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Kleist and Nabokov:
Knight Moves and Paronomasic Subjectivities

R. J. A. Kilbourn

In a game of chess, the knightπs move is unique because it alone goes around corners. In this way, it combines the continuity of a set sequence with the discontinuity of an unpredictable turn in the middle.
· ∑ Loder and Neidhardt, The Knightπs Move

≥Man errs, so long as he strives.≤
· ∑ Goethe, Faust


Introduction
This paper begins from the intertextual coincidence of two works: Vladimir Nabokovπs 1947 novel Bend Sinister and Heinrich von Kleistπs 1811 play åDer zerbrochene Krug.π These two works connect at the noun and/or proper name of åKrugπ – Professor Adam Krug, the novelπs protagonist, and the åbroken jugπ (Krug) of the playπs title – a connection whose seeming arbitrariness is subsumed under the far more meaningful appearance in each work of a protagonist who represents, in his own way, the irreducibly ironic aspect of an exemplarily modern subject whose literary status is defined by an oblique and as it were åunconsciousπ resistance to the epistemological and metaphysical certainties of literary representation.
This study of Nabokovπs novel and Kleistπs play gestures toward a larger comparative analysis of the productive differences among a group of texts chosen in part for their harboring of a constellation of novelistic protagonists whose fictional ontology is determined within an intertextual matrix of specific attributes. It is to the latter that these heroes owe their membership in a series of variations on a certain fictional subjectivity or character åtype.π This åtypeπ – the inverted commas denote both the inadequacy of the term to the heterogeneity and idiosyncrasy of these characters, as well as the inadequacy of the latter to the term – is conceived as something like a cross between the Kierkegaardian åknight of faithπ and what has been called ålimitedπ or ålimping man,.π[i][1] This subjectπs attributes are derived from, notably, the Homeric Odysseus and the biblical Abraham, with not merely all the moral shadings these names imply but also whole narratives emblematized by such proper names. This is a sort of proto-type for what Mikhail Bakhtin calls ≥that authentically solitary individual who makes his appearance only in the Middle Ages and [who]äplays such an important role in the European novel,≤ only posited to prepare the ground for his late-modern parodic counterpart (Bakhtin 145). That is, neither the Greek nor the Jewish hero is meant to be taken as either origin or summation, but only as two variations, more distinct than similar when directly compared. Neither Odysseus nor Abraham is paradigmatic in the way of an archetype; each is an instance of a certain intertextual syntax of signifiers. This is a point to be stressed: the mention of a åtypeπ is misleading, since the intention here is to suggest that such a åtypeπ has no validity, no existence, except negatively: a non-existent standard against which each instance can only be measured to discern its differences from the others. It is tempting, given such an approach to the question of literary character, to speak in terms of an ideal or archetype whose avatars are amongst the proper-named heroes of myth and literature across occidental history. Samuel Beckett, for one, parodies this generational or genealogical approach in his trilogy, where the speaker in The Unnamable affirms and then denies his invention of the two preceding novelsπ protagonists as mere avatars of a subject with no greater right to originality or ontological autonomy than they. My intention, however, is not to argue on behalf of such an archetype, whose ultimate purpose is to validate preexisting suppositions about the textual functions in question. Rather, my intention is to examine the protagonist of each relevant text in a comparative context predicated on the notion of a narrative subject as the irreducibly negative ground for the selfπs constitution in memory.
Why this allegiance to what appears to be a vestigial notion of åcharacterπ? Primarily because it is a way to put a face or faces, in the sense of figura as a verbal construct, upon the subject under consideration, an otherwise åfacelessπ philosopheme. An examination of specific literary characters furnishes parameters unavailable to a strictly philosophical treatment of subjectivity. Recent works in the field demonstrate the ongoing degree of complexity of these issues.[ii][2]
In the apophatic introduction to Bend Sinister Nabokov emphatically states that his characters are not åtypesπ (xiii).[iii][3] For Nabokov, at least, fictional characters as the åinventionsπ of an author seem to possess an irreducible åroundednessπ as completed beings in that they are in these terms distinct from åreal peopleπ whose being remains unknowable because incomplete, while they are alive.[iv][4] But this would not appear to be an accurate assessment of the portrayal of the subjectivity of a character like the hero of the novel, Adam Krug. There is a great deal to be said for the eerily premodern-sounding rethinking of character from the ≥classical structuralist/semiotic position,≤ which ≥regards characters as aggregates of semantic features subsumed by a name.≤[v][5] The almost Deleuzian concept of a post-metaphysical subject as a de-centred (ådeterritorializedπ) bundle of desires also has its attractions.[vi][6] But either of these approaches has to be reconciled with a datum of self-reflexivity that an author like Nabokov, for one, refuses to relinquish. (And it should be noted that he shares with Deleuze et. al. a healthy contempt for Freudπs åoedipalizedπ subject).
Using Bend Sinister as a focus, my intention is to show how assemblages of certain traits or attributes recur across different works united by the general purpose of putting into play or (dramatically) presenting an intertextual fictional subject whose ultimate significance as a subject can only be evaluated negatively. The avatars of this subject could add up to an idealized archetype only ironically, in the sense that their one åuniversalπ commonality is a fundamental blindness: they are all representations of the inability ever to know themselves in their self-ignorance, compounded by the inability ever to recognize this utter lack of self-knowledge. Walter Benjamin, writing about Kafkaπs protagonists, emphasizes the obverse of memoryπs significance for this writer: radical åforgetfulness,π a forgetting of forgetting. Benjamin makes the rather suggestive observation that it is as though heroes like Josef K. and K. arrive on the scene having forgotten something important, something which they are then ≥subtly invited to recall to mind,≤ but this proves impossible, as they have forgotten the single most important thing: that they have forgotten – an oddly appropriate description of the dream-like quality of the Kafkan novelistic heroπs persistent incomprehension (Benjamin 131). Kafka achieves in Das Schlofl, in the character of K., what is arguably an extremity of negative subjectivity exceeded only perhaps by Beckettπs åUnnamable.π[vii][7] In the degree to which it foregrounds an unknowing self-ignorance, this type is the negative or ironic counterpart in modernity of the self-divesting narrative subject of premodern apophatic mystical texts.
