), the wine thematically figuring the dual usageand incompatibility of toast and sacrifice (much as the glass of wine imbibedby Julie on her last day augured both health and death), while formally fig-uring the system of allusions and distortions, of juxtapositions and superim-positions, upon which the scene, and the book as a whole, are based. There is,moreover, one other distortive conflation of two key Platonic dialogues in In-vitation, this superimposition dominating the novel from start to finish. But inorder to broach that greater issue, we first must prepare the ground and clar-ify the transposition of the Phaedo into the setting of Invitation.

As the dialogue which represents Socrates in his last hours proves in factto be an inexhaustible fund of images and ideas for Invitation, its discussionwill have to be subdivided. For now, only the most obvious points of con-tact—details of physical and dramatic setting—will be dealt with. Other top-ics are to be touched on below. Once again, for the sake of economy, thetreatment that follows will be highly schematic.

(a) Socrates’ execution is delayed by uncertain winds, leaving the date opento speculation. In the interim Socrates takes up, for the first and last time in hislife, literary composition, which is largely therapeutic in value (to “clear” hisconscience, 60e). Similarly, Cincinnatus “finds” paper and pencil in the prison(12). Writing for both is a form of spiritual preparation (52: “preparation ofthe soul”), the compulsion to leave behind—definitively leave behind—a lit-erary remain (a corpus), however insignificant. Poetic emulation (“env[y] ofpoets,” 194) is the sign, for both, of a tedious, repetitious postponement.

(b) From the vantage of his bed (klinē), the most prominent piece of furniturein the cell (and it is philosophical furniture; see below), Socrates greets hisguests (60a) and bids them farewell (117e). If the dialogue strikes us as beingsomewhat clinical in tone, this is because the bed is the locus of the body andthe body’s inclinations, the topos which the dialogue desires, with all the fu-tility of desperation: namely, Socrates’ body, furnishing the theme with whichthe dialogue commences and to which it ultimately returns, or rather to whichit nostalgically yearns to return but never can, since by then the body is whatSocrates was. Rubbing the blood back into his freshly unchained legs, Socratescomments on pleasure’s close connection to pain: “they are like two bodiesattached to the same head” (60b). This corporeal dualism heralds the single,most obsessive topic of the sequel, the duality of body and soul, the releasingof their bonds at death, translation into “the company of others like ourselves”(67a-b), “beings of a kindred nature” (79d), into the realm of unveiled “truth”(alētheia, 67b).

Cincinnatus’s terminal fate is tied relentlessly to the “cot,” whose hori-zontal plane provides a surface from which he can discard the attitudes of thebody and mount vertically, transcendentally, to his purest condition. This tran-scendental reduction is the seduction of the klinē:32 “What anguish! Cincinna-tus, what anguish! [ . . . ] What anguish, Cincinnatus, how many crumbs in thebed!” (48). Cincinnatus’s dualistic relation to his body (read: the world; cf. 25:

32. Cf. 32: “What was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly coloring the air. . . .”


“What stars, what thought and shades above, and what ignorance below”) isso painfully and pleasurably obvious, it needs no further stressing, except tomention that the novel’s ambivalent end is the rigorous consequence of a vac-illation experienced throughout: as the librarian “double[s] up, vomiting” atthe sight of Cincinnatus’s beheading, Cincinnatus’s inner double, the “an-swer” to his self-posed metaphysical questions (222), unfolds and stalks off “inthat direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him” (223, thelast words of the novel; emphasis added).

(c) The inner fracture of being takes its heaviest toll on the frangible body,whose matter splinters off into countless causes and metaphors: the physicalbody is a distraction, a hindrance, the source of disease, love, desire, fear,phantasms (eidōla) and non-sense (phlyariai) (66c). But the body is also morethan this. It is the sum total of all the infractions against the soul; it is the verycell in which Socrates has been detained:

up to the time when philosophy takes it over his soul is a helplessprisoner, chained and glued (proskekollēmenē)33 in the body, com-pelled to view reality not directly but only through its prison bars,and wallowing in utter ignorance. And philosophy can see that theimprisonment is ingeniously effected by the prisoner’s own activedesire, which makes him first accessory to his own confinement.(82e-83a)

Cincinnatus’s body is susceptible to the same gamut of metaphorization,which is perhaps best summarized by the description that follows:

He was very thin, and now, as the light of the setting sun exaggeratedthe shadows of his ribs, the very structure of his rib cage seemed a tri-umph of cryptic coloration inasmuch as it expressed the barred natureof his surroundings, of his gaol [ . . . . ] As he dried himself, trying to findsome diversion in his own body, he kept examining his veins and hecould not help thinking how he would soon be uncorked and all thecontents would run out. (65; emphasis added)

Clearly, Cincinnatus evinces only a wavering commitment, so to speak, to hisSocratism. Any analogies that can be adduced must of necessity pass throughthe distortive prism of parody. Thus, the visitation of Socrates’ household (hischildren and “the women of the household,” Phaedo 116b; Xanthippe had beenpresent and brought home as the dialogue began, 60a) just moments before thepharmakon is administered, turns into the nightmarish “interview” with the“entire family,” Marthe’s own version of the klinē (the “black couch,” 100) “on

33. On the “sticky” nature of appearances in Invitation, compare the inaugural ges-ture of the novel: “The hoary judge put his mouth close to his ear, panted for amoment, made the announcement and slowly moved away, as though ungluinghimself” (11). The pasteboard world, so “hastily” put together, no less readily fallsapart. M’sieur Pierre is the pre-eminent magician who presides over these fabri-cations. On p. 85 he gallantly, and symbolically (not to say, stonily), offers to mendthe rent fabric of things for Cincinnatus: “Who will console a sobbing infant, andglue his broken toy together? M’sieur Pierre . . . . . All will be done by M’sieurPierre.”

