Invitation To A Beheading

Valdimir Nabokov, 1935 (russian), 1959 (english)

Summary

Chapter 1

The novel begins with Cincinnatus C being condemned to death by beheading, to “don the red top hat”. The judge whispers C’s sentence in “moist undertones”. C is led to his jail cell where his lawyer, Roman Vissarionovich, is already waiting before being summarily dismissed. C’s cell morphs into the prison director’s office, before morphing to a tableau of the countryside and C’s house, before turning back into his cell.

Chapter 2

We learn about the fundamental defect of C – he is “impervious to the rays of others”. Various events from C’s life play out; becoming a kindergarten teacher, meeting his wife, Marthe, her consistent infidelity.

Chapter 3

C has a long discussion with his laywer, asking, begging to know his execution date. There is also some indication that this entire world only exists in C’s mind, his “invented habitus”. C, Roman, and Rodion, the prison director, climb a massive tower to view the world before returning to C’s cell.

Chapter 4

The chapter begins with a small child, Emmie, breaking into C’s cell. C begs her to help him escape, then failing that, to tell him the day he is set to be executed. Later, as C is leafing through magazines “of the ancients”, we finally learn why C wants to know when he’ll die – whether he has time to finish his work, describing the space between a dream world and reality, which may be this cell. C’s punishment is beginning to feel self-imposed and self-perpetuated.

Chapter 5

The prison director brings two pieces of news, one that the prison will be adding a new prisoner, and two, that C will have a meeting with his wife, Marthe. The second piece of information causes C to swoon. C is taken to see the new prisoner, a “little fat man” he peers at through a peephole. Then C writes a note to Marthe, calling her half woman, half monster, but despite that C is enthralled. C takes a bath, shaves, puts on clean clothes smelling of “home washing” and sleeps.

Chapter 6

Marthe’s arrival is delayed a day to the vagaries of the legal process. This prompts C to consider his condition “in exactitude”, and we learn of his crime, “gnostical turpitude”. Rodion wants to clean C’s cell, so C takes a daydream walk and ends up stumbling upon Emmie, who shows him a look into Tamara Gardens. C want to go there but is beckoned back to his newly cleaned C by Rodion, walking past the new prisoner on his way.

Chapter 7

C again doesn’t get to meet Marthe, but is introduced to the photo-loving and insufferable fellow prisoner, Pierre. Pierre and Rodrig have a good laugh in C’s cell while C sits quietly looking on.

Chapter 8

The entire chapter follows C’s thoughts in first-person. We learn how dissatisfied he is. This seems to be the start of “his work”, something he was terrified of not having time to finish. There is also something elegaic in the tone – the chapter ends with him stepping out of the third floor window in his school building.

Chapter 9

C finally gets to see Marthe, but their children and Marthe’s entire family also show up. Amidst the absurd family reunion, C attempts to get to the couch where Marthe is sitting, accompanied by a “young fop”. Just as C reaches her, Rodrig and an accomplice pick up and remove the entire couch from the cell.

Chapter 10

Pierre and C converse and Pierre tells C that the reason he is in prison is for trying to help C escape, and that he (Pierre) will be joining C on the scaffold. Then C insults Pierre’s stature and strength, and the cell devolves into a circus display with Pierre jumping on to the table to walk on his hands while holding the chair in his mouth, to off-stage applause. After, Pierre beats a hasty retreat as he realizes his dentures were stuck in the chair.

Chapter 11

The shadow of unreality grows long in this chapter. Time is blending and blurring, and no one is visiting C except Rodion. A long description of the fictional book Quercus, a 3000 page tome about the 600 year life of an oak tree and what that tree witnessed, is provided. More hints that this dream-like world is a fiction and most of C is elsewhere.

Chapter 12

C is awoken by the sound of clawing and then spends the rest of the night looking for the source of the sound before daylight terminates both the sound and the search. Then, his mother visits him. C dismisses her as a parody created by his jailers until at the very end, when a glint in her eyes suggests some sort of reality, and immediately after she is whisked away.

Chapter 13

C hears the tunneling again, and after banging a chair on a wall to see if he could elicit a response, he’s sure the tunneling is coming to rescue him. The narrative transitions to first person & C’s letter to Marthe. Pierre arrives in the cell to play games, first a game of chess where Pierre relentlessly cheats while prattling on about women, then a game of goose in which Pierre also cheats.