But what is the more properly literary pre-history of this particular, peculiar modern fictional subject? The most relevant avatar is the above-mentioned ålimited, limping man,π homo claudus (Hays 125; Freccero 45), a surprisingly widespread type whose lineage extends back through Dante-pilgrim, lost in the dark wood in the first canto of the Inferno, constrained by the weight of his ≥piË fermo,≤ his åfirmer (and lower) footπ (the left one [Freccero 29-54]). Ultimately – and the evidence for this will emerge gradually in what follows – the prototype is Sophoclesπ Oedipus, driven by forces he does not fully comprehend, to precipitate a revelation of the åtruth,π which is to say the degree to which he misjudged appearances and misunderstood himself: a thoroughly negative åtruth.π[viii][8] It is in fact the latter who, along with Adam in the Judeo-Christian tradition, provides Heinrich von Kleist with both a proper name and a set of traits for a little-known but paradigmatically modern version of Oedipus. That Kleist is an uncommon intertext for Nabokov in no way reduces his relevance. What Kleistπs protagonist in åDer zerbrochene Krugπ exemplifies in particular is the one, perhaps irreducible, åcharacteristicπ shared by all the avatars of this subject. In post-Christian terms, this is the modern trope of moral åfallennessπ reflected in literature, as part of a nostalgic or ironic looking back to a fictive past; a utopian, golden time against which the present is unfavourably compared, and the model (in the more ånaiveπ modernisms) for the future-as-recuperated past; the myth of the Fall or of a lost innocence, which persists (in more åenlightenedπ modernisms) in spite of the gradual erosion of faith in the possibility of this recuperability. In the terms of the primarily literary focus of the present discussion, this is an origin-less state of errant or erroneous being, a state reducible to neither a moral nor a cartographic-directional error; a condition always subject to affirmative revaluation.
Kleist: åThe Broken Jugπ
Traditional representations of the Devil as cloven- or club-footed are of course pre-Christian in origin. The Christianized conflation of the rebel-god who helps man and is thrown out of heaven with the underworld ruler has its locus classicus in Paradise Lost (1674). It appears to be Goethe, in Faust, part I who unearths the Devilπs podiatry problem for modern literature.[ix][9] All of the relevant signifying traits are combined in one parodic figure in Kleistπs 1811 play ≥Der zerbrochene Krug≤ (åthe Broken Jugπ), a figure that is possibly the first literary conflation of three primary types: the limping Devil (åOld Adamπ), fallen Adam (the first man), and Oedipus. Kleistπs Judge Adam is constrained to preside over a case of the attempted rape of a village girl named Eva, in which he is himself the guilty party. The crime is emblematized by the broken jug (Krug: åjugπ) Evaπs old mother presents as evidence; the valuable piece of crockery was broken by the perpetrator as he made his precipitous exit. Unlike Oedipus, who insists on bringing the truth to light at any cost, Judge Adam bends over backwards to keep the truth concealed, particularly from his clerk, ironically named Licht (ålightπ). In the end his clubfoot gives him away when a telltale footprint is found at the scene of the crime. In the light of Kleistπs play, then, the greatest trick the devil ever tried to pull might have been to pass himself off as his own most obvious victim – at once the foot and the snake that bites it – to paraphrase Genesis (and Bryan Singerπs 1995 film The Usual Suspects). In the case of Kleistπs Judge Adam, the devil has become a pathetic and laughable figure, ironically conflated as he is with the type of the tragic inquirer after knowledge, in this instance a literal judge who is compelled, by circumstances of which he is fully aware, to judge himself. But in the later figures of Beckettπs novelistic protagonists, in Kafkaπs K., and in Nabokovπs Adam Krug, for example, to these traits are added certain aspects of the questing knight, drawn from both the Dantean Christian pilgrim (as mentioned above) and the chivalric romantic hero, but especially the latterπs parodic apotheosis: Don Quixote.
This complex of traits adds up to a subject whose constitutive characteristic is self-blindness, and whose avatars are remarkable for the degree to which their narrative function (especially in terms of their relations with others) is determined by a tension between a sequence of geometrically plotted movements (impatience, activity) and a tendency to immobility and stasis, whether reflective or unconscious (patience, inactivity, passivity).
Nabokov: åWhat Remains of the Knightπ
Oedipus stands at one end of a filiation that reaches a modern extremity in Kleistπs Judge Adam in åDer zerbrochene Krug.π But, as a dramatic character, dependent on performative exposition, the latter can only be compared up to a point with novelistic characters as assemblages of attributes bound to a voice-image entailing a point of view, etc. As noted above, my principal concern here is the operation of fictionality within novelistic discourse. Appropriately, it is a lexical element of Kleistπs play that carries over, as much as the figure of the Judge with his Pferdefufl; an element from the playπs title: åKrugπ – a strange German word that precipitates a circuitous, intertextual filiation from Kleist himself (not only in the play but in such works as å‹ber das Marionettentheaterπ) to Nabokov, in Bend Sinister.