Porter 407

34. I owe this quotation from Milton, Paradise Lost 4.76 to David Lloyd.

which Marthe was reclining” included (105). Cincinnatus cannot competewith a philosopher who rejoicingly makes a “profession” of dying (Phaedo67e), except in his aspirations, for instance his aspiration to locate the propername of the world as opposed to “the so-called order of so-called things ofwhich your so-called world consists” (69) with all the “so-called pleasures”connected with this so-called reality (64d). The contrast between realities, ofwhich Cincinnatus is quite conscious, causes him to feel pangs of remorse thathis inmate soul has “disgraced” itself through its preoccupation with the“dithering details” of sensuous memory,

For I know that the horror of death is nothing really, a harmless con-vulsion—perhaps even healthful for the soul [ . . . ]—and that thereonce lived, in caverns where there is the tinkle of a perpetual stillicide, andstalactites, sages who rejoice at death and who—blunderers for the mostpart, it is true—yet who in their own way mastered— [ . . . ] (l93)

as Cincinnatus cannot.

(iv) “In the lowest deep a lower deep.”34 If Cincinnatus appears to havea faulty “recollection” of the Phaedo (in misplacing the sage Socratesin a “cavern”), this could be attributed, with some plausibility, to hishaving assimilated Socrates to his own condition. His prison is, afterall, just that, a cave or cavern, located in the depths (the “crevice,” 11)of a massive rock formation that is referred to, misleadingly, as “thefortress.” In point of fact, this fortress is nothing but a labyrinth ofstone passageways joining three stone-walled cells to the artificiallyrecessed outside: “not only was the tower huge, but the wholefortress towered hugely on the crest of a huge cliff, of which itseemed to be a monstrous outgrowth” (42). The line between whatis naturally a cave and what is artificially cave-like seems intention-ally blurred, a metonym: “[Cincinnatus] caught a whiff of dampnessand mold just as though he had passed from the bowels of thefortress wall into a natural cave” (164). Compare p. 72: “the coldwall—undoubtedly related to the rock on which the fortress hadrisen.” Extending the metonymy, it appears as if Cincinnatus’s cell isjust such a cave within the fortress bowels, the orifice of light pass-ing through a “tunnel” (the window is assimilated to the epicenemetaphor of a natural/unnatural tunnel, 28), which debouches,along its “incline” (“the inclined cavity of the window,” ibid.), de-clensions of light, figurations of the visible: the window bars cast“their shadowed repetition on the peeling walls of the stone incline”(ibid.). Skiagraphia.

Has Cincinnatus in fact “misremembered” the Socratic example? On thecontrary, let us suppose that he has recalled the Phaedo entirely through theoptic of its culminating myth; that Cincinnatus is recalling, in a stupid or be-wildered fashion—completely literally—the wondrous version of a geogra-phy that Socrates creates a few moments before making his final preparationsfor the afterlife: “the idea [visible shape] of the earth such as I trust it to be,


and its topoi [regions]” (108d-e). Here is an excerpt from this sublime specta-cle:

We live round the sea like ants or frogs round a pond [ . . . . ] Thereare many hollow places all round the earth [ . . . . ] We do not recog-nize that we are living in [the earth’s] hollows, but assume that weare living on the earth’s surface. Imagine someone living in thedepths of the sea. He might think that he was living on the surface,and seeing the sun and the other heavenly bodies through the water;he might think that the sea was the sky. He might be so sluggish andfeeble that he had never reached the top of the sea, never emergedand raised his head from the sea into this world of ours, and seenfor himself [ . . . ] how much purer and more beautiful it really is thanthe one in which his people lives [ . . . . ] And if his nature were ableto bear the sight (theōrousa) he would recognize that this is the trueheaven and the true light and the true earth. For this earth and itsstones and all the regions in which we live are marred and corroded,just as in the sea everything is corroded by the brine, and there is novegetation worth mentioning, and scarcely any degree of perfect for-mation, but only caverns and sand and measureless mud, and tractsof slime [ . . . ], and nothing is in the least worthy to be judged beau-tiful by our standards. (109b-110a)

This, then, is the myth or metaphor Cincinnatus will have, on the read-ing I am suggesting, entirely literalized in the process of recollecting it. Whichis to say that Nabokov, too, has performed this literalization. Or else Nabokovhas anticipated a move that Plato himself would make later on in the Repub-lic, and then vengefully subverts it through a literalization that Plato had alsoforeseen and forfended by displacing it into the unreliable mode of analogyand image (“It is a strange [atopon, place-less] picture [eikōn] and strange pris-oners,” Glaucon replies to Socrates’ depiction of the cave in Republic, Book 7):Nabokov, in other words, replaces Socrates with a Cincinnatus, and thenplunges him deep within Plato’s Cave, which is also an allegory for the humancondition as a distorted prison of the soul and for the disgrace of materialthings.

