The Tragedy of Mister Morn Read Free

aside
shell after shell, that man shall come to
the Creator, to the Master, with empty hands—
and he will find that he is deaf and dumb
in heaven …
(I.ii. this page )
    The conceits are often as whimsical as those in Shakespeare, defying that Enlightenment ideal of rhetorical decorum according to which Shakespeare’s imagination was deplored as savage and untutored. So Tremens declares that
… The soul is like a tooth, God
wrenches out the soul—crunch!—and it is over …
What comes next? Unthinkable nausea and then—
the void, spirals of madness—and the feeling of being
a swirling spermatozoid—and then darkness,
darkness—the velvety abyss of the grave …
(II. this page )
    Or, earlier, he remembers an evening in which he “shook with fever,/rippling like a reflection in an ice-hole” (I.i. this page ). One is reminded of a line in Chapter 26 of Nabokov’s penultimate novel, Transparent Things , which was finished nearly fifty years after Morn , in 1972, about “an African nun in an arctic convent touching with delight the fragile clock of her first dandelion.” Such wild conceits, yoking together hot fancy and cold reason, are common in Nabokov’s mature style. They derive, as Morn helps us to see, from Shakespeare, and mark the rebellion of Nabokov’s genius against the decorousness of the Age of Reason.
    Equally Shakespearean is Nabokov’s subtly reasoned orchestration of many different voices and registers. At one extreme, we have the high-toned rhetoric of Tremens, Klian, Morn, Dandilio, and Ganus, each of whom Nabokov endows with an individual voice that speaks of their desires, values, and condition. The first note struck is that of Tremens’s feverish rhetoric, tightly coiled upon itself, thickly patterned with spite and self-pity, and embroidered with antique curses: “Begone, fever, you snake!” (I.i. this page ). In Klian, the court poet of Tremens’s revolution, that destructiveness finds a sexual urgency which takes his rhetoric to the very limit of intelligibility. In our translation, we have allowed many of his speeches to remain as obscure in English as they are in the original Russian, where they seem to evince his commitment to the revolutionary poetics of violence upon the word associated with such poets as Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), on whom he may be modelled.
    At the other pole of the play’s rhetoric are Morn and Dandilio: in Morn there is a noble purity and simplicity of speech—“radiant,” to identify it by one of Morn’s own favourite words. Although Morn is not a poet, he has the champagne-like effervescence he himself identifies with creativity, and it is definitive of him that when Ganus attacks him he responds with the carefree laughter which gives him his power. Dandilio shares with Morn this equanimity, which is not to be mistaken for a Buddhist absence of will or desire: on the contrary, Dandilio urges that life be embraced without scruple or discrimination. He is a snuff-taking eighteenth-century Optimist of the kind Voltaire famously satirized in Candide , and whom Nabokov would reprise in the figure of Pale Fire ’s John Shade. He believes that all in the world is well, good and evil, Morn and Tremens alike. In the compressed aphorisms of his speeches the sententious gravity of the Age of Reason is combined with the intermittently childlike and singsong tenor of its thought.
    Indeed, memories of childhood, and especially of the pains and illnesses of childhood, stud the play, introducing into it a domestic counterpoint to the stagy rhetoric, in something like the way that Shakespeare typically sets tavern against court, and prose against verse. (The Old Man who enters to clean up after Edmin and Morn have fled is, with his rustic speech, closely reminiscent of such Shakespearean characters as the Porter in Macbeth .) Dandilio says that life assuages all pain, like a mother rushing in to kiss better a child who has scratched itself (11.340–45);