To point out that Adam Krug, the protagonist of Bend Sinister, is more åsympatheticπ a character than Kleistπs Judge Adam, is unfair, and not simply because the former is already bereft of his wife in the novelπs opening pages. Kleistπs Krug has no comparable circumstance to mitigate his generally venial behaviour as the åheroπ of an anti-tragedy (åanti-heroπ would be redundant); but, generally speaking, the Judge as a character is constrained by the limits of the hybrid genre of which he is a textual function. To compare them on åpsychologicalπ grounds is of course misguided. Their comparison instead on the basis of their status as contrasting aggregates of partially corresponding, often highly significant, semantic features will serve as a methodological model for the problem of character in the reading I offer here.
Adam Krug is figured as a highly intelligent man, and Nabokov is hardly alone in displaying an interest in exploring the relation between the intellectual heights and the moral depths – or, as in Krugπs case (speaking, for the moment, in a åpsychologicalπ register), a deep-seated ethical-emotional conflict at a level beyond the scope of his formidable intellectual powers. Nabokov biographer and scholar Brian Boyd adopts a typical axiological position regarding Nabokovπs attitude toward his hero in any given story or novel, and Krug is no exception. Boyd seems to equate intellectual brilliance with moral virtue, something which he may derive from his familiarity with Nabokov himself, and therefore a position to which the reader is under no compulsion to adhere. Therefore, says Boyd, Bend Sinister is one of Nabokovπs least åsuccessfulπ novels, dismissing the fact that Krug (like Van Veen, Humbert Humbert, or other of his more famous novelistic protagonists) is neither moral exemplar, nor a particularly ånice chapπ (although nicer than the other two); a point of which Nabokov himself was appreciative.[x][10] Boyd seems disappointed that he is not able to ålikeπ Krug (Boyd 105). For every favourable quality (of which he has many) Krug has an unfavourable one. In the end, claims Boyd, Krug is åundoneπ by his weakness and blindness and hesitation; he fails, and is only exempted from a really bad end by the pity of his åmaker.π The point (and this is borne out by the inherently double significance of his name) is that, in his very particularity Krug is a kind of literary åEtermonπ himself,[xi][11] in the line that extends back through Kleistπs Judge Adam to Hamlet, Oedipus, and Adam the first man. A character who becomes exemplary as the nominal nexus of a set of specific traits (as Adaπs Van Veen is comparably the intertextual heir to Faust, Don Juan, et. al.) which come to signify in any manner of new and other contexts, intertextually, trans-historically, trans-ideologically, and so forth. Furthermore, Krug, like these others, is åerrant,π but according to a modern moralized temporality. Like, in their very different ways, Hamlet, Oedipus, Judge Adam, and Kafkaπs and Beckettπs åheroes,π Krug inhabits an always already åfallenπ world, which is another way of saying that he is himself congenitally postlapsarian, to the extent that the myth of the Fall has a lingering and tenacious value for art and literature in a modernity that sees itself on the far side of the Copernican emancipation from some kind of theological tyranny. This secular construct rejects for modernity not only the guilt and regret of the loss of an original unity of human and divine, but also the hope of a future return to this state through a redemptive transcendence – the promise of a restorative act of grace from åon highπ that effaces the stigma of the initial error by which humankind got itself catapulted into time, suffering and death. Such åfallennessπ therefore must be considered in the present context in its revalued form as an unmoored theological metaphor.[xii][12] According to this line, the modern human condition is irredeemably fallen, with only the promise of an approximate or metaphorical redemption, figured as a return to or restoration or recuperation of a place and time, whether literal or metaphorical, which, however unchanged, are never the same (home, childhood, a significant relationship, etc.).
This persistence of such a tropological constellation accounts for what in Bend Sinister could otherwise be interpreted as puzzlingly contrary to expectation: Krug the brilliant and famous metaphysician is marked by his physicality, his åheaviness.π He is a ≥great big sad hog of a man≤ bearing no resemblance to the archetype of the ascetic, dried-up philosopher (eg. BS 46-47; 197). To this extent he also constitutes a modern secular counterpart to the Christian-Dantean pilgrim, the limping hero whose piË fermo on the one hand keeps him grounded, connected to the earth, and, on the other hand keeps him errant, going in erratic circles (Freccero 43).
Krugπs question in chapter two to the bridge guards regarding the ≥gentle gardenerπs≤ left leg evokes the oedi-pedal permutation of the åsinisterπ in the title, reminding the attentive reader of Kleistπs Judge Adam with his left foot injured in a fall from a scene of foiled seduction (see above), not to mention Dante-pilgrimπs åpiË fermoπ in the Prologue to the Inferno. To cite John Freccero: ≥[the Divine Comedy] is an itinerary, a åcamminoπ of the life, made by a soul. Just as the body moves with its feet, so the åbodyπ of the soul, so to speak, moves with twin powers, and to say that the two are not working in harmony as in normal movement is to say something very important about this first attempted journey, in an allegorical language which has a long tradition≤ (Freccero 37). Where Dante combines elements of Platonic astronomy, Aristotelian physiology and Pauline dualism in the pilgrimπs embodiment of the allegorical struggle between intellect and will, mind and body (Freccero 29-54), Nabokovπs Adam Krug, in the course of his itinerary (the novelπs narrative, at the near end of a more-or-less continuous line) is the site of a contest between his metaphysicianπs brain and the earthly impulses of his ≥big heavy≤ body. This allegorical struggle is ironically rooted in the history of biblical interpretation: ≥Ever since Adamπs sin, manπs ability to see the good has outdistanced his ability to do it on his own, for in the life without sanctifying grace, the middle ground of which St. Paul was so painfully aware, only one foot takes the forward step≤ (Freccero 44). Adam Krug is connected to Adam both nominally and by allusion (eg. BS 46). As Freccero explains, the left foot is the åfirmerπ one of intellectus, opposed to the more ådextrousπ right foot of faith, will, or affectus – the side that necessitates the services of a guide, but also the foot that will take the first step beyond rational comprehension of truth to genuine åsalvationπ (for the body, and therefore the soul, as a whole). The notion of a åmiddle ground,π which Dante gets from St. Paul, is related to Augustineπs regio dissimilitudinis (Augustine 7.10), an intermediate zone representing the ≥great gap that remains to be traversed≤ in the allegorized moral landscape of the Commedia, as the pilgrim leaves the selva oscura and faces the Mountain of Purgatory, apprehending it intellectually but still far from capable of actually making the ascent (Freccero 30). Like Dante-pilgrim, Krug is a thoroughly embodied wanderer whose åsalvationπ at journeyπs end is dependent on a woman who is for the entire narrative already dead, whose relation to the man left behind is entirely new: the strangely formalized intimacy and distanced immediacy imposed by memory. Krug as a subject is wholly determined by the condition of mourning in which he finds himself at the outset, and which he neither names nor acknowledges.