Here is how Book 7 of the Republic opens:

Next, said I, here is a parable to illustrate the degrees in which ournature may be enlightened or unenlightened. Imagine [ide, “see”; thevisual syntagm of philosophical speculation is critically important]the condition of men living in a sort of cavernous chamber under-ground, with an entrance open to the light and a long passage alldown the cave. Here they have been from childhood, chained by theleg and also by the neck, so that they cannot move and can see onlywhat is in front of them. At some distance higher up is the light of afire burning behind them; and between the prisoners and the fire isa track with a parapet built along it, like the screen of a puppet-show,which hides the performers while they show their puppets over thetop. (514a-b)

The shadows cast by projection onto the facing wall are the delusive images

Porter 409

35. Gregor 1999, 17; trans. adapted.

of a perceived reality, in the absence of philosophical paideia and eventuallymathematics (Republic, Books 6 and 7; Invitation p. 205: “That is how mathe-matics is created; it has its fatal flaw. I have discovered it.”). Paideia, translatedabove as “enlightenment,” literally construed, means maturation through ed-ucation, a metaphor that Kant would famously commemorate in his pro-grammatic essay, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”(1784), which opens with the words, “Enlightenment is the emergence (Aus-gang) of mankind from its self-incurred immaturity.”35 From childhood, ekpaidōn (514a5), the prisoners of Plato’s Cave take in a putative reality as it re-veals itself to their senses, mistaking the shadows of gadgetry and the echoesof the thaumatopoios (puppet-master) for the real thing: “In every way, then,such prisoners would recognize as reality nothing but the shadows of those ar-tificial objects” (515b). Indeed, their self-conceptions would be limited entirelyto the reflections thrown on the walls by their own bodies, the more so “if alltheir lives they had been prevented from moving their heads” (515a).

Paideia prefigures release, ascent, and the pedagogical “conversion” ofthe soul (periagōgē, 518d4), a turning through “Leitung” (psychagōgia) into light:“It is a question of ’night or day’ to be determined not, as in the children’sgame, by spinning a shell, but by the turning about of the soul from a day thatis like night to the veritable day, that journey up to the real world which weshall call the true pursuit of wisdom” (521c). The turning of the soul requiresa certain violence, a forcible arrest that releases:

Now consider what would happen if their release from the chainsshould come about in this way. Suppose one of them set free andforced suddenly to stand up, turn his head, and walk with eyes liftedto the light [ . . . . ] And suppose someone were to drag him awayforcibly up the steep and rugged ascent and not let him go until hehad hauled him out into the sunlight, would he not suffer pain andvexation at such treatment, and, when he had come out into the light,find his eyes so full of its radiance that he could not see a single oneof the things that he was now told were real? (515c; 515e-516a)

Cincinnatus enacts just such an ascent into daylight on three separate oc-casions in the novel, the first occurring on p. 42: “It was not easy to climb thesteep staircase, whose progress was accompanied by a gradual thinning ofthe gloom [. . .].” The second is more dramatic, and more explicitly erotic, asCincinnatus tunnels his way “from the bowels of the fortress wall into a nat-ural cave” before bursting into “a blaze of light,” insignia of “freedom” (164).He retraces a familiar symptomatology: “dizziness” resulting “from liberty,altitude and space,” then a period of light-adaption (“He regained his breathand got used to the brightness dazzling him . . . ”), followed by lucidity, per-ception, lawless “excursions” of the eyes (cf. 44). Each of these ascensions isshort-lived, and the gratification they supply comes heavily qualified. Thepanoramic splendors are tinged with artificiality, whether he is met withponds resembling mirrors or with windows “borrowing” the sunset’s blaze.“How bewitching all this is” becomes a litany that diminishes in significancewith each repetition, until a phrase like “Matter was weary” (43) usurps the


very ground for aesthetic pleasure. Similarly, the second spectacle of natureterminates in the object Emmie, the virtual analogue of Cincinnatus’s com-plex desires, “her face and legs painted pink by the sunset” (164; emphasisadded). It is only fitting that Cincinnatus should be betrayed immediately byhis own desire, as the coquettish young girl deftly lures him into returningback down into the Cave: “All her movements betrayed excitement, rapturoushaste. ‘Where are we going? Down?’ Cincinnatus inquired haltingly, laughingfrom impatience . . . .” (ibid.).

Nor should we limit the scope of the analogies that present themselves assuch. A logic of greater proportions is at stake. As the fortress is to the rock,Cincinnatus’s imprisonment is to his life as a whole. From his earliest memo-ries, he has dwelt dissatisfied in a cave. This is why it can be so meaningfullysaid of him, at thirty years of age, “It was then that Cincinnatus stopped and,looking around him as if he had just entered this stony solitude, summoned up allhis will, evoked the full extent of his life [ . . . ]” (72). The Cave, by explicit ex-tension, reaches back to a first pedagogical context, where even then heshowed a preference for “white” nooks as opposed to the “shadow” of en-casements that negatively defined his place of comfortable resort (96), whilesitting “at the end of the stone gallery” (97).

Cincinnatus is instinctively drawn to the light, perhaps like a moth, withall caution thrown to the winds, be the consequences momentary paralysis orfinal death. In uncanny anticipation of his second ascent, Cincinnatus enactsthe abbaglio that Socrates describes: “Cincinnatus lay prone on the flagstones,spread-eagled as one who has been felled by a sunstroke, and indulging themummery of the senses, clearly visualized through the tympanum the secretpassage, [ . . . ] and sensed [ . . . ] how the stones were being loosened, and hehad already begun guessing, as he looked at the wall, where it would crackand burst open with a crash” (147). Cincinnatus is literally smitten by the sun,for the preeminent source of light is also the primary source of illusion in thisworld. This deserves to be stressed: the sun is as much in the world as it standspoised on its periphery to illuminate that world. It is, indeed, the ultimate fig-ure for the phenomenality of all things (ta phainomena), and so the hallucino-gen shares in the flaws of hallucination. But note the perversity of the logic. IfPlato establishes an analogy between the firelight of the Cave and the sun, hisintention is to distance this coordinated pair through an epistemological dif-ference, and to approximate as much as possible the sun, as figure, to therealm of intelligibles and non-sensibles.

