Invitation to a Beheading: When the Farce Won’t Let Him Speak
At the beginning of Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov imagines testing a novel by touch.
The unread pages under the right hand, once reassuringly thick, have dwindled to a few quick turns. He borrows the feeling of nearing a book's end for Cincinnatus C., sentenced to die on a day his jailers will not disclose. On the prisoner's cell table lies a pencil that Nabokov calls “as long as the life of any man except Cincinnatus”: a grim joke about time made physical. That object is also his means of writing. By the eighth day, it has lost more than a third of its length.
The prison often behaves like a theater. Officials change parts, letters are presented with a flourish, and visitors speak as though an audience were waiting for them. I laughed at the precision of these intrusions, especially when Marthe's family brings an entire household into the cell. But I also found that some performances kept going after I had grasped the trick. I'd consider this damaging for the trick efficiency has structural bearing: Cincinnatus is trying to reach someone through the noise. When a joke takes away a chance to speak, its length has a human cost; when it only repeats the proof that his world is staged, the same length can become wearying.
Spoilers: Pierre’s identity and the novel’s ending are discussed below.
How long a sentence can last
Cincinnatus first tries to write a declaration beginning “In spite of everything I am comparatively.” The comparison has no second term. He crosses out the words and shades the paper instead, while a guard watches through the door. Even before the prison has filled with elaborate spectacles, a sentence can fail under the pressure of being seen. The imagined book's dwindling pages give the pressure a shape; the unfinished comparison measures how little of Cincinnatus's own experience he can yet put into language.
His long passage on the eighth day keeps approaching a thought and losing it. “I know something. I know something. But expression of it comes so hard!” He moves through memories of childhood, dreams more vivid than waking life, the sensation of a self beneath successive layers, and the possibility of another world for which this one is a crude copy. Each image seems to bring him closer. Then he withdraws or revises it. A word that lived in the depths bursts when brought into the air; the water he searches grows muddy as he reaches into it. The movement of the prose gives us a mind working faster than its available sentences, fearful of death and of failing to say what death has made urgent.
This is also where my (let's call it) resistance to the book begins. Cincinnatus can name the waking world a painted life and propose that dreams contain a truer reality. Such declarations offer a remarkably clear account of the novel's philosophical arrangement.
The searching, qualifying motion of his writing remains more affecting than the arrangement it sometimes states outright. What he cannot quite say has texture because we follow the successive failures; the proposition about a genuine world becomes thinner when offered as an answer. The novel is at its best while his thought is still in motion.
The family moves in
Marthe's promised visit begins with a comic error of scale. She comes with her father, brothers, grandparents, children, a young man, attendants, household utensils, and pieces of wall. A wardrobe has its own private reflection, as though it has transported part of the marital bedroom into the prison. An inlaid table and a couch follow. The more objects Nabokov admits, the less room Cincinnatus has for the encounter he imagined. His request is modest: a few words alone with his wife.
The geometry of the scene turns the request into an obstacle course. To reach Marthe, Cincinnatus must go around a table set for ten and squeeze between a screen and the wardrobe. Family conversation interrupts him; her escort speaks for her. Cincinnatus finally reaches the couch and says, “I must—in private—”. At that point Rodion (the jailor) and another employee pick up the couch with Marthe on it and carry her out. The sentence breaks where the furniture moves. An absurd stage direction has performed a painfully exact action: it has removed the person to whom the next words were meant to go.
The spectacle's disproportion becomes beautiful: an entire marriage, with its walls and furniture, is dragged into a cell, while Cincinnatus asks for a room fit for two. Its abundance is measured against one withheld conversation. Even its ending has an unsettled edge. Emmie clings to Cincinnatus, weeps, and is dragged away; the narration gives her the “shadow of genuine despair” as she goes. That phrase leaves a little uncertainty inside a visit whose other gestures have seemed rehearsed. We cannot simply mark every visitor as an empty prop and keep moving. The child may feel something, and the machinery carries her out all the same.