Sons of Adam
To the extent that an authorπs autobiography constitutes an extratextual adjunct to the intertext in which their works participate, it is worth recalling here that there was a real åKrugπ in Kleistπs life: Wilhelm Traugott Krug, who bore the dubious distinction of being ≥successor to Kant as professor of philosophy in Kˆnigsberg,≤ not to mention successor to Kleist for the hand of Wilhelmine von Zenge (Kleist, Broken Jug v). Roger Jones, in the introduction to his translation of the play, speaks of Kleistπs famous åKant crisisπ as stemming from ≥[his] uncritical reaction to Kant – and especially the whole-hearted assimilation of Kantπs postulation of the limits of human understanding≤ (v-vi). Paul De Man notes that the date of the pseudo-autobiographical encounter in Kleistπs åMarionettentheaterπ essay – 1801 – is not only the year of the åcrisisπ but is also when his engagement to Wilhelmine begins to disintegrate (De Man, Rhetoric 283-84): ≥To decide whether or not Kleist knew his text to be autobiographical or pure fiction is like deciding whether or not Kleistπs destiny, as a person and as a writer, was sealed by the fact that a certain doctor of philosophy happened to bear the ridiculous name of Krug≤ (284). Can the analogous statement be made of Nabokovπs Krug? Adam Krug, professor of philosophy at the newly-christened University of Padukgrad, would be the third in this series of recurring names and attributes – one of those instances in which the årealπ and historical begins to be subsumed by the intertextual. (There is a fourth Krug: the shadowy åProfessor Martin Krug,π Vice-President of the Universityπs Academy of Medicine, who is, as Krug never fails to emphasize: ≥No relative of mineäPure coincidence≤ [BS 6]. The difference between them is narrowed even further by the end of the book, when it is announced that the title ≥Vice-President of the Academy of Medicine≤ has been erroneously conferred upon Adam [225][xiii][13]).
The noun and/or proper name åKrugπ constitutes a kind of nexus among these otherwise apparently disparate texts, a point of connection which can only be called åontologicalπ if being is redetermined as an irreducible textuality; a kind of negative nominalism, where a name designates the site of an absence of essence: an empty vessel. But can interpretation – let alone being – be based on a pun? Nabokov himself provides an etymological gloss on åKrugπ in his preface to Bend Sinister, in the deceptively informative section on his use of paronomasia. He reveals the other etymology of åkrug,π cognate with the German: Bend Sinister, he admits, ≥teems with stylistic distortions, such as puns crossed with anagrams (in Chapter Two, the Russian circumference, krug, turns into a Teutonic cucumber, gurk, with an additional allusion to Krugπs reversing his journey across the bridge)≤ (xv). So åKrugπ is in a sense the crossing or crux formed by the intersection of an anagram and a pun (the paronomasic equivalents of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes, respectively), as well as a crock (French cruche), an ≥earthenware pot or jar,≤ even ≥a broken piece of earthenware.≤ (It should be noted here that the engraving that inspired Kleistπs play was titled åLe Juge, ou la cruche cassÈeπ [Jones viii].).[xiv][14]
Knight Moves
Nabokov criticism abounds with studies of the multifaceted yet remarkably consistent metaphorical infrastructure of his oeuvre. Two of its most prominent and/or obsessive constituents (other than entomological taxonomies), heraldry and chess, intersect at certain points outside of themselves, in a third zone, literature – although formally they are distinct codified systems. The first is a complex semiotic system, the ålanguageπ of heraldic coats-of-arms (a taxonomy in itself), in which the respective positions of åbearerπ or owner and åinterpreterπ relative to the sign-assemblage (the blazon or shield) play a crucial role in semantic ådecoding.π (It was from heraldry, after all, that AndrÈ Gide took the name of mis-en-abime for a structure which is now seen as as much a literary as a visual phenomenon [Gide 17]) As a semiotic system, heraldry signifies in terms of absence and difference, sharing with the office of herald the sense of ≥a person or thing which precedes or announces the approach of another; a precursor≤ (OED). The heraldic blazon signifies because it is different from what it stands for (an aggregate value), and it signifies in the absence of its åbearerπ or owner (the one to whom, presumably, this value obtains).[xv][15] The signifying content conveyed in heraldic emblems of greatest significance for literature, perhaps, is what is imparted to the viewer-reader about relations between fathers and sons; it is a particular filial construct that is privileged, and the question of ålegitimacy,π in all its polyvalence, is therefore emphasized.
