The Aesthetic as a 'Democratic Space': Political Philosophy of Nabokov's Bend Sinister
The Aesthetic as a 'Democratic Space': Political Philosophy of Nabokov's Bend Sinister
By Bertha Sorbert
‘‘In the aesthetic state the most slavish tool is a free citizen, having the same rights as the noblest; and the intellect which shapes the mass to its intent must consult it concerning its destination. Consequently in the realm of aesthetic appearance, the idea of equality is realised, which the political zealot would gladly see carried out socially’ (Friedrich Schiller).
Friedrich von Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) is a work of philosophy seeking to reconcile Kantian dualism with Reinhold’s doctrine of drives. Schiller argues that the unfettered rein of Sinnestrieb (the sense drive, equivalent to Kantian ‘nature’) and Formtrieb (the form drive, equivalent to Kantian ‘reason’) have produced a condition of excess in which ‘Man can be opposed to himself in a twofold manner: either as a savage, when his feelings rule over his principles, or as a barbarian, when his principles destroy his feelings’, leading to cultural stagnancy and decadence. Only Spieltrieb, the play drive, can unite ‘the double action of the two other instincts’, and ‘will content the mind at once morally and physically’ by creating the ‘aesthetic state’ (Letters, p. 18). According to Schiller, it is ‘alone in the aesthetic state, and not in the physical state, that the moral state can be developed’ (p. 31).
The moral state, this condition of ‘rational liberty’, lends itself to political participation. As Frederick Beiser observes, Schiller’s theory indicates ‘a person has the right to civil freedom only when they demonstrate their capacity for moral freedom’. Since the indeterminate play of the aesthetic state restores freedom to mankind; beauty, which ‘does not carry out a single intellectual or moral object’, is conducive to a democratic-republican mode in which a plurality of moral individuals realise their interests (Letters, p. 28). Hence the state, for Schiller, is this ‘canonical form in which the manifold differences of the subjects strive to unite’ (p. 5). As expressed in the prompt quote, ‘in the realm of aesthetic appearance, the idea of equality is realised’; since Schiller is an Idealist, ‘the aesthetic’ is metaphysically democratic (p. 41). These conclusions would readily be applied to Man’s artistic endeavours at large if it were not for the problematisation of Schiller by the function of art itself. In this essay, I offer an alternative understanding of democracy in the aesthetic realm by the example of Vladimir Nabokov’s modernist novel, Bend Sinister (1947).
Literary Totalitarianism
Bend Sinister is about a philosopher, Adam Krug, living under a newly empowered totalitarian regime (‘Ekwilism’) in an unnamed European country, whose language is ‘a mongrel blend of Slavic and Germanic’. Grieving his dead wife Olga, Krug is called to participate in the State’s revised higher education establishment. His refusal to endorse the Ekwilist dictator, ex-schoolmate Paduk (‘The Toad’), leads to the systematic persecution of his friends and family by Paduk’s military-intelligence complex, and eventual decline into madness upon the murder of his son. Unlike other dystopian novels such as Orwell’s 1984, Bend Sinister’s plot is not revealed in normative narrative techniques; the ‘free’ reader does not vouch for the ‘oppressed’ dissident protagonist, because Nabokov forbids it.
Form and content are indistinguishable; the totalitarian state is narrated in a totalitarian voice, belonging to ‘an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by [Nabokov]’. Nabokov-as-deity exercises a reign of terror over the reader; a regime of interruption and disbelief. The syuzhet is constantly destabilised, proven to be untrue. In Chapter 9, Krug is seen to reminisce over his first sighting of Olga; Krug yearns, ‘I want to have the whole scene repeated’ as he replays his idyllic vision of his wife as a teenager, describing her attire, the house, her reflection in a mirror (p. 99). Yet we come to understand that Krug was never there: ‘Where was I at the time? An eighteen-year-old student sitting with a book… on a station bench miles away’ — the couple did not meet until five years later (p. 100). Whether Krug had sighted Olga years ago, ‘no amount of probing and poking could either confirm or disprove’ (p. 101). The three-act memory reel, in all its sun-dappled bittersweetness, is torn away, rendered mere fantasy.
Next, in Chapter 11, Krug attends a meeting with Paduk, in which he apparently questions the arrests of his friends and demands brandy and milk from Paduk’s servants, despite warnings from the office telephone that ‘The chief of State is not generally addressed as [‘my precious’], and that Krug could be shot for disobedience. Yet Krug is discovered to have never exhibited such defiance, for the scene ‘did not go on quite like that’ (p. 108). Krug’s bold virility was invented; in truth, the characters appeared ‘doll-like, a little limp’ to the anthropomorphic deity (p. 109). The scene is attempted a second time, in which Krug reads aloud a speech prepared by Paduk, inaugurating his role in the new University, yet again our tyrant Nabokov asks ‘Did Krug really glance at the prepared speech? And if he did, was it really as silly as all that?’ However, Nabokov now confirms ‘He did, it was’ (p. 112). The author not only wields the power to reframe truth as falsehood, but to present truth itself as ungrounded and subject to change. This tyrannical style of storytelling would go on to reappear in televised narratives such as The Prisoner (1967), in which the viewer is demoralised as the apparent liberation of the protagonist is repeatedly shown to be a visual trick orchestrated by an unseen despot, the elusive dictator ‘Number One’.