This is made explicit, for instance, at Republic 506e, where the sun is saidto stand somehow outside the sensible realm it informs, as a cause stands in re-lation to its effects, or as the Idea of the Good stands in relation to intelligibleobjects. In Invitation, the vulnerability of the sun’s pivotal position is throwninto relief: it cannot simultaneously figure the ultimacy of truth and thattruth’s immediate distortion, and also remain coherent; it cannot, that is, func-tion both literally and metaphorically at once. Thus, whereas Plato’s para-digm operates on a principle of a proliferative chain of metaphors thatsuccessively degenerate into literal signs once they have given life to higherorder metaphors, Nabokov’s novel seeks to arrest that movement by focusingon its essential ambivalence: precisely because the sun cannot coherently serveas a figure and a fact, in Invitation it is called upon to do both these things si-

Porter 411

multaneously. Thus we find no absolute confirmations in the novel of a higherlevel of reality, of a “divine craftsman,” God, the Good, or the like. Instead,what we have is a Platonic world decapitated, ineradicably cut off from itsideals, which appear only in the attenuated guise of Cincinnatus’s quailingaspirations. Cincinnatus is, as it were, a Socrates manqué who lacks thestrength of his convictions.

Cincinnatus’s third ascent is his last. Only death finally carries convic-tion:

Cincinnatus tried in vain to out-wrangle his fear, despite his under-standing that he ought actually to rejoice at the awakening whoseproximity was presaged by barely noticeable phenomena, but thepeculiar effects on everyday implements, by a certain general insta-bility, by a certain flaw in all visible matter—but the sun was still re-alistic, the world still held together, objects still observed an outwardpropriety. (213)

Only in his last moments does Cincinnatus achieve lucidity, although thequestion of conviction is now relentlessly tied to the question of convincing-ness. In what is surely the “least convincing scene” of a novel that intention-ally flaunts its unconvincing character, the line between parody andincorporation withers away definitively. Cincinnatus observes, at last, that“something had happened to the lighting, there was something wrong withthe sun” (219). He has evidently willed the effigy of a world into its Platonicmode, until finally he achieves the death that philosophy, long ago, had pre-scribed for him: the released prisoner, upon re-descending into the Cave, is“required once more to deliver his opinion on those shadows, in competitionwith the prisoners who had never been released”; he will face their scorn andridicule, and be charged with blindness: “If they could lay hands on the manwho was trying to set them free and lead them up, they would kill him” (516e-517a). This, Plato indicates all too ominously (shifting his levels by anothersubtle degree), would take place via the law courts, the venue for disputesabout “the shadows of justice or the images that cast those shadows,” and for“wrangling over the notions of what is right in the minds of men who havenever beheld Justice itself” (517de). The note in the Cornford translation sim-ply reads: “An allusion to the fate of Socrates.”

Catoptric effects

The last section concluded on an insoluble note. If Cincinnatus must decrease,what guarantees are there that he has in fact deceased, only to join the com-pany of kindred spirits? Or that this final transitive motion is not rather thelast intransitive motion of his mind, carried out by the sheer force of its ownmomentum: the last strained echo of his projective thought, a frail wreath,wrack or limn, that attains no new reality, but merely completes the formal cir-cuit back to Socrates? On this interpretation of the most difficult final scene,Cincinnatus would lose all purchase on his identity just when he seems mostto have regained it; he would be the equivalent of a mirrored image, some-thing even less substantial than an image in a mirror, let alone the original ob-ject mirrored. And, given the ever-closer approximation of Platonic and


Nabokovian fictions, we have every reason to believe that Cincinnatus is in-deed a character who has lost his bearings between two literary realms andtheir corresponding ontologies or metaphysical worlds.

In the following, I would like to explore the consequences that Nabokov’sparody of Socrates holds for a theory of form and substance in imitative con-texts. Given that such a theory is implicit in Nabokov’s fiction, one would liketo think that it is also a theory to which he would have subscribed. The mir-ror analogy will play a critical role in this discussion, for as we shall see, thedistortive mechanisms of parody operate through the encountering, not of atext and its mirror, but of two mirrors, since the mirrored text (Plato’s) is in-evitably a thing recast in the light of the mirroring element (the fictionalprocess that Nabokov installs in his own),36 while the recast image in turn en-gages its parent text (again, Plato) in a similar specular relation, and so on, adinfinitum. The mirror analogy is simply a visual analogue for an infinitelyricher and more complex relation between two texts. One point of this anal-ogy is to lay stress on the lively interanimation that occurs whenever two textsare brought into contact in a parodic way. And yet, the net yield of this spec-ular structure, we might add with an eye to the discussion to ensue, will notresemble a mere chain or sequence of derivations; it will not be a logically orhierarchically ordered structure, but a polychromatic, multi-faceted system ofeffects not unlike a hall of mirrors. But since the focus here will be on parodyas a critique of imitation, we will be concerned only with the critical functionand use of this endless recession of mirrors in Invitation to a Beheading.37

Catoptric effects, on any reading, are ubiquitous in the novel. While it istrue that mirrors solicit, in conventional novelistic phraseology, the attitudesof mind, art, and consciousness,38 they enjoy a more specific function than thisin Invitation, exactly because of their ubiquity. The fact, for instance, that thereis not a single character who cannot be directly implicated in the mirror motif,is only one (emblematic) aspect of the problem: mirrors here serve as a kindof badge indicating membership in a generic class whose identity is only in-directly visible. For behind the “hand-mirrors” (21, 65, 99) and the “pocketmirror[s]” (71), the “mirrorlike pupils” (29) and the erotic mirrors (145)—be-

36. I say “installs” to highlight the processual nature of the mechanism, and to getaway from the notion of a static text. Once inaugurated, the process is beyondeven the control of the author: the conceptual interplay has its own momentum ofentangled complication and implication which no description can adequately en-compass. The notion of the specular is a poor substitute that has the virtue of atleast suggesting the near-infinite interplay and mutual interference of images withone another.