Chess, on the other hand, is ≥a game of multiple possibilities and interlocking strategies≤ within a strict geometry (Loder and Neidhardt, 2). In fact, as Nabokov shows in the third chapter of Speak, Memory, it is in the specific and unvarying pattern of the chessboard that the two systems combine (much as in Lewis Carroll):
An experienced heraldist resembles a medieval traveler who brings back from the
East the faunal fantasies influenced by the domestic bestiary he possessed all along rather than by the results of direct zoological exploration. Thus, in the first version of this chapter, when describing the Nabokovπs coat of arms (carelessly glimpsed among some familial trivia many years before), I somehow managed to twist it into the fireside wonder of two bears posing with a great chessboard propped up between them. I have now looked it up, that blazon, and am disappointed to find that it boils down to a couple of lions – brownish and, perhaps overshaggy beasts, but not really ursine – licking their chops, rampant, regardant, arrogantly demonstrating the unfortunate knightπs shield, which is only one sixteenth of a checker board, of alternate tinctures, azure & gules, with a botonÈe cross, argent, in each rectangle. Above it one sees what remains of the knight: his tough helmet and inedible gorget, as well as one brave arm coming out of a foliate ornament, gules and azure, and still brandishing a short sword. Za hrabrostπ, ≥for valour,≤ says the scripture. (SM 51)[xvi][16]
The progress of both systems, chess and heraldry, as displaced permutations of medieval Western European martial and courtly codes (bearing, as Nabokov suggests, a historical debt to the åEastπ) has been a steady metaphorization over time. One need look no further than the socio-literary code of chivalric romance to see their significance for the history of the novel alone. And this is precisely their significance for this discussion: on the one hand the lexicon of heraldic blazon-emblems and the determination of their åmeaningπ relative to the bearer, the one årepresentedπ in his absence by the shield; on the other the åexistentialπ resonance of the knightπs perpendicular trajectory, as if it were not constrained to go the long way around by the higher law of the game, but by some aspect of its very nature. As the passage from Speak, Memory shows, only in the order of literature are these phenomena enabled to converge, where the bar or åbendπ on a blazonπs face predicts or even dictates the bearerπs åfateπ on the basis of his origins, in a manner complementary to the flexible inflexibility or discontinuous continuity of the knightπs move on the chess board (Loder and Neidhardt 2). (Other than Speak, Memory, The Defense [1930; 1964] is the early, Russian-language example of Nabokovπs chess obsession, followed [in English] by The Real Life of Sebastian Knight [1940]: ≥[t]hat twisted quest for Sebastian Knightäwith its gloriettes and self-mate combinations≤ [Speak, Memory 257]). Chess imagery is so prevalent in Nabokovπs fiction that it could be said, beyond any supplementary figurative function, in concert with other tropological systems, to determine the shape and structure of the novels.[xvii][17] The logic of chess movements and strategies may for example determine key elements of narrative, such as ≥the bilingual chess metaphor that informs the love triangle≤ in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1940):
if he and Clare [Bishop] are obviously knight and bishop, Nina [Rechnoy]πs first documented family name is Toorovetzäfrom the Russian word for rook. Not only does the knight stand between the other two pieces when a chess game begins, but its way of moving, which V. evokes in another context as åthat special Knightian twistπäcombines a bishopπs diagonal with the straight lines of a rook. Thus Sebastianπs name, originally chosen to assert his English identity, turns into an emblem of his free-floating position between cultures. (Foster, Jr. 164)
This åknightπs moveπ occurs throughout Nabokovπs fiction, suggesting that Foster, Jr.πs analysis, although perspicacious, is too general in its conclusion. Sebastian may have åchosenπ his name for any number of stated reasons, but, once chosen, its determinant effect upon the course of his enigmatic life – upon his constitution as a narrative subject – transcends any subjective choice. The combination of the knightπs moveπs obliquity and geometrical predictability is clearly of key significance on a level or levels wholly other than the literal game.[xviii][18]
One of the earlier instances of the knightπs move trope is in Nabokovπs last Russian novel, The Gift (1938): ≥any genuinely new trend is a knightπs move, a change of shadows, a shift that displaces the mirror≤ (239). The mirror is an element which goes largely unspoken thirty years later in Ada, but which is, along with the knightπs move, a structuring principle in that strange novel. Of interest here is the conjunction of knightπs move, chessboard, and mirror. Lewis Carrollπs Alice books provide a relevant starting point for their importance to Nabokov no less than the fact that the second (Through the Looking Glass [1871]) combines the optics and physics of a looking-glass world with the logical and strategic topography of chess.[xix][19] It is no secret that Nabokovπs novels owe a great debt to Carrollπs stories, departing from their spirit and general philosophy of fiction primarily on the question of endings.
