#invitationtoabeheading

[deathcabforme]

I blame wanting to read and buying Invitation To a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov on #maradyertrilogy specifically on author @michellehodkin She made me do it! I regret nothing 😊 #vladimirnabokov #invitationtoabeheading

[mtsveta]

Measure me while I live - after it will be too late.

Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

[ashallowroot]

Invitation to a Beheading

                When reading invitation to a beheading, Vladamir Novokov’s audience will find themselves in a world of absolute absurdity: the pages of a book—touching the paper, turning syllabary into symbols and symbols into letters and letters into words: words that, in and of themselves, make up the two dimensional existence of the characters we read about—this indiscriminately designed establishment: the one that keeps Cincinnatus clinging to his own body, the one that keeps us clinging to the pages.  Throughout this novel, the very existence of material—its manipulation of our physical vulnerability—is palpable; its sensory manifestation obscures our misguided opportunity to relate to a man imprisoned for “the most terrible of crimes, gnostical turpitude” (72). And yet, we find ourselves peering in on Cincinnatus. We are, by all means, “the observers on the other side of the door” trying to make sense of the absolute ambiguity that this two-dimensional “phantasy” continues to offer (65 and 61). So, is it through Cincinnatus himself or by some indirect method that we quantify a conclusion? And through what means do we finally distinguish the misrepresented character?

                We might start at Nabokov’s description of the novel: a “heap of cherries, whose mass had seemed to us of such a ruddy and glossy black, had suddenly become discrete drupes: the one over there with the scar is a little rotten, and this one has shriveled and dried up around its stone (and the very last one is inevitably hard and unripe).” (12) And it is the material world that is ever important throughout this book—and not just within the words that represent certain thoughts, but of the pages themselves, and what resides on these pages and how we feel when we attempt to chew through them and how they will leave us tastefully unsatisfied. Our sensory perception is thoroughly immersed within the first few paragraphs and for the remainder of the book we are constantly coerced into digesting the tactile tangibility contrived by the composer. We are handicapped by the strain of our sensory perception, and could, in turn, lose sight of the “other Cincinnatus” and the direction in which he makes his way (222).

                 It is important to define the “we”, the “our”, that permeates this paper, that penetrates this novel. There is a crowd of nameless, faceless individuals: “the spectators [that] [are] quite transparent, and quite useless” (222). We are Cincinnatus’s audience—the readers of his final words—his observers, and in consequence the characters: and they’re all the same, we’re all the same. So here we are, watching “the course of his [Cincinnatus’s] movements” standing around—perhaps with Nabokov himself—the “limited space of the haphazardly invented cell” (121). And we’re being compared to “spy’s” and “predators” watching, inspecting, examining, becoming “teased” by “this brazen elusive flesh”: this isolated character that we may have felt we were so linked to, is now much like the words he searches for to explain his existence: full of “live iridescence” (122 and 93).

                Consequently, we receive no mechanism to engage with Cincinnatus, with his separation from himself.  His litigation, his performance, his explanation: they are all seemingly incomplete. Yet, it is us—his audience, his observers—only observing through “an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind” (92). But perhaps there is a way to distinguish Cincinnatus even as we find ourselves trapped there—the “there” that is probably more easily explained as the “here” for us: the material world, this book between our hands, the sounds a sights placed in our minds by the words on the pages that we so trustingly allow to incriminate our perspective: the lies that we can’t seem to let go of—because “there shines the mirror that now and then sends a chance reflection here…” (94)

…”that is, when you placed one of these incomprehensible, monstrous objects so that it was reflected in the incomprehensible, monstrous mirror, a marvelous thing happened; minus by minus equaled plus, everything was restored, everything was fine, and the shapeless speckledness became in the mirror a wonderful, sensible image” (135).

                So, here they are, the suggestions, yet again in the form of questions: where is the here, what is the “incomprehensible, monstrous object” and where is the “incomprehensible, monstrous mirror”: the final refraction that relinquishes the “optical illusions” Cincinnatus “employs…to feign translucence” (24)? And here I am, searching and searching for the fluctuating conclusions that now consume my thoughts and how do I say them? ”There is something I know, there is something I know, there is something…” (95) And I could say the moment was the final word written by Cincinnatus: the one crossed out and it radiates fearless life; or I could say it was the “shadow of the swing” (222) that allowed Cincinnatus to slip into his soul—where he renounces his physicality, and the world in which it existed, completely. And it is beautiful: his transcendence into the syncope. But still I am left here, with his “shadow…caught on the wall’s unevenness” (53).

                                                                 Works Cited

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Invitation to a Beheading. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.