37. Cf. Blanchot 1965: “un univers où l’image cesse d’être seconde par rapport au modèle, oùl’imposture prétend à la veritè, où enfin il n’y a plus d’original, mais une éternelle scin-tillation où se disperse, dans l’éclat du détour et du retour, l’absence d’origine” (quotedin Deleuze 1969, 303 n. 7, Appendix I, “Platon et le simulacre”).

38. “Nabokov invokes a whole spectrum of traditional symbolic associations sug-gested by mirrors—the mirror of art held to nature; the mirror of consciousness ‘re-flecting’ reality (or does it only reflect itself, we are at least led to wonder; isCincinnatus’s prison merely a house of mirrors?); the mirror is a depthless, in-verted, unreal, mocking imitation of the real world” (Alter 1970, 51). Further, Rorty1979; and Clark 1986, chs. 3-5.

Porter 413

39. See Cornford 1957, 184; Mills 1968. Gill 1987, 48-49 finds the analogy “apt” butnotes that it is not explicitly named by Plato, who runs through a number of othermetaphors for the receptacle of appearances to account for its different functions,which remains on his own reckoning “obscure.”

40. It is perhaps worth pointing out that although the Russian title literally means In-vitation to an Execution, Nabokov chose the less literal rendering, Invitation to a Be-heading, for the sake of euphony (to avoid “the unpleasant duplication of thesuffix” [viz., “-tion”])—though he claims, perhaps puckishly, that he would haveoriginally chosen the latter sense (beheading) if the equivalent wording hadn’tcreated “a similar stutter” of its own in his native tongue (Priglashenie na otseche-nie golgvï); see Nabokov 1965, 5, from the Foreword. By insisting on beheading,Nabokov thematizes anti-Platonism (the decapitation of ideals). What is more, thetitle, together with this explanatory note, twice decapitates a doubling (of sound),thus pointing ahead to the novel’s ungluing of mimesis. That this doubling never

hind these and the appearances they mirror—lies a Platonic mirror that cap-tures all of the phenomenal world on its polished surface:

It seemed as though at any moment, in the course of his movementsabout the limited space of the haphazardly invented cell, Cincinna-tus would step in such a way as to slip naturally and effortlesslythrough some chink of the air into its unknown coulisses to disap-pear there with the same easy smoothness with which the flashingreflection of a rotated mirror moves across every object in the roomand suddenly vanishes, as if beyond the air, in some new depth ofether. (121; emphasis added)

The allusion is of course to the mirror Plato invokes in Book 10 of the Repub-lic as a means to disgrace all representational art; it takes us, in other words,straight to the heart of Plato’s theory of mimesis. There, Socrates asks Glau-con (596c) what sort of name could apply to a craftsman who can produceevery kind of article from every known craft; who further can produce, be-yond artifacts, all known products of nature: all plants and animals, “himselfincluded,” earth, sky, gods, the heavenly bodies, and even the invisible thingsstored within Hades. The answer is simple:

The quickest [way] perhaps would be to take a mirror and turn itround in all directions. In a very short time you could produce sunand stars and earth and yourself and all the other animals and plantsand lifeless objects which we mentioned just now. (596d-e)

Where Nabokov allows the rotated mirror to be hidden behind thecoulisses (121), leaving the agent of the “rotating” anonymous, Plato does nothesitate to name him: here it is the poiētēs (intentionally general, to cover anyrepresentational artist); in the Timaeus (49c-50b), where the mirror figuresagain but on a cosmological scale, it is the Demiurge of the world.39 The twonames which Plato supplies correspond exactly to the two options Nabokovleaves dangling open: the events and effects in the novel are to be ascribed ei-ther to some fictional motivation (whether Cincinnatus’s own mind or the au-thor/narrator behind him) or else to the presumed ontological structure ofthe world contained in the narrative (which we would perforce call Platonic,whether it be full-blown or “decapitated,” lacking the overhead of its ideals).40


Without seeking to force the issue to a crisis prematurely, let us simply notethat both alternatives share a similar structure, and there is ample evidence foreither. The areas of overlap deserve further consideration.

Plato’s theory of imitation notoriously provides for an ontological dis-crimination, the basic principles for which are laid out in the pages that im-mediately follow the mirror analogy. The painter of a bed (standing for thework of any representational or mimetic artist) looks to the bed of the car-penter, who in turn looks to the Idea of Bed (the product of the divine crafts-man). The three levels of Bedhood illustrate three degrees of reality and ofknowledge, the lowest rung occupied by the shadowy imitation of an imita-tion, the copy of a copy, the third-hand understanding. This is the schema-tism that, for all its essential simplicity, laid a conceptual stranglehold on somany future developments in aesthetics through Kant and, despite Kant, wellinto this century.

But the schema is not without its lapses. Why, one might reasonably ask,a Bed (klinē)? At the outset of the demonstration, Socrates had made a seem-ingly bland and arbitrary choice “out of the many” possibilities for illustrat-ing the formal ties between ideas and physical objects: “For instance there areany number of beds or of tables, but only two Forms, one of Bed and one ofTable” (596a-b). If we follow the discussion, we observe that Socrates has beensomehow seduced by his preferences into a further elimination. The tablesdrop out, mysteriously, as do the beds in the plural, leaving only a solitarybed to be run through the three declensions of the real before being discardedfor grander speculations. What is of interest here is the symbolic value of thebed and its eventual supersession.

