Nabokov

I am starting to fall behind a bit on this and I am not covering every book that I read for one reason or another.  Today I am going to write briefly about Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading.  Before that, however, I want to note that I re-read Jacques Ranciere's book The Politics of Aesthetics.  Ranciere's work is foundational to my own scholarship and I tend to agree with a lot of his thoughts on disagreement and dissensus.  I will likely read and write about more of his books later on, but I had forgotten that this book was primarily taken up with sections written by other commenters (Gabriel Rockhill's translator's note is helpful to understanding the work and is clearly written, Slavoj Zizek's afterward is typically dense, etc).

I originally read Invitation to a Beheading a number of years ago while in graduate school.  After having read Lolita and Pale Fire for a seminar, I delved a bit deeper into Nabokov's work and this is one that I had read.  One of Nabokov's earlier novels, Invitation to a Beheading is more absurd than what he will go on to author.  In this novel, Cinncinatus is imprisoned and sentenced to die for an imaginary crime.  He is visited by his jailer, the jailer's daughter, a mysterious second prisoner and his own family.  The narration dances around the nature of his crime without ever revealing what he had done.  At the same time, the actual execution is delayed and Cinncinatus is not allowed to know the actual date of his death.  This pains him because he sees knowing the day of his death as a consolation for being condemned.  He thinks that freedom comes with the price of never knowing with certainty when one will die.  Toward the end of the novel, Cinncinatus realizes that he can alter his reality more than he had been aware.  In the end, as he is walking to his death, he wills away the executioner, the scaffold, and the crowd.  He has effectively shifted his reality and there is no resolution to this.  In a forward to the novel, Nabokov writes that he had never read Kafka at the time of writing this despite the similarities with the other author's work.  Invitation to a Beheading does play with the absurd in a similar fashion to Kafka's work, but it veers toward something else.  Kafka's protagonists never gain the agency to shift their own reality the way that Cinncinatus eventually does.    Instead, Kafka's characters are left to die alone, are mired in the absurdity of the situations in which they find themselves, or are equally mysteriously released from those absurdities through no actions of their own.  I don't know what to make of this difference aside from noting it.