The Enchanter: The Obsession That Outruns Its Plot
The strangest object in The Enchanter is a wristwatch that seems to have no hands. A girl examines it in a park. The hands are there, but almost entirely concealed beneath the dial; only their tips show at the edge.
Written in Russian in 1939, long before its posthumous publication and before Lolita, The Enchanter follows an unnamed man who can describe his guilt, anticipate discovery, imagine retreat, and recognize the fraudulence of his schemes. After each moment of recognition, he resumes planning.
Nabokov exposes the man's intention from the start, then makes the approach procedural: the park encounter leads to a pretext for entering the girl's home, courtship of her mother, marriage, and finally the chance to be alone with her. The thriller's suspense comes from his ability to convert each obstruction, including his own conscience, into another calculation.
Spoilers: This essay discusses the girl's awakening and the novella's ending.
The mother, the girl, and the surrounding social life rarely acquire purposes capable of pushing back against his. When the girl finally wakes to find him beside her, her scream breaks into a narrative that has allowed almost none of her own speech. The violent speed of the ending follows from this confinement, although the middle has done too little to prepare its collision.
A Sentence That Can Confess and Continue
From the opening pages, the man speaks to himself as though self-knowledge might count as innocence. His first long self-examination separates kinds of tenderness, asks whether they belong to different “genera,” calls the aesthetic sense to dinner, and then pivots with “On the other hand.” One qualification creates the need for another. Only at the end does he say that, “under the pretext of discussing something remarkable,” he is seeking “justification for my guilt.” The next movement of the story takes him to the park and the girl.
His reasoning repeatedly bends back on itself without changing his course. A thought advances, notices what it is doing, supplies an objection, and continues with greater precision. Later, when he recognizes the “evident error” of his obsession and considers leaving his wife, the imagined letter already contains instructions to “expand” and “be more specific.” Even flight becomes a draft to revise.
His recognition of guilt does little to stop him, which makes moral blindness unnecessary to the novella's psychological tension. Nabokov gives him enough intelligence to detect his own fraud and enough appetite to put that intelligence to work on the next obstacle.
Nabokov gives the calculations physical tasks. The man first notices the girl in the park; later he returns furniture to her mother as a pretext for admission to their home. He courts and marries the mother without wanting the marriage as a life, and imagines illness, widowhood, travel, and paternal authority as successive clearances. The event plot follows a nearly straight line—encounter, access, marriage, death, journey, exposure—while the mental plot grows intricate with every lie required to make the next step seem legitimate.
The method appears with particular ugliness when he tries to describe his desired future as ordinary paternal care. His fantasy preserves criminal intent inside a counterfeit domestic scene. The language of solicitude becomes camouflage. Nabokov's achievement is to let us feel, clause by clause, how a mind can remain lucid about its fraud while inhabiting it.
The World Becomes a Board
The protagonist works with numbers, colors, and precious stones. His trained vision appraises, classifies, and detects imperfections. When the girl thinks his watch has lost its hands, he calls it “a rarity.” At the hotel he will describe her sleeping body as a “priceless original.” His profession cannot explain his desire, but its vocabulary offers him ways to prize and arrange what he sees.
The novella's motifs submit to the same treatment. A counterfeit coin becomes a talisman. Chess supplies the instruction to keep pressure on “the weak corner of the board.” The returned furniture is both household matter and an algebraic term in a scheme. A theatrical curtain rises; a fairy-tale enchantment promises transformation; in the hotel, the sleeping girl is imagined as an oil painting. His metaphors remove other lives from ordinary reciprocity and place them inside his private composition.
Gem, painting, chessboard, stage, and fairy tale multiply his acts of appropriation. The metaphors proliferate while the girl's thoughts remain almost entirely inaccessible except as he imagines them.
The lucky coin proves counterfeit, and the domestic bliss he projects is a “forgery.” The later performance of grief and guardianship extends that same fraud into public life. For much of the novella, other people can delay or inconvenience him, but scarcely anyone occupies enough narrative space to test the story he tells about their futures.
The mother enters his account principally as the route to her daughter; her illness hastens his plans and her death clears his path. Her friend and a police call meant for someone else interrupt him; the old man at the hotel searches through his register and keys. Most disturbing of all, the girl is assembled first from what he sees and then from what he imagines she must like, think, or become. Keeping her unnamed reproduces his refusal to recognize a separate person, but it also keeps the novella inside that refusal.
What the Obsession Excludes
Nabokov gives the mother and daughter so little independent time that the man's small practical problems can fill whole stretches of the novella. He must secure a visit, wait out other adults, preserve his disguise, arrange the journey. The destination is visible early, but each delay prolongs the reader's dread of his reaching it.
That narrow focus leaves too little autonomous counterforce. We know the mother largely through his assessments and impatience; the marriage seldom makes him contend with a life fully imagined apart from his wishes. We spend little time with the girl outside his gaze. Other adults enter intermittently, usually to interrupt the next stage of his plan. Her fear at the hotel is unmistakable, but the novella asks that brief awakening to carry almost all of her resistance.
The external action mainly ratifies stages already completed in fantasy. Psychological intricacy supplies the propulsion, but it cannot supply all the resistance as well. The hotel scene has to bring in, very late, the perception the man's account of the girl has systematically excluded.
The Instant She Sees Him
When the girl wakes, the man registers for an instant how he appears to her: “some monstrosity.” We still receive her terror through his consciousness, but his fantasy of paternal intimacy cannot survive her reaction.
His schemes have depended upon reading every surface while monopolizing interpretation. Now he is interpreted, and her screams bring neighboring guests toward the room. The girl refuses the role his imagery assigned her; the “priceless original” he pictured sleeping on the bed has seen the man looking at her.
Nabokov then accelerates violently. The corridor, pursuit, street, traffic, and collision arrive in a broken “cinema of dismemberment”; the protagonist's “film of life” bursts. The imagery completes motifs established earlier. Theater has become cinema, private composition has become involuntary spectacle, and the man who turned people into aesthetic objects is himself reduced to fragments of perception.
Within a handful of pages, the finale must accommodate the girl's gaze, intervention from outside the room, exposure, panic, self-destruction, and formal disintegration. Nabokov has prepared the motifs for their collapse, but not enough competing life in the middle to give the collapse comparable dramatic weight. An old woman wrests the key from him as guests crowd the stairs; he runs past them toward the street.
Sources
Vladimir Nabokov, The Enchanter, translated by Dmitri Nabokov, First Vintage International Edition (1991); quotations checked against the supplied ebook. Publisher's edition record.
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