In the Platonic corpus, the klinē clearly represents the horizontal plane ofphysical, sensuous experience (it is without exception the primary locus oflove, life, and death) which both resists the vertical, transcendental motions ofthe mind and also invites a departure from the bodily needs through philos-ophy (the philosophical session, as in the Protagoras and the Symposium). Theklinē is the indispensable luxury of philosophy that must be dispensed with,the excess that must be exceeded (declined), in the name of a higher klinē. AndI would like to suggest that the klinē is, for these very same reasons, Plato’sway of signing the Socratic signature. For, if the bed is the exemplary piece ofphilosophical furnishing, it is indistinguishably bound up with the exemplaryphilosopher (as a record of its occurrences in Plato would readily show). Thebed of Republic Book 10 is arguably the same klinē on which Socrates philoso-phized (lived out his bios philosophikos); this is the klinē on which Socrates setaside his earthly frame in the Phaedo; and the bed’s ascension in Book 10through the declensions of reality represents Socrates’ ultimate assumptioninto the Platonic world of Forms. The klinē represents the idea of Socrates.

This is an important link. For Nabokov will import this notion directlyinto Invitation in a parodic, literalized form—by victimizing Socrates in theform of Cincinnatus (a devolved, Romanized version of the Greek citizen?; atthe very least, a cognitively challenged version of the paradigm of civic opac-ity and gnoseological turpitude), not only with the Cave of the Republic but

obtained, but was only imagined and contemplated (was never really “heard,”though it was explained), is only a further irony.

Porter 415

41. Plotinus, Enneads 5.3.2: “[the reasoning power] continues to acquire understand-ing as if by recognizing the new and recently arrived impressions (typoi) and fit-ting them to those which have long been within it: this process is what we shouldcall the ‘recollections’ of the soul” (trans. Armstrong); cf. ibid., 5.3.3: “Well, then,sense-perception sees a human being and gives its impression (typos) to discur-sive reason. What does reason say? It will not say anything yet, but only knows,and stops at that; unless perhaps it asks itself ‘Who is this?’ if it has met the per-son before, and says, using memory to help it, that it is Socrates.’ ” Socrates has plainlybecome, in the Neoplatonic tradition, a philosophical cliché for recollection itself.

42. The concept of “superfoetation” has a curious literary history. Nietzsche discussesit in The Birth of Tragedy with reference to Socrates’ “logical nature,” which he con-siders to be the product of a superfluous gemination of the spirit: it results “froma superfoetation” (“durch eine Superfötation”; Nietzsche 1988, 1:90). And it recurs ina fictional context that closely parallels Invitation, Beckett’s Molloy, where Molloyand Moran exemplify a “superfetatory” relationship not unlike that betweenCincinnatus and Socrates (the word appears at Beckett 1965, 99, but it could, andshould, be read back into the whole of the narrative in which it features).

also with the couch and the entire theory of imitation that rests on it (“Thecell’s quota of furniture consisted of a table, a chair and the cot,” 14). Cincin-natus’s transfiguration from his bed to a beyond will be hampered by the veryfactors that make this ascent thinkable in the first place, namely by his ties tothe Socratic klinē. Cincinnatus, posturing as a Socrates figure (and hence im-plicating Socrates as well), is entirely a creature of imitation imprisoned in aworld that rigorously enacts the Platonic schema in the absence of any outletsto the meta-schema, without, in other words, incorporating the positive ele-ments of the Platonic argument (metaphysics) into its structure. The mirror-ing device that generates the phenomena of Invitation is glimpsed on occasion,only to be withdrawn, occulted, and denied. Cincinnatus’s inferences as to itsreality are consequently so weak as to be at times utterly implausible. Butthere are other, more telling indicators of its implausibility.

Take one example: whereas Cincinnatus is on the one hand perfectly ca-pable of a Platonic insight into the “erroneous” nature of existence—how “thiswhole terrible, striped world . . . seems not a bad example of amateur crafts-manship, but is in reality calamity, horror, madness, error” (91; emphasisadded), and even into its derivative status (“It exists, my dream world, it mustexist, since, surely, there must be an original of the clumsy copy,” 93), on theother hand he admits, rarely but nonetheless, to a precociously revealed apti-tude for being a copy artist. Cincinnatus records his childhood insight intohis gnostical turpitude (“I knew without knowing,” 95); but curiously thatknowledge is accompanied by a prior learned skill: “I must have just learnedhow to make letters,” Cincinnatus reasons, since he was wearing a ring thatwas awarded to children who “already knew how to copy the model” (96).Significantly, it is the ensemble of legible skills that predates knowledge of aprior knowledge, like a seed which, once implanted, blossoms into a recol-lection (“for what is a recollection, if not the soul of an impression,” 181, pos-sibly a reminiscence of the neo-Platonist Plotinus).41

One of the themes running through this process involves a superimposi-tion, or rather superfoetation,42 of a kind of knowledge within a lacuna createdin the act of imitation (writing). The effect is that of an incision and then an in-

