Even more than self-expression, [Nabokov’s] fiction could be described as an act of programmatic self-establishment, an elaborately performative “I am.” Using his own preferred idiom of fairy tale and romance, it could be described as a way for a king-in-exile to recover his country and reassert his rule on a linguistic-aesthetic plane. Nabokov’s lifelong attraction— sometimes ironic, sometimes not—to the traditional romance motif of unrecognized royalty is fabulously evident in Pale Fire, where the deranged editor Kinbote has (at least in his own mind) been chased from the throne of the nation of Zembla to his ignominious dwelling at Wordsmith College, U.S.A. As the descendant of Russian nobility cut off from the vast country estate he roamed as a child, and from the language, Russian, in which he first made his name as a novelist, Nabokov had a more plausible biographical claim to a fantasy of royal restoration-in-language than most. But even for him this was essentially metaphorical, a way of imagining a life of uncompromised and exalted individuality. Certainly the fantasy is transposable to the inhabitants of the democratic United States, the immigrant nation where, as it has been well and untruly said, “every man is a king.” And it certainly fits quite snugly into the progressive school’s commitment to enhancing students’ self-esteem. It’s good to be king (or queen); and to recover one’s throne in the enchanted realm of one’s own writing is to bend the arrow of personal experience around until it reattaches to its origin like a golden Möbius band. Instead of testifying to a permanent condition of disadvantage in the face of physical necessity, or to the relentless humiliations exacted by social institutions, or to a perpetual process of wounding at the hands of history, “personal experience” is redeemed in this manner as a proud and vibrantly reflexive textual presence. That anyway is the idea. Of course, in practice, time marches on and nothing really comes full circle. And when we pull back from the therapeutic enchantments of literary experience to a wider angle of vision, we see something slightly less mystical than a golden Möbius band: a world in which the category of “personal experience” has over the course of the twentieth century, and in the postwar period in particular, achieved a functional centrality in the postindustrial economies of the developed world. These economies in turn inhabit what Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and others have described as a “reflexive modernity.” The utility of this concept for understanding the metafictional impulse in postwar writing leaps off the page, suggesting that literary practices might partake in a larger, multivalent social dynamic of self-observation. This would extend from the self-observation of society as a whole in the social sciences, media, and the arts, to the “reflexive accumulation” of corporations which pay more and more attention to their own management practices and organizational structures, down to the self-monitoring of individuals who understand themselves to be living, not lives simply, but life stories of which they are the protagonists. It would be absurd to deny the large payoff to individuals living in the inherently pluralistic conditions of reflexive modernity, who are vested with a thrilling panoply of choices about how they will live their lives. But it would be equally wrong to deny the degree to which, as Beck puts it, modern people “are condemned to individualization.” To be subject to reflexive modernity is to feel a “compulsion for the manufacture, self-design, and self-staging” of a biography and, indeed, for the obsessive “reading” of that biography even as it is being written. And in this project there are a host of agencies, including schools, waiting to help.
Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), pp. 11-12
