Safe from His Readers: Interpretation as Inhospitality in Cold War America
Published in Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture: Modern and Contemporary Perspectives, 2016
Abstract
Vladimir Nabokov took every opportunity to disavow political interpretations of his fictional works, so it is almost heresy to begin by pointing out that the first two novels Vladimir Nabokov published in the US were published during the Red Scare: Bend Sinister appeared in 1947, and Pnin in 1957. Yet one cannot help but note that precisely such disavowals had become a key trope of the Red Scare itself: people in the Red Scare were constantly denying the political meanings, not only of their literary works, films, and other forms of expression, but also of their associations, memberships, movements, and actions. Thus Nabokov’s first novels, along with his energetic rebuttals, were published in the United States during a profoundly pertinent national debate about interpretation and intention. But while relations, both general and specific, between Nabokov’s work and the Cold War have been extensively and usefully discussed, my intention in exploring Nabokov’s escapes from interpretation is not finally to assert understanding of Nabokov’s political views—and particularly not to capture Nabokov in the act of supporting the period’s anti- or anti-anti-Communism. Instead, by paying close attention to the debate around the Fifth Amendment, and to two of Nabokov’s lesser-known novels, I aim to illuminate a particular moment in the history of modernity, and its modernisms: the transition from the logic of “discipline” to the logic of “security.”