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sertion within the cut—a syncopation and an assertion, or a beheading in twosenses: a decapitation and a fitting-out with a head, in the sense of a befittingor bequeathing (compare the German Behauptung, “assertion”). The effect is,moreover, that of heliotypy and of imaginative assertion, such as is describedon pp. 52-53, where Cincinnatus traces the lacuna between a “movement andthe movement of the laggard shadow,” wherein he locates the real: “that sec-ond, that syncope—there is the rare kind of time in which I live—the pause,the hiatus.” But isn’t this pause filled with the status of a “second”? Doesn’tCincinnatus reiterate, time and again, the cadences of a prior metrics, andwonder “to the rhythm of an ancient poem” (53) inflicts itself on his mind al-most involuntarily, engraving his thoughts with that superfluous, terminal“archaic letter, an upsilamba” (26 [sic]: this represents a badly spliced mem-ory, in the consciousness or semi-consciousness of either Cincinnatus or else,more vaguely and plausibly, the novel itself, of two letters of the Greek al-phabet, upsilon and lambda), (re)tracing “only vestiges being the corpses ofstrangled words, like hanged men . . . evening silhouettes of gammas andgerunds” (90), seeking to revive “the ancient inborn art of writing [ . . . ] longsince forgotten” (93) through sheer willfulness, and Cincinnatus is trappedinto reproducing a tragically doomed crepuscular writing that, like the sun,simply goes on “repeating effects that were already familiar” (32)? It is as ifwriting preceded orality in the Platonic world of Forms, and then was broughtback through dim recollection. Consider once again the despairing line byCincinnatus quoted earlier: “I mean much more besides, but lack of writingskill, haste, excitement, weakness [ . . . ]. I know something. I know some-thing. But expression of it comes so hard!” (91).

Cincinnatus may have achieved this superfoetation on his identity, as aself-forged, willful invention of the self, that is, by his taking on—assuming—the (death) mask of Socrates. Cincinnatus may literally be, in other words, his“own accomplice” (90) as he accomplishes his own (mimicked) identity. Orelse this assumption may represent something that has been bequeathed tohim by the fictional environment he inhabits (Cincinnatus here functioningas a purely narrative or logical device who does not experience events butmerely engenders relations, much the way Socrates, innocent of writing, wasthe narrative invention of Plato’s literary fiction). Either way, Cincinnatus’smuch-vaunted “opacity” is easily misunderstood. If, as he boasts, he is not“transparent” in the way that others are, then he is opaque in the way of a mir-ror. This is all but stated at one point, where in his effort to mimic transparency(to imitate imitation) Cincinnatus becomes the fictional principle behind theworld in the novel, or simply that principle which regulates the novel: likethe Platonic mirror and the “rotated mirror” like it, Cincinnatus “would turnthis way and that, trying to catch the rays, trying with desperate haste to standin such a way as to seem translucent” (26).

Cincinnatus the mirror cannot surmount the optical limitations that hewould elude: try as he might, he can never achieve translucence (his “rota-tions” remain tropes, not a transparency in the proper sense). What of hisinner “lucidity”? This internal sense of sight or inner light cannot escape itsown phenomenality either: his utterance, “I am,” is heavily qualified by thefacts of recollection; each “I am” requires an “I remember” that affiliatesCincinnatus with “that first branding contact, the mainspring of [his] ‘I’,” viz.

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Porter 417

43. Plato’s concern with perspectivalism surfaces at Rep. 10.598a-b: “You may look ata bed or any other object from straight in front or slantwise or at any angle. Is therethen any difference in the bed itself, or does it merely look different?” “It onlylooks different.” “Well, that is the point. Does painting aim at reproducing any ac-tual object as it is, or the appearance of it as it looks? In other words, is it a repre-sentation (mimēsis) of the truth or of a semblance (phantasmatos)?” “Of asemblance.” “The art of representation (hē mimētikē), then, is a long way from re-ality.”

44. Nietzsche 1988, 11: 440; 34[66] (1885).

an initial typology and an alibi ego. Nothing in the novel can convincinglydissociate Cincinnatus’s inner and outer modes of perception; both are in-trinsically conditioned by the laws of perspective that govern all phenomenalvision (as Plato, long before the Cartesian experiment, objected43). Thus, thereis always a perspective to which Cincinnatus must remain blind, and fromwhich he must look as absurd as the “mirrored wardrobe” that, itself likewisea figure for Cincinnatus insofar as Cincinnatus figures the representationalstatus of his world, bears “its own private reflection” (99).

(Re)capitulation

I believe that the magic of Socrates was this: that hehad one soul, and behind that another, and behindthat another. Xenophon lay down to sleep in the fore-most one, Plato in the second, and then again in thethird, only here Plato went to bed with his own, sec-ond soul. Plato is himself somebody with many re-cesses and foregrounds.

Nietzsche44

Cincinnatus’s identity cannot be located with any certainty. Endowed withthe opacity of a mirror, he is not transparent to himself, and so his self-reflec-tions are no more trustworthy than the shadows he projects in his cell. Behindthe cipher Cincinnatus stands a complex association with another seeminglyopaque figure, or rather set of figures. If Nabokov appears to have made awholesale adoption and modification of a concentrated portion of the Platoniccorpus, the Platonic texts may be viewed as subtexts that have been variouslyshuffled, layered, and transposed, not to mention deformed with distortiveeffects, yielding a curious blend of parody, exposure, and reinscription.Nabokov successfully concealed his trail. His biographers and the vast ma-jority of his readers have simply denied the possibility that he could have hadany interest in Plato, never mind the classical tradition. But all the clues arethere, pointing us back to the classical past, in whatever jumbled form: “theinscriptions on the walls, [. . .] the classic pitcher with spelaean water in its res-onant depths” (119), the “whitewashed columns, friezes on the pediment, andpotted laurels” (181), Cincinnatus, Roman patrician and perfect citizen, Som-nus, god of dreams and twin brother to Death, heliotypy, Socrates Must De-crease, . . .