The visit also shows why the play analogy reaches a limit. Actors could bring the wardrobe and couch onstage, and the last exit would be devastating. Nabokov lets the reader carry into that spectacle Cincinnatus's earlier difficulty of expression. We know the effort behind a request for privacy that sounds so small; the porters cut short a thought he has struggled through pages to form. The physical joke acquires its weight from the interior duration the novel has given it.
Pierre rewrites the rules
The letter to Marthe later gives Cincinnatus another chance to be heard. Its address to her becomes increasingly urgent: he wants her to grasp, for a moment, that he is going to be killed. The prose bends through accusation, tenderness, disgust, and pleading as he searches for words capable of crossing the distance between them. Near the end he insists that it is he, Cincinnatus, writing and weeping. The narration then turns him back into a man walking around the table. That shift from “I” to “he” lets us hear the written appeal and see how exposed its writer remains in the cell.
Rodion takes the completed letter, though the novel gives us no assurance that Marthe receives it. He tells Cincinnatus to learn to knit: “Writer, indeed!” Pierre, a fat man in his 30s, described earlier as a fellow prisoner, comes in with a woolen chessboard and pieces made of kneaded bread. He comments on Marthe's body and his own sexual exploits while repeatedly taking back moves, denying checkmate, and accusing Cincinnatus of cheating. His performance has no need of an answer. The man who has just risked a letter asking to be understood must now sit through somebody else's inexhaustible version of intimacy.
Pierre is very funny for a while. His hand keeps altering the game he claims to be playing, and the bread knight Cincinnatus picks at begins to return to dough. Later the chess gives way to another game that drags on; Pierre quarrels even over where the dice landed. By the time Cincinnatus complains that he cannot breathe, he has also asked about Pierre's smell, so the complaint has an immediate bodily cause. The length of the visit has made that bodily discomfort part of its comedy. The later disclosure that Pierre is the headsman gives his false camaraderie a satisfying, ugly explanation, though the talk itself had already begun to wear on me. A sustained performance can make captivity felt and still spend more of a reader's patience than its next variation earns.
Pierre's photograph album extends the same urge to arrange other lives. It assembles Emmie, the director's twelve-year-old daughter, into a series of retouched pictures showing ages she has not reached. In one bridal photograph, the groom has Pierre's round face. Where Cincinnatus's letter asks another person to respond, the album supplies a finished story before its subject has lived it. Nabokov needs no abstract pronouncement about the prison's power at that instant. Pierre has inserted himself into the girl's future through a photographic trick.
When the set breaks
An earlier reading of the novel as a parable resistant to a single decipherable meaning puts pressure on my impatience. The family furniture and Pierre's bread chessmen need no one-to-one symbolic translations. They alter the space and duration in which a frightened man can address other people. My objection concerns the moments when another display of false scenery confirms what such encounters have already made us feel. Cincinnatus eventually calls the deception “all of this theatrical, pathetic stuff” while listing its promises. Once he can supply the diagnosis, a fresh proof of the set's artificiality has a harder task.
At the execution, Nabokov gives it one. Pierre asks Cincinnatus to count. The narration divides him: one Cincinnatus continues the count, while another ceases to heed its sound and asks why he is lying there. His answer is an action. He gets up. The change in attention precedes the collapse of the stage around him, with its painted wood, plaster, and pasteboard. A production could show us a man standing amid broken scenery; the sentence has first let us occupy the split between obedience to the countdown and a thought that no longer accepts its necessity.
The last scenery is almost excessively explicit, and Cincinnatus's fear before it was physical. Its collapse cannot erase the terror of the preceding days or tell us exactly where he goes. The novel ends with him moving toward voices that seem to belong to beings akin to him. I can believe in that movement without treating every earlier trick as a step in a solved parable. The family couch had made speech impossible; Pierre had made listening almost impossible. The opening pencil measured how little time Cincinnatus had to write. At the block, he stops giving his remaining moments to the executioner's count.
Sources
Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, translated by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author, Vintage International, 1989 edition/2011 ebook. Primary passages cited by chapter (1, 8, 9, 13, 16, 19, 20).
Dale E. Peterson, “Nabokov's Invitation: Literature as Execution,” PMLA 96, no. 5 (1981), 824–836. The linked abstract argues that the novel's parable resists a transparent allegorical key.
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