The slippages and defects in the boundary between Nabokov’s fabula and syuzhet create an invasive, weaponised literature. As he comments in his Introduction, ‘While the system of holding people in hostage is as old as the oldest war, a fresher note is introduced when a tyrannic state is at war with its own subjects’ (p. vi). This maxim is appropriate to the author who, violently betraying the reader, claims total control. The phenomenology of Bend Sinister forbids the reader from prolepsis or analepsis, inhibiting Formtrieb, the drive which ‘embraces the whole series of times’ rather than the immediate moment. Therefore, when reading of the sadness of Olga’s death or the bravery of Krug, the reader is left at the behest of nature, which, ‘so long as [the individual] is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence’, will act ‘for him’ (Letters, p. 3) As McCarty (2015) confirms, Nabokov demands ‘submission of the reader’s critical faculties to the author’s will.’ It is Sinnestrieb alone which now governs this hallucinatory experience, sensation which ‘holds sway over [the individual] and carries time along with it’ as increasingly fleeting scenes unfold in the mind’s eye. This interruption to the dialectic of drives forbids the ‘aesthetic state’ from being attained. Thus the democratic experience is not only inhibited by dint of the novel’s theme, but on formal grounds.
Nabokov’s literary totalitarianism can be understood in dialogue with criticisms of individualist consumerism, which emphasise the illusion of free choice when experiencing aesthetics. For instance, in her history Fiction and the Reading Public, Q.D. Leavis found that by the late 18th century ‘the readiness to read a good novel had become a craving for fiction of any kind’ due to the rapid circulation of what she considers unrefined yet addictive literature. As Leavis reports, the Schillerian ‘aesthetic state’ proved to be mere escapism at its very inception, Sinnestrieb alone. Such interpretations evidence an alternative notion of ‘the aesthetic’ in which the reader-viewer is subsumed into the author’s will, rather than exercising autonomy by engaging in a dialogic relationship with art. Like Krug’s childhood headmaster, forbidding the boys’ thought beyond the school programme of ‘politico–social consciousness’, Nabokov’s use of style refutes the existence of an Other. Such conditions, it would seem, are lent far more readily to totalising cultures in which alterity is incorporated within the eidos of being (Premier, Führer, Toad, Author). Suitably, it is Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile who outlines the ‘Actual Idealist’ theory of aesthetics, arguing in his Reform of Education (1922) that since ‘Art is the self-realisation of the spirit as subject’, the artist ‘spreads out over his own abstract interior world, and dreams; and as he dreams, he escapes from the outer bustle into the seclusion of his enchanted realm.’ Such is the dreamer who invents Shakespeare; the attempt to ‘reach out and gather in as much life… as possible’.
Gentile’s artist-as-fantasist aligns with Nabokov’s simultaneity of plot as film, play and dream, all constructions of his mind. Krug’s internal monologue is dependent on ‘a good deal of cutting and trimming and conventional recombination’ by the ‘dream producers’, emanations of this cruel demiurge. The apparent fluidity and irrelevance of the fantasy medium emphasises that it is Nabokov, rather than the object (book, play etc) who determines Krug’s fate. By this example, we might extend Gentile’s argument to a refutation of a democratic aesthetics altogether. Idealism, in denying the Other, necessarily denies the possibility of experiencing democracy, which is pluralist. Unless the system is inverted, and we find, to our horror, ‘democracy experiencing us’.
Political Nominalism
Where Gentile conforms to the archetype of the ‘political zealot’ who would ‘gladly see [his philosophy] carried out socially’, Schiller is, at heart, no different to the Hegelian in his extrapolation of political imperatives from metaphysics. At the root of his argument is the belief that submitting the ‘will of the individual to the general will’, can alone ‘make society simply possible’. Though at no point in the Letters does Schiller overtly proclaim ‘liberal democracy’ as a remedy to societal ills, this is laid bare in far more words. Both thinkers believe that ‘the aesthetic’ has a particular, and necessary, manifestation in politics. However, we find the Idealist argument already sabotaged by the essay prompt itself, which articulates the democratic experience as one among many possible experiences. Likewise, the coexistence of conflicting models of statecraft (democracy and Fascism) as simultaneously ‘innate’ applications of Idealism destabilises the truth-claim of both.