To what end, one might justifiably ask. Why this debunking of Socrates?Had we been looking closely, part of this question would have answered itself:Nabokov has not trained his sights on Socrates, but on the lacuna between

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Socrates and Plato which Plato sought to fill by erecting that supreme fiction,the greatest of Platonic myths: the myth of Socrates. Cincinnatus, in imitation ofSocrates, is actually closer to Plato’s Socrates than one might at first suspect.How short of the “real” Socrates does the imitation we meet in the Platonic di-alogues fall? The question admits of no answer. To the degree, then, thatCincinnatus is like Socrates, Cincinnatus must be said to embody both the factof imitation and the differential gap, the strivings after and the inevitableshortcomings that constitute this relationship to his predecessor: “In spite ofeverything I am comparatively” (12; emphasis added). Socrates, then, comes tofigure his own asymptotic nature, which he receives by virtue of being a crea-ture of interpretation and of interpolation. And the culprit, if there is any, is thesource of that infinite regress which only charitably might be called an “ap-proximation”—for it is nothing other than the Platonic theory of imitation it-self (of which Socrates was one of the original victims).

All of this complication is the sort of thing one might expect of a writerwho built his reputation on a scandalous exposure of the “mimetic-fallacy” ofliterature. Robert Alter’s reminder on this score bears repeating: “Nabokov isthe preeminent practitioner of partial magic in the novel, from Cervantes’sday down to our own. . . . He has been more self-conscious about his novelis-tic self-consciousness than any of his predecessors or imitators, more sharplyfocused on a continuing critical recapitulation of a whole literary tradition.”45

Although Nabokov’s own literary metaphysics is deeply antithetical to thePlatonic model, and in ways represents a total inversion of that scheme, in aneven stranger way his view of reality (as “an infinite succession of levels, lev-els of perception, of false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable”) ri-vals the Platonic view in its scathing attack on a reification of appearances,and on the self-sufficiency of mimetic illusions, of the pretension, for instance,to an objective authorial perspective, which is the hallmark of classical nine-teenth-century fiction (and is ridiculed in the image of the hypertrophic novelQuercus—a thousand-page novel recounting the life of a thousand-year oldoak tree, replete with camera hoisted to the “topmost” branches, surveyingomnisciently its own events, 122-23). The criticism extends to characterologi-cal self-sufficiency, even in a case like that of Cincinnatus who pretends to acamera-like objectivity (percipient consciousness) while denouncing photo-reflexivity. It is perhaps this degree of affinity that permits Nabokov to con-struct a novel that, on the surface, can replicate a Platonic universe with suchdeceptive fidelity. Cincinnatus’s proximity to Socrates and Socrates’ plight isprecisely the enabling fiction that ultimately sends readers off in the oppositedirection, into a “critical” reading (ultimately, too, a self-critical reading, aswe fall out of sympathy with empathizing, identification, that “romantic rot,”to speak with the novel). Finally, such an approach to Invitation shows, if noth-ing else, Nabokov defining his position vis-à-vis the classical problem of im-itation—indeed, at its very roots.

Some might object to a reading that fixates on issues germane to literatureand philosophy while it bypasses the topical nature of the novel, its political“message.” If indeed Invitation can be fairly read for its political opinions, asI think it can, we should not mistake the depth of the level of criticism im-

45. Alter 1975, 180; emphasis added.

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Porter 419

46. In Karlinsky 2001, 180. Evidently, Nabokov’s access to classical literature was sec-ond hand through facing translation, mainly in French (the Budé series). But henevertheless seems to have had a close familiarity with a number of Greek andLatin authors, from Homer and Plato to Vergil, Horace, and Propertius, amongothers. See Boyd 1990, 87, 150, 209 (“taxonomic Latin”), and thanks to Brian Boydfor additional information (per litt.). That Nabokov was perfectly capable of put-ting his classical learning to literary use is evident from his works. See Nabokov1970, 403 on p. 221 (lente currite, noctis equi, from Ovid, Amores, 1.13.40) and nowBoyd 2008, a Propertian allusion.

47. Or perhaps “they are like two bodies attached to the same head” (Plato, Phaedo60b; quoted earlier).

48. “The inscriptions on the walls had by now been wiped away. The list of rules like-wise had disappeared. Also taken away—or perhaps broken—was the classicpitcher with spelaean water in its resonant depths” (119; emphasis added). This isa figural breaking of the vessels, a dislocation and shattering of classical formthrough an anti-aesthetic spillage, which is, quite simply, Nabokov’s novel. Here,“classical” form coincides with a classical content, anamorphically distortedthrough the medium of parody (cf. the negativity inherent in the game of “nonnon”played before a mirror [136], which signals the productivity of Nabokov’s anti-aesthetics, double negation yielding a [not quite] positive integer).

plied. Plato’s Republic can and has been viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a tyran-nical conception and prototype. Nabokov’s own view of the matter can begauged from a letter written to Edmund Wilson on 24 December 1945:

I am working furiously at my novel [sc., Bend Sinister (1947), the lastin a trilogy of anti-totalitarian novels, of which Dar (The Gift) was thesecond (begun in 1935 and published serially in 1937-38), and Invi-tation the first] (and very anxious to show you a couple of new chap-ters). I detest Plato, I loathe Lacedaemon and all Perfect States. I weigh 195pounds.46

Socrates must decrease, Nabokov seems to say with bared teeth, defiantly un-Spartan (Socrates was a great admirer of the Spartan regime, as was Plato)and decidedly overweight. How much weight can be given to a statementthat issues from the end of a war, when evaluating a work published a fewyears before the atrocities that doubtless provoked the remark could occur?Probably quite a lot, if the reading given above is to be trusted, and if we keepin mind the indelible memory of Stalin and his Great Purge. Nabokov’s Invi-tation to a Beheading is accordingly a double-edged summons: Socrates com-plies by acquiring another head, Plato by losing his.47 And if Nabokov thewriter could in good conscience disavow Plato and Socrates as models, hecould do so only once he had sentenced them to spelæan obscurity.48

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