創作する語り手 : V.ナボコフの『バッハマン』をめぐって

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Short stories of Vladimir Nabokov are little treated by Nabokov's critics, perhaps because he left so many comlicated novels for critics to wrestle with. It's true that his short stories are rather simple in their construction, but there we sometimes can see the essence of Nabokov's literature. Among his short stories I've chosen Bachmann (1924) to show that the narrative form of this work predicts that of Nabokov's later novels such as Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962) and Ada (1969), where Nabokov estabished his own style of narrating and where the very action of narrating forms a "story". The narrator of Bachmann presents three streams of time, putting them on one another. The first stream of time follows the story of Bachmann and his lover Mrs. Perov, the second follows the scene where a friend of the] narrator tells him the story, and the third follows the very action of narrating the story to the reader. (The story is told twice, to the narrator and by the narrator.) Mixed with one another, each stream loses its continuity and gets fragmented, but this is the way the narrator creates a complex whole consisted of various dimensions of time. Lolita and Ada take over this way of dealing with time. Telling their own menoirs, the narrators often connect one scene to another in succession not by a chronological order but by his individual connection of ideas, so that the stream of time gets fragmented and, at the same time, gets recombined newly. By doing so, the narrators try to recreate their own past in the field of words and consciousness. The main theme of Lolita and Ada is said to be "time and memory," and the theme is supported by the way of treating time and of recreating the past. The second feature of the narrator of Bachmann is the fact that he does create some parts of the story by himself, which means he inserts in the story "the twofold fiction" or "a fiction in a fiction" from the viewpoint of the reader who stays outside the primary fiction where the narrator belongs. The narrator adds many details of his own making to the story he heard from a friend. These details all belong to one figure, Mrs. Perov, and bring her to life, whereas the figure Bachmann is left as it is, as a comical puppet. In a sense, Bachmann contains tow stories in it, one of which is a comedy of Bachmann and the other is a tragedy of Mrs. Perov. The narrators of Pnin (1957) and Pale Fire take over this manner of creating the twofold fiction. But the portion of "a fiction in a fiction" in these works grows much larger than that of Bachmann, as illustrated in Pale Fire, where Mr. Kinbote, the narrator, creates a new country called Zembla. Mr. Kinbote mixes up the story in Zembla and the story in America together. So, Pale Fire contains "another story" ass Bachmann does, but "another story" becomes the chief story of the novel. Reading these novels of Nabokov considered above, the reader see the narrator not only narrate a story but also create or recreate a story. In this sense, I named them "creative narrators." In these works, Nabokov has revived the rights of narrators, I suppose. The right to create, the right to deceive readers, the right to enjoy themselves, and so on. Nabokov's "creative narrators" may fiind the likes of themselves in the novels of Francois Rabelais or Laurence Sterne.
1990-10-01

著者

杉本一直
愛知淑徳大学多元文化専攻

創作する語り手 : V.ナボコフの『バッハマン』をめぐって

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