This argument is favoured by Nabokov, whose description of the Ekwilist regime decouples language/symbol from reality by merging political classifications, thus renouncing them. In this way, Nabokov provides a nominalist critique, denying that there is a corresponding reality to names. If Schiller and Gentile hold that politics is philosophy properly expressed, Nabokov scorns this as deluded hylomorphism. In Bend Sinister, The Ekwilist regime is both Nazi and Soviet, brutal and feeble, everything and nothing. Its greatest innovation is a device which imitates authenticity. Its flag bears ‘a remarkable resemblance to a crushed dislocated but still writhing spider’, an impotent, puny swastika (p. 26). Upon crossing the bridge, Krug asks Ekwilist soldiers to draw ‘a gammadion, or something’ on his pass — a more rigid variation of the Nazi symbol (p. 12). Or we have Mr. Etermon (Everyman), a socialist-realist cartoon mascot whose Stakhanovite vitality is rather that ‘the rules of gentle humour forbade his being shown on his deathbed’ (p. 57). The carelessness with which Nabokov employs these references presents them as trivial decorations lacking any underlying truth. Bend Sinister is not only anti-democratic, but deeply anti-political.
In his Introduction, Nabokov outlines how ‘Fascists and Bolshevists… Philistine thinkers and jack-booted baboons’, interlaced with ‘bits of Lenin’s speeches, and a chunk of the Soviet constitution, and gobs of Nazist pseudo-efficiency’ in the plot are merely a reflection of ‘the influence of my epoch’ (p. vi). Political aesthetics, little more than assorted fragments of memory, are stripped of their power. Krug’s statement upon his departure from Olga’s hospital (‘I am not interested in politics’) precludes, and accounts for, every attempt to politicise him thereon. This passage is steeped in negation; Krug ‘ought not to not to not to not to’ go outside while fighting continues on the streets. His pass ‘might not help’ save him from getting hurt either. As it turns out, stray bullets, once ‘flukhtung about in the night’, had ‘long ceased’ altogether (p. 4). This is the juncture at which Krug says ‘no’ to ephemeral ideology, to self-representation. The ‘I’ (Krug) is severed from ‘everything else’, the chattering mass of bureaucrats and militants which seeks, with a phagocytic hunger, to consume everything within its reach. In Krug’s rejecting the imposition of universals, Nabokov here echoes the anarchic bent of D.H. Lawrence, who condemned the ‘One Identity’ of the body politic as ‘a horrible nullification of true identity and being’. Like Krug, Lawrence rejects the ‘Law of the Average’ (Ekwilism), claiming the Average Man was ‘never intended to be worshipped’, for he does not represent the complexity of the Spirit.
Rorty (1989) claims that, due to these individualist leanings, Nabokov ‘was unable to free himself entirely from the Kantian association of ‘art’ and the ‘aesthetic’’, which ‘helped to blind him from the possibility of liberal ironism’. However, as I have argued, it is difficult to imagine a political doctrine of any variety underlying a text whose purpose is to subvert and mock meaning itself. Rorty thus seems oblivious to the difference between allegory and satire. Where McCarty concedes that if Nabokov were ‘a liberal of sorts’, his liberalism is founded on a ‘profound skepticism… of ‘‘general ideas’’, I would extend this ‘skepticism’ to an outright refutation of these ideas’ existence. Bend Sinister’s irony only heightens its aversion to politico-aesthetic culture. The Ekwilist doctrine, the novel’s ironic centre, is of course utterly divorced from its idyllic design. It aims to eliminate individuality, yet lauds its one leader’s ugliness. Its solemn anthem, its ode to the Common Man, is sung to the tune of a gaudy drinking-song. Its clearly Aristotelian grounding in ‘the idea of balance as a basis for universal bliss’ manifests in a merciless police state, the antithesis of the ‘good life’ (p. 55).
Searching for a correlative politics to the experience of Bend Sinister, democratic or otherwise, misunderstands the extent to which this aesthetic space is so desperately sorrowful that politics is made impossible. Surely only an Ekwilist would then say Nabokov dwells in the ‘slums of pure aestheticism’ or is ‘socially irresponsible’, by refusing to sing to a broken tune.
