Nabokov's Invitation to Plato's Beheading

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A. Moudrov. “Nabokov’s Invitation to Plato’s Beheading” his other works, particularly Pale Fire, Lolita, The Eye, and the 1923 play Death. As if addressing the readers, Humbert tells Quilty at gunpoint: “I want you to concentrate. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity” (Lolita 297). It may well be. In what reminds us of Socrates’ attempts to dispel his reservations about immortality, the central conflict in Invitation to a Beheading appears to be not between Cincinnatus and the prison-world in which he is entrapped, but between him and his sense of reality. His doubts, not his jailers, seem to keep him in prison. His many flights of imagination, which are his way of escaping, are soon or later undercut by a doubt. Thus in the first scene of the novel, in which Cincinnatus learns about his death sentence, he is compared to “a man who has dreamt that he is walking on water,” which would create an optimistic image if it was not undercut by “a sudden doubt: but is it possible?” (11). Cincinnatus asks himself the same question throughout the novel, and the answer is not always affirmative. Even when he seems convinced, his belief still lacks a convincing ring. “It exists, my dream world,” Cincinnatus says in his soliloquy, “it must exist,” he repeats as if in doubt. And like Socrates before him, he feels that he has to prove its existence to himself: “surely there must be an original of the clumsy copy,” he says in what actually sounds an echo of Socrates’ famous argument (93). 6 They are, consequently, torn between their optimism about afterlife and a realization that they are mortal. This explains why there appear to be two Cincinnatus’, one confident and rebellious while the other complacent and fearful (15, 25, 29, 40, 69, and 222-3). This 6 The idea that this world is a copy of another reverberates throughout Plato’s works, and can be exemplified with Timaeus’ words: “the world has been framed in the likeness of that which is apprehended by reason and mind and is unchangeable, and must therefore of necessity, if this is admitted, be a copy of something” (Timaeus 27c-29d).
NOJ / НОЖ: Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. I / 2007 distinction between two different characteristics of the same person also evokes Plato’s portrayal of Socrates who sometimes appears confident in his reasoning about immortality while at other times is notably ridden by doubts. 7 What torments Cincinnatus and Socrates, who found themselves in the same situation, is the question of how real that place where their reasoning and imagination often take them is. Strangely, most commentators do not share their doubts, discussing Cincinnatus’ immortality as something certain. Brian Boyd, in his reading of the novel, commented on Cincinnatus’ situation: “Only beyond death can a mind so alive find its true scope” (413), which can remind us of equally optimistic readings of Socrates’ death. At the execution Cincinnatus does not die, Boyd wrote, but “tears a hole in his world to reach his likes beyond” (415). 8 Cincinnatus’ fate, however, is more uncertain than this. Nabokov, perhaps unintentionally echoing Plato’s way of writing about Socrates’ wavering hopes for immortality, gave us many reasons to believe that Cincinnatus survived his execution, while at the same time hinting that he did not. 7 We can also distinguish two distinct images of Socrates in the context of Socratic literature in general. Xenophon portrays Socrates as a philosopher who is completely assured of his immortality and intentionally defies the jury during his trial in anticipation of his death (or afterlife). Plato, in contrast, creates image of Socrates as a less confident man. 8 Likewise, Socrates suggests at one point that death is the final step toward satisfying a philosopher’s desire for wisdom, arguing that “when we are dead, [we] attain that which we desire and of which we claim to be lovers, namely, wisdom” (Phaedo 66e). Many critical responses to the novel are equally optimistic about Cincinnatus’ survival. Gavriel Shapiro, by comparing Cincinnatus to Christ, argued that Christian allusions “enable to interpret the novel’s close as the resurrection of its hero” (124). Vladimir Alexandrov, in his examination of the novel’s Gnostic motives, was equally optimistic when he concluded that Cincinnatus “appears to transcend his mortal being following his decapitation” (86) so that his soul is allowed to escape the confines of his body and “return to the spiritual homeland to which he had been attached throughout his life” (87). Julian W. Connolly, for his part, wrote that the “end of the novel depicts Cincinnatus picking himself up from the ruble of the world disintegrating around him and heading off toward a new realm of kindred spirits” (183). Countering such an incorrigible tradition of interpretive optimism, Dale Peterson wrote in his admirably elaborate “Literature as Execution” that although “critics [often] assumed that Nabokov invites his readers to believe that imagination can rise above everything and anything, redeeming mundane hurts and losses,” it is doubtful that Nabokov “can actually be irresponsible enough to advocate imaginative escapism as an adequate response to police states” (70).
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