When understanding a novel becomes an impossible task, it then becomes the task to find the simplest meaning possible within the text. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Transparent Things offers such a task to its readers. Not only is it very difficult to follow the plot through the abnormal narration, but it is also nearly impossible to quickly find connections within the sporadic chapters, each jumping within time and space. One can only admire such a work and seek to find what one can in the strategic, and yet seemingly-random outline of the work. Thus, after considerable deliberation, it becomes somewhat clear from the overarching picture of the book that the author, the narrator, and the main character, Hugh Person, seek to define certain aspects of life that are indefinable. They seek to make physical that which is hypothetical and out of the reach of human hands—and most importantly, out of the reach of human minds as well. Two of these items that Nabokov calls “transparent things” appear to be love and death.
The last sentence of the book offers the first clear light of understanding, making the reader wish to re-read the whole story with the statement in mind. “This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another” (104). The simple thought intended for the book is that these unreachable concepts are like transparent things, the outline of which is discernable, the concept is definable, but the true understanding is altogether invisible. With transparent objects, a person can describe what he sees on the other side and imagine what it would be like in that place, but he will never know with certainty until traversing the obscure barrier and experiencing it for himself. This action, Nabokov explains, is more painful to the mind than any physical ailment to the body.
Hugh Parson travels to Switzerland four times throughout the book, and each time he becomes more acquainted with the “transparent things” in his life. The first trip offers him a close experience of death by his father’s sudden passing, and a search for love through a prostitute, both items leaving him on the inexperienced side of the transparent material, because he himself did not traverse through either of them to fully know what they are. The death of a loved one is not our own death, and thus is still an obscure understanding of it. The love of a prostitute is not real love, and thus is a false representation of it. During his second trip, he falls in love, suggesting that he discovers for himself the other side of the transparent thing of love. However, he is disappointed with it, leaving the reader to question whether or not it is real. The third trip brings more experience with death, but still not his own; it also presents him with more hints of false love through the indecent passions of R, reminding the reader again that attempting to define the undefinable is very complicated. Both love and death remain mysterious and obscure concepts until Person fully experiences them on his own during his final trip to Switzerland.
It is interesting that on this last voyage, he completely traverses both barriers but the process of doing so is different for each one. The author suggests through the nostalgia Person feels while visiting all the memorable locations of moments with his late wife, Armande, that he does in fact know love. However, he did not know it fully until it was taken from him by her death. Nabokov also implies through the proceeding description of the burning hotel and Person’s relent to death’s eminency, that he does not understand death until he surrenders himself to it, and it pulls him through the invisible substance of which it consists. Ultimately, the reader is left to wonder what the true form of love and death actually is—a question that Nabokov seems to conclude can only be uncovered upon one’s own personal arrival past each “thing’s” transparent barrier.
October 25, 2018
Works Cited:
Nabokov, Vladimir. “Transparent Things.” Vintage International, New York, 1989.