Like the truncated knight in the passage from Speak, Memory (≥tough helmet and inedible gorget, as well as one brave arm coming out of a foliate ornamentäand still brandishing a short sword≤ [SM 51]), the knight in chess is conventionally only a metonymic remnant, not the knight himself but his horse – and, as Don Quixote well knew, beneath every successful knight there is always a good horse. The horse is the foundation of chivalry in many senses, beginning of course with the word itself. One of the defining characteristics of the knight as type is that he rides a horse: French le cavalier and Spanish el caballero, or the even more straightforward der Ritter in German, bear this out more overtly than åknight.π[xx][20] Chivalric romance illustrates the logic: the primary diegetic level is determined by knight errantry and the quest, and thus it would not be cavalier to state that the knightπs mobility is paramount. The quest as structuring principle is as old as Odysseus or Gilgamesh, but it only takes a glance at Don Quixote to see the significance for the romance genre of the coincidence of knight, horse, and road (and sometimes squire); from this the narrative unfolds, paratactically and episodically.[xxi][21]
My recurring references to Cervantesπ parodic romance are obviously not arbitrary. The literary space-time of concern here is not that of romance or epic but of their intertextual afterlife in the modern novel. The åknightπ is thus always intended ironically, as a verbal placeholder for what becomes the masculine subject under consideration in this chapter, the limited (and sometimes lame) protagonist whose primary åphysicalπ characteristic is that he is on the move, a traveller or wanderer, following a course by definition errant, erratic, bent, åsinister,π or circular. If he is capable of getting anywhere at all, he always takes the long way around because he has no choice: deviation is impossible because that is precisely what he is already doing. Deviation is redundant. This is one legacy of the knightπs move in literature – a legacy whose origins (The Odyssey, for example) predate the invention of chess – but the move provides a handy shorthand. There are other uses, other interpretations (and most of them are in Nabokov), but for the purposes of this analysis my focus is on a åknightπ like Krug, who is among the heirs of Quixote, unaware of the åtruthπ of his ontological status; of Dante-pilgrim, whose body follows an itinerary that is an education for his soul; of Oedipus, coming into a terrible knowledge only much too late; or of an Adam in an interminably ambiguous relationship to knowledge and guilt. It is no coincidence that all these examples involve mytho-literary heroes for whom the central question, whether they realize it or not, is the degree of control they exercise over their own fate as fictive representations of agential beings. (What I do not have space to deal with here is that permutation of this åknightπ who moves deviously by design, assuming at a crucial juncture the mantle [and cloven-foot] of the Devil and his specific avatars.[xxii][22]) At issue (were there space for this comparison) is the dual question of agency and will, where the first type is marked by a certain åpassivityπ (to the point of ignorance), and the second by an active, willful malevolence, manifesting itself in various forms, such as åillegitimacyπ (Bend Sinister) or the breaking of societal taboos through heterosexual pederasty (Lolita) or incest (Ada). Staying with the darker side of these phenomena, it should not be forgotten that the chessboard is also a formalized, schematized battle field, and that the harder årealityπ behind knight-errantry is the kind of adventure in which Don Quixote got the living daylights beaten out of him: åadventureπ as outright explosion of violence.[xxiii][23] Ultimately, going back to Homer once again, chess, like chivalric romance, incorporates within formally distinct but comparably economical spaces the salient features of both epic paradigms, with chess favouring the mimetic and martial panoply of the Iliad (only the knight is capable of wandering) and romance, to restate what is common knowledge, continuing the diegetic tradition initiated in the Odyssey (and other works).
Anamorphic Reading
The chess- or checkerboard and the harlequin diamond pattern are thematized in Nabokov, where the latter is the former viewed on a slant. Optically (or in a visual representation), this means that a flat two-dimensional surface can bear what appears to be a åpurelyπ decorative, non-semantic colouration or pattern that is in reality the effect of a dislocation of the åproperπ point of view.[xxiv][24] Like the arche-trope of the mirror, this is the kind of feature that serves to ålay bareπ what is fashionably called the åself-consciousnessπ of the art object. But it does so only in what is for the viewer/reader an un-self-conscious or hidden manner, one that necessitates a åsplittingπ of the attention, of the attending consciousness, between a åpassiveπ and an åactiveπ function. Technically, this is not the effect of parallax, where the same object is perceived from different points on a line, but a species of anamorphosis, which invokes an optical metaphor of distorted representation, where an object can only be clearly or wholly perceived from one particular viewpoint. In other words, if either position is åidealπ it is in fact the one which is åoutsideπ of or oblique to the picture plane or the concomitant textual surface: the position (or attitude) from which the viewer or reader can åproperlyπ view/read. This may run counter to the conventional directionality of reading: left to right, up to down, front to back. The alternative of course is quite simply looking at the text and appreciating it as a material object, flat, like a painting or a mirror, but even more reluctant than these to give up the images it harbors in an oblique secrecy. It should be obvious that this is no reception theory, as the ideal point of view is one that is in a sense inaccessible to any reader motivated by the desire to read the text in a conventional manner and arrive at some understanding of its ådeeperπ structures of meaning. This may indeed be an impossible quest.
The metaphorical system of Nabokovπs novel is characterized by the geometrical permutations (triangles, circles, spheres) of the line (either finite and curved or impossibly straight and infinite). But this immediately begs the question of the status of metaphor. Nabokov and Kleist, and their modern and premodern forebears, remain in the end trapped within what Paul De Man calls an ≥epistemology of metaphor≤ (Sacks 11-28). In other words, ≥mind, or subject,≤ as De Man puts it, ≥is the central metaphor, the metaphor of metaphors≤ (Sacks 23), and this is nowhere more evident than in modern novelistic discourse. In their different ways, the geometrical metaphorics of these authors serve the cause of årepresentingπ consciousness, even if this amounts to the representation of an unrepresentable interiority.
