A Surface Reading of Vladimir Nabokov

Abstract

What does it mean for a text to be transparent? If in order to be considered such, as the Oxford English Dictionary among others tells us, a thing must either be ‘easily seen’ or else ‘easily seen through’, what does this contradiction embedded into the term mean for the reader of transparent things? Vladimir Nabokov engages precisely this line of inquiry in the candidly named 1972 Transparent Things, his penultimate text before his death in 1977. In doing so, the author also articulates a particular understanding of and attraction to transparency which has permeated his body of works since at least the 1920s and which, in this emphatic iteration, serves to complicate any notion of stability in the roles of ‘authors’ and ‘readers’; to dismantle the dichotomous logic of the categories of ‘surface’ and ‘depth’; and finally to advocate for that which appears as ‘surface’ as the space where writing, reading and criticism is at its most fluid, inventive and kaleidoscopic.