The Text and the World in That in Aleppo Once by Vladimir Nabokov

The relationship between literary texts and the world has been a central problem in criticism and theory ever since Plato punished the poets of his Republic for purposely misinterpreting the world. This phrase, the text and the world, however, implies a separation between the two, also commonly applied when it comes to perceiving literature as mimesis or imitation. Yet, recent poststructuralist studies are trying to undermine the text-world dichotomy. Michel Foucault points out the fact that if language expresses, it does so not in so far as it is an imitation and duplication of things, but in so far as it manifests the fundamental will of those who speak it1 In the light of the above, the short story written by Nabokov, That in Aleppo Once is a text that actually makes up the world. At the first reading, the story , as the title suggests, explores the issues of jealousy, marital fidelity, and the ways that a credulous mind is affected by one more crafty, theme also present in Shakespeares Othello, in which the title character, through the machinations of the villainous Iago, becomes so jealous of his innocent wife that he eventually strangles her and kills himself. Beyond the simple plot of an innocent man whose wanton wife makes a fool of him through her adulterous affairs, the story proves more elusive and the events of its plot more difficult to pin down upon closer examination. The story is written in the form of a letter from an anonymous narrator to V., his Russian emigrant friend living as a novelist in the United States and it id told in the first person narrative point of view. The narrator begins by telling V. that he has arrived in America. While in New York City, he casually met a mutual friend of theirs (Gleb Alexandrovich Gekko), who gave V.s address. After recalling their days as young, eager poets, the narrator begins telling the story of his doomed marriagethe real subject of his letter. Im a rhyme, he metaphorically states in exposition, implying that one cant exist
1

Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, New York, Random House,1970, p290

outside the text. In his essay, Of Grammatology2, Jacques Derrida suggests that there is no access to the world except through language. From here, the ambiguity and subjectivity of each outside event once perceived through the filter of the mind. For Nabokov, there is no pure body without, or outside of his poem. Therefore, his marriage events and wife herself stopped existing as physical entities once they disappeared from his poetic memory. His love is not the wife of whom he writes but rather poetry, writing, and word. Thus, we learn towards the end of the story, that all past events of her uncles family cannot be traced anymore, and nor can his wifes house, now just an anonymous gap between two realities. The touch that first generated the love story at the beginning has now lost any consistency, like the character herself, who gradually separates from the narrator by building her own text-worlds. In terms of meta-fiction there is an interesting twist to the story in that it ends by the narrator imploring his friend V. not to take up the Othello references in the story: It may all end in Aleppo if I am not careful. Spare me, V: you would load your dice with an unbearable implication if you took that for your title 3 Since the story does have part of the famous quotation as its title, the implication is that V. is publishing the letter and that therefore the narrator has committed suicide like Othello. Certainly from various hints in his narrative we are led to suspect that he is not psychologically stable. His jealousy leads him to permanent questioning of his wife: It went on like that for aeons, she breaking down every now and thenanswering my unprintable questions4 and maybe to a physical ill treatment of her: I could imagine the accursed recurrent scenewith the dim limbs of my wife as she shook and rattled and dissolved in my violent grasp 5

2 3

Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University press, 1976, p.156 Updike, John and Katrina Kenison, eds., The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Boston New York : Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999, p.242 4 Op.cit. p. 243 5 Op.cit. p. 243

This appears to be confirmed when, searching for his wife after she has finally left him, a third party in whom she has confided accuses him of being a bully and a cad 6. But his wife has also told this woman that the narrator hanged their pet dog before leaving Paris, and we know that there is no dog: it is one of her fabrications. And since we have her own evidence that she is capable of sustaining a lie, we are therefore in a dilemma. Whose testimony do we accept, knowing that it is all being presented to us by the narrator? There does not seem to be any answer to this problem, and the writer purposely leaves the answer to the imaginative mind of his readers. He explicitly plays upon the text-world opposition, shifting from what could be stated as real and the reality produced within the text."Although I can produce documentary proofs of matrimony, I am positive now that my wife never existed. You may know her name from some other source, but that does not matter: it is the name of an illusion,"7 Even if at some points of the short story he attempts to point beyond language, to refer to the womans body, here and now, her tiny brown birthmark on her downy forearm , her elusive touch8, their clumsy clutch or even the pain of her treachery, beyond all there is the refuge of art as the only immortality that two souls can ultimately share, as Nabokov himself states in Lolita, and even more poignantly here: We play, we die: ig-rhyme, umi-rhyme. And the sonorous souls of Russian compose lend a meaning to the wild gesticulation of trees or to near discarded newspaper sliding and pausing, and shuffling again, with vapid flaps and apterous jerks along an endless wind-swept embankment. But just outright I am not a poet,"9 In other words, we cannot go beyond or transcend the text since our only access to the world is thorough it, the real world of the story is the story. As Roman Jakobson defines, the poetic function of language as a focus on the message for its own sake10,

6 7

Op.cit. p. 243 Op.cit p. 245 8 Op. cit. p.246 9 Op.cit. 241 10 Jakobson, Roman, Closing Statement: Linguistics and poetics in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Cambridge, Mass:MIT, 1960, p. 23

Nabokovs short story is ultimately a self-reflexive autonomous work of art which transcends the interests of the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, New York, Random House,1970 Jakobson, Roman, Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Cambridge, Mass:MIT, 1960 Updike, John and Katrina Kenison, eds., The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Boston New York : Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999