In Nabokovπs fictional universe a curve – every curve – being finite, is a turning to the left (a sinistra[xxv][25]) for the simple reason that it does not partake of straightness, perfect straightness being the exclusive property of the åinfinite lineπ of late medieval geometrical negative theology, which, for Nicholas Cusanus at least, is ultimately identical to the infinite triangle, curve, circle, sphere, and so forth.[xxvi][26] Thus a curve, bend, turn or deviation is always, whether literally or figuratively, to the left (åa sinistraπ); is always pejorative or åin error,π by virtue of the fact that it is not straight (i.e. årightπ; a destra).[xxvii][27] åBend sinisterπ in this very literal reading becomes pleonastic: it describes at once a double bend, a double error (a åright bend,π in this sense, becoming a logical contradiction). But to read this way is to forget the etymology of the phrase: åbendπ in heraldic terminology describes not a turning but more simply a diagonal band slanting in a particular direction. To begin with, ≥the terms dexter and sinister mean merely årightπ and åleft.π A shield is understood to be as if held by a user whom the beholder is facing. Thus the side of the shield facing the beholderπs left is the dexter or right hand, and that opposite his right, the sinister or left hand≤[xxviii][28] – a chiastic mirror-logic. The åbendπ or band is a strip or stripe; ≥a third part of the shield, drawn from the dexter chief to the sinister base; the bend, sinister, drawn from the dexter base to the sinister chief≤ – that is, from lower left to upper right, from the observerπs point-of-view.[xxix][29] By thus taking Nabokovπs title for the moment at its most heraldically literal, a fundamental shift is instituted in the significance to these texts of geometrical figures, from the ideological or moral to the purely directional and perspectival; in short, the term åbend sinisterπ accounts within itself for its own relationally-dependent significance.[xxx][30] Whether the åbendπ is to the right or to the left depends entirely upon the viewerπs vantage point; in fact, were he/she to be behind the shield, he/she would not be the viewing subject at all but rather the subject of the viewing, which is clearly no small distinction. Nor is this relationship of viewer and viewed entirely relative: after all, in order for heraldry to function semantically, one of the parties, as the shieldπs bearer, is its owner or their proxy: what we have here, therefore, are two distinct points-of-view as epistemological positions. As the åsemiotic codeπ of chivalry, heraldry inscribes an idiosyncratic subject position: in addition to the obvious viewing/interpreting/knowing subject, there is the åbearingπ subject, behind the shield/blazon, from whose perspective, the front – the åsignifierπ – cannot be seen. It might seem redundant to insist on this double subject, when one plays no åvisibleπ role in either signification or interpretation – until it is recalled that the relative orientation of the blazonπs elements are determined vis-a-vis the bearerπs point-of-view, and not the viewerπs.[xxxi][31] On the other hand, insofar as a åbendπ is in this sense a straight line, it is also finite, and therefore in some measure curved; hence, a åbendπ in the current, conventional sense.
It is at this point that all of the sign- or tropological-systems granted a privileged status here – heraldry, chess, mirror optics, a certain geometry – are seen to be all the more suitable in such a metaphorical or analogical application to literary texts when, viewed åsideways-on,π they are revealed in all their two-dimensional ådepthlessness,π their respective modes of enigmatic signifying through displacement and doubling, and their differing qualities of self-reflexivity as exemplary second-order images; simulacra utterly sundered from any extratextual referent, yet still offering the appearance of mimetic reference. Like the anthropomorphized deck of cards that reverts to its collective inanimate form at the end of Alice in Wonderland (1865), as a presage to Aliceπs awakening from the dream that was the narrative, the armorial bearing, the chess board, the mirror – all are seen to be semantically charged facets of the paper-thin surface of the world of literature.
Conclusion
This paperπs ultimate intention has been to examine the set of fictive protagonists in a comparative context predicated on the notion of a narrative subject as the irreducibly negative ground for the selfπs constitution in memory. This rather abstract notion finds concrete form in the figure of Nabokovπs Krug, who stands in the text as the crossing-point of the objectively illusory depth of the novelπs world and the possibility of a radically oblique subjective perspective, yielding the sudden awareness that the otherπs absolute absence is what is concealed in the shadow cast by the self in its own field of vision. In this regard, Krug the novelistic hero is as idiosyncratic as he is åtypical.π For, in Krugπs combining of the knightπs move trope with an act of radical forgetting – a forgetting that conceals its own tracks – we are reminded that the straightest path is only åimpossibleπ precisely because it leads straight to death.
In raising the most difficult problems of representation or representability in the novel, Nabokov re-poses the oldest aesthetico-philosophical questions, but in this context in which the fictional åcontent,π the mode of writing, and the conceptual, cannot be separated out. The two strands are inseparable: the self-denying writing and the possibility or impossibility of redemption – particularly the very subjective åredemptionπ represented by memoryπs recuperative potential; the ådenialπ of any positive transcendence manifesting itself in ironic, unrepresentable, fictional forms and structures of finite infinitude: the åartificial infiniteπ of the selfπs relation to the other. Out of this emerges not a new ground for hope as such but an alternative to metaphorπs empty promise of redemption, its åverticality,π predicated on identity and simultaneity. This alternative emerges in the non-metaphysical space that opens up within the text, on the horizontal level of differentially produced meaning, of the grammar and syntax of character, action, speech; the seemingly endless paronomasic play of the discourse itself: elements of a fictional ontology. It is along this axis that a new relation to fictionπs value continues to be negotiated.
McMaster University

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[i][1] See Kierkegaard; Hays; Loder and Neidhardt. As the term ålimited manπ implies, he is invariably masculine.
[ii][2] Eg. Cadava, et. al.; Levinas; Critchley and Dews.
[iii][3] And in response to an interviewerπs attempt to reduce him to a finite set of qualities, he adds, ≥how can I ådiminishπ to the level of ciphersächaracters that I have invented myself? One can ådiminishπ a biographee, but not an eidolon≤ (Strong Opinions 94).
[iv][4] See Bakhtin.
[v][5] åNarratology,π Makaryk 114.
[vi][6] Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, åWhat is a Minor Literature,π Kafka 16-27.
[vii][7] See Kilbourn, ≥The Unnamable: Denegative Dialogue.≤ European Journal of Joyce Studies special issue: ≥Joyce, Beckett, and the Negative.≤ Forthcoming Winter 2003.
[viii][8] Cf. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy 9 (67-9). This is intended as a pre-Freudian Oedipus and, therefore, also prior to Deleuze and Guattariπs de-oedipalized subject. It is of course impossible to invoke Oedipus without raising the spectre of Freud, even negatively; hence this disclaimer.
[ix][9] See Russell.