An Everyday Demiurge
Liberal democracy, in a condition of decline, ‘no longer seems to be responsive to citizens’, producing ‘the collapse of axes of resonance’ (Hartmut Rosa). According to sociologist Rosa, simply casting one’s vote every few years is a ‘de-aestheticized, de-emotionalized’ programme lacking the ‘bodily, and sensual qualities implied by the concept of voice that are so important to understanding how democracy actually plays out in practice’ (p. 279). By contrast, German National Socialism ‘understood how to appeal to the pervasive and deeply rooted human longing for resonance’, causing ‘the world to vibrate and resound’ with its ‘songs, torches, parades, rallies, ceremonious incantations’ and so on (p. 218). If Nazism can arguably reach a Schillerian frequency in which people feel as though they are ‘are able to determine the social, political and economic order’, experiencing ‘a responsive sphere’ far more successfully than the ‘mute’ regimes of Merkel or Schröder, Rosa joins Nabokov in realising the age of political nominalism
The aesthetics (in this case, acoustics) of modernity newly take on a democratic potential on this sub-political level. Having undermined the metaphysical grounds of politics, raw noise and song become a tabula rasa in which ‘true democracy’ can be created in contradistinction to its previous conceptions. For this reason, Rosa’s focus on expression and embodiment are an effective antidote to the Enlightenment philosophers and their 20th century necromancers. Accordingly, Rosa cites Alkemeyer (2006), who in his sociology of sports as mass entertainment observed that the collective experience is ‘not a hermeneutic but a somatic process’. The physicalisation of aesthetics allows us to feel, rather than theorise, democracy. If, as a resonance theory of politics maintains, a truly democratic culture is a call-and-response within the demos, its expression begins with the first singer or speaker, who is ‘touched and transformed by the ‘‘singing’’ of others’ (p. 279). According to Gentile’s concept of artist-as-fantasist, we might reconsider Nabokov as this artist who ‘neither cognises nor acts, but sings’ to begin the exchange.
If we are to wrest a democratic quality from this novel at all, it would be by Nabokov’s use of sound, which, while the plot does nothing but suppress, presents an undeniably resonant musicality. The sonic reprieves of synaesthesia and translation act against the oppressive tide, growing more lucid as Krug’s fate grows bleaker. When Krug wakes from his dream in the Ekwilist prison cell, he remembers his ‘hideous misfortune’; the torture, imprisonment or murder of everyone he loves. The pain is too much to bear for Krug, who has been driven mad. Yet Nabokov intervenes, feeling ‘a pang of pity for Adam’. Krug’s senses, a ‘tangle of immemorial and by now formless and aimless machinations’, are, by the author’s mercy, medicated with an ‘amazed and happy’ bask in ‘the occasional akh-kha-kha-akha yawns of a guard, the laborious mumble of sleepless elderly prisoners… the heartbeats of younger men noiselessly digging an underground passage to freedom and recapture’ (pp. 171-2). The resonant experience, being surrounded by others — tortured, yet living, noise-making men — is of great reassurance for the mad prisoner who can no longer think, only sense. Through the sonic experience, Krug is again made to feel like a citizen among many.
At the very end, when Krug is shot, the fantasy is shattered altogether. Now, the demiurge’s consciousness glimpses the reverberation of the killing bullet. A ‘sudden twang’, which the demiurge initially cannot place, strikes ‘the wire netting of [his] window’. In the moment of Krug’s liberation — now he is free to die, to leave the stage — his world resonates back into Nabokov’s. We finally see the startled author ‘among the chaos of written and rewritten pages’; a mere man whose ‘comparative paradise’ is a bedside glass of milk and sleeping pills (p. 177). Dialectically echoing this seemingly omnipotent creator, the fantasy self-legislates its own existence by disturbing him. Yet this is no Schillerian self-legislation, in which autonomy is developed and refined — this is autonomy by the violent fact of being-itself. That there is an Other, and thus extramental, quality to the author’s aesthetic space is a view admitted by Nabokov, who understood the work of art as ‘the creation of a new world’ coexisting with ‘other worlds, other branches of knowledge.’ We must not forget the word ‘demiurge’ has its origins in the Latin for ‘creator’, ‘producer’, and ‘artisan’. Artistic creation, far from some inanimate invention of a departed god, leaves open the possibility of its own revolt.
Though Rosa’s resonance theory of democracy bridges ‘associative and dissociative concepts of the political’, he agrees it tends towards the dissociative. This ‘resounding disagreement’ of dissociative political organisation is distinct from, and often in opposition to, ‘the mute resistance against petrified conditions’ which Krug experiences until his death (p. 281). This is precisely why the text cannot produce a democratic experience until its very end; in order for such an experience to emerge, it needs to be made epistemologically possible. A world beyond the text must reveal itself, acknowledging plural subjectivities. If the rule of the tyrant depends on Krug’s subservience, Krug’s death dethrones him. It is only in this state of radical dialogue that Krug has, if for a brief moment, ‘the same rights as the noblest’. Where Schiller’s dream now seems an intangible conjecture, and Gentile’s an exercise in egotism, resonance theory truly recentres the Hellenic demos in articulating a democratic experience in the aesthetic space. However, when the very notion of the political is proved unstable, it is difficult to conceive of a democratic aesthetics on purely sensory grounds, without a slip into a vulgar empiricism backed by the same worn presuppositions.