[x][10] ≥I loathe Van Veen≤ (Strong Opinions 120).
[xi][11] åEtermonπ is the everyman hero of a newspaper serial cartoon; a mass cultural symptom of the epistemo-ideological condition of Padukgrad (see BS 98-100).
[xii][12] See Schulte-Sasse, in Hohendahl 116.
[xiii][13] There was also, incidentally, a short-lived Russian emigrÈ review in the 1930πs called Krug, in the first issue of which (1936) Nabokovπs early work was appraised (see Field).
[xiv][14] In Bend Sinister, the stated goal of the dictator Padukπs Ekwilism, as a ≥violent and virulent political doctrine,≤ to ≥make the contents of the human vessel conform to an average scale≤ so as to ≥enforce spiritual uniformity,≤ is foiled by the specific, concrete differences that make it possible to distinguish among åaverage menπ everywhere: ≥No, the average vessels are not as simple as they appear: it is a conjurorπs set and nobody, not even the enchanter himself, really knows what and how much they hold≤ (77-79). Krug (in terms of the German) is at least nominally such a åvessel,π and the concretized puns on vessels and containers have to be acknowledged. There are, for example, Krugπs persistently intrusive memories of Olga: ≥If, for instance, a given amount of water were contained in a given number of heterogenous bottles – wine bottles, flagons and vials of varying shape and size, and all the crystal and gold scent bottles that were reflected in her mirrorä≤ (75).
[xv][15] Cf. Kermode: ≥Parableämay proclaim a truth as a herald does, and at the same time conceal truth like an oracle. This double function, this simultaneous proclamation and concealmentä≤ (47).
[xvi][16] Cf. Speak, Memory 66
[xvii][17] Boyd recounts an anecdote about Nabokovπs relationship with Edmund Wilson: ≥With his prickly competitiveness, Wilson attempted to ensure he would never be caught out by Nabokov, and as a result imagined hoaxes that had never existed. He telephoned Nabokov shortly after reading The Real Life of Sebastian Knight to tell him he had discovered that the whole novel was built like a chess game. Nabokov told him, quite truthfully, that this was not the case≤ (Boyd 72). åTruthfullyπ or not, given the nature of the book, and the nature of Wilsonπs insight, one wonders what other answer Nabokov could have given. Chess infuses Sebastian Knight on a variety of levels: eg. åSt. Damier,π the name of the hospital in which Sebastian supposedly dies, is translated by Alexandrov as åSaint Checkerboardπ (152). Alexandrov also identifies åun damierπ with åein Schachbrett,π a chessboard (154). Cf. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight 197-98.
[xviii][18] For the significance of chess to Nabokovπs creative life in general see eg. Speak, Memory 288-93. By the time of Ada (1969), the knightπs move itself signifies in a plurality of ways. It is as banal, for example, as when ≥the windows in the black castle [at Ardis] went out in rows, files, and knight moves≤ (72). Cf. also Lolita: ≥One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unsustained rectangles and its asymmetrical position – a knightπs move from the top – always strangely disturbed me≤ (192). Ada shares with her åuterine sisterπ Lucette a predilection for the ≥knight move of specious response≤; i.e. oblique or indirect, three logical steps (and around a corner) beyond the query (383). On the other hand, it is possible that the many knots – the various permutations of connection and liaison – in the Veen family tree (schematically represented at the front of the novel) can be interpreted in terms of the logic of the knightπs move. For, as Adaπs mother (and Vanπs putative aunt), Marina, muses early on, ≥I could never understand how heredity is transmitted by bachelors, unless genes can jump like chess knights≤ (234).
[xix][19] ≥Iπll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, thereπs the room you can see through the glass – thatπs just the same as our drawing-room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair – all but the bit just behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit!≤ (Carroll 170-71).
[xx][20] The modern der Reiter is a horseman or cavalryman. The German for the chess piece is, variously, der Springer, literally åjumperπ; das Pferd(chen), (little) horse; and das Rˆssel, Southern dialect for åhorse.π
[xxi][21] Cf. Bakhtin, åForms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,π Dialogic 84-258.
[xxii][22] Kleistπs Judge Adam, as suggested above, combines all of the foregoing characteristics in one figure.
[xxiii][23] See Cormac McCarthyπs Blood Meridian for the contemporary apotheosis of this tendency.
[xxiv][24] For a visual analogue cf. Holbeinπs åThe Ambassadors,π the inaugural painting of the Northern Renaissance: within what appears to be a thin, mottled strip or band is a deathπs head, hidden in full view. The attenuated skull is only visible from a 15E angle, to the viewerπs right and below, as from a staircase. Thus no single åproperπ viewpoint is dictated, but rather two non-coincident and incommensurable viewpoints, one straight on and the other oblique to the picture plane. In each case, the åmeaningπ of the painting is radically different.
[xxv][25] åSinisterπ is construed here and throughout in terms of its full polysemy, with both moral and directional connotations (eg. BS xii).
[xxvi][26] See Docta Ignorantia 1. 15.
[xxvii][27] Nor is it even åin the right.π Many Western European lexicons employ the same word for not only both the direction and åcorrectness,π but also for the notion of privilege due under the law; cf. droit, Recht, etc.
[xxviii][28] åHeraldry,π Encyclopaedia Britannica 570.
[xxix][29] Nabokovπs use of chivalry self-consciously completes its ådomesticationπ as a complex of heraldry and chess metaphors.
[xxx][30] And a heraldic åbendπ is a åsignπ par excellence, painted onto the outer surface of a shield, its meaning determined through consensus and convention.
[xxxi][31] Being, after all, always potentially that of an antagonist. See eg. Gough and Parker 538; Woodcock and Martin 206; etc.