Chapter 14

The tunneling continues. Emmie comines in and tells C she’ll save him tomorrow. Pierre and Rodrig come in, Pierre continuing his monologue on “pleasure”. Pierre implies that if C repents, there might be salvation. C muses on his fortnight in jail.

Chapter 15

The tunnel is finally complete, and Rodrig and Pierre emerge from it laughing hysterically into C’s room. C & Pierre follow it back to Pierre’s room, where Pierre implies he is the executioner by showing C his ace. C takes the tunnel to return to his room, but instead finds himself on the fortress walls, a short climb from escape. Shortly after climbing, he runs into Emmie, who pulls him back into the fortress to a room with the director, his wife, and Pierre. Emmie is the child of the director.

Chapter 16

Emmie seems to die through a series of photos, and the final execution date is set for the day after tomorrow. C is largely aloof as Pierre reveals he is the executioner and he knows C’s sould. C has a conversation with the librarian, who is more talkative than he has been.

Chapter 17

C is paraded to the “city elders” as tradition dictates. The party is a bizarre performance of eating, revelry, Pierre’s non-sequitur jokes, attended in part by C’s extended family, and capped off by a technical difficulty riddled fireworks show. After the party while C and Pierre are returning to the fortress, Pierre chastises C for his shyness.

Chapter 18

The execution has been suspended, and Marthe comes to visit. In a parody of her role as adulteress, she comes in adjusting her dress and implying that to see C she needed to pay the toll with her body. She says the execution was delayed because everyone overslept. She then leaves again to buy a few more minutes with C for the price of another romp. After coming back, she begs C to repent, if only to save the accusatory looks Marthe receives.

Chapter 19

Rodrig shows up carrying a humongous moth for the spider in the corner of the cell. The moth escapes, and the spider does not get the snack. Only C sees the moth alight under the table. Pierre arrives. Despite thinking he has more time, Pierre arrives and informs C that it is now time. The cell begins to disintegrate, Rodion and Rodrig remove their makeup and props and turn out to be nearly identical to each other. The ever-present spider in the corner is revealed to be a toy.

Chapter 20

C is led to the scaffold and his death by Pierre. Reality seems to be warping and things appear unreal. Poplar trees fall

Thoughts

Nabokov has said that he detests symbol and allegory, but even the most austere readings of Invitation to a Beheading would find it irresistible to veer towards those earlier literary devices more omnipresent cousin, metaphor. The novel almost begs it; we, much like Cincinnatus C, beginning to realize with each page that the fortress in which Cincinnatus awaits his turn to “don the red top hat” is invented, a fiction. A superficial reading might claim the novel is a meditation on authorial procrastination, the protagonist Cincinnatus inventing a fictional beheading to compel him towards completing his great work. Throughout, we have constant references to the unreality of their “invented habitus”, the characters all vaguely resembling each other, the tableau like a stage play, complete with prop changes between Rodin and Rodrig and Roman, off-stage directions, canned laughter, sound, and in-place set changes. We as readers are caught up in this reality since no one seems to be questioning it except the condemned man.

In the prologue, Nabokov disdains the comparison to Kafka, claiming to “[have] had no German, was completely ignorant of modern German literature, and had not yet read any French or English translations of Kafka’s works”. Whether or not we believe Nabokov, who always played the inveterate sniper to his literary contemporaries (Nabokov doesn’t seem to have a high opinion of anyone), I don’t know if the comparison rings completely true if taken to its logical extremes. In a prototypical Kafka-esque purgatory, the protagonist is detained by the bureaucratic inanity of the outside world, a world his only handle into is via these word-bending and elusive administrative priests. The protagonist has no hope of escape from the prison not of his own making. Cincinnatus, on the other hand, is author of his own fortress. He has imprisoned himself, invented his jailer and lawyer and the strangely mobile immoveable table in his cell and the bizarre and insufferable executioner qua prisoner, Pierre. This is a fundamentally different equation. We have an author, as all Nabokov characters are authors at their cores, attempting to write something enduring about the space between illusions and reality, “between [Cincinnatus’s] movement and the movement of the laggard shadow”, a vantage that only Cincinnatus has via his “gnostical turpitude”, the crime he is going to soon be headless over.

There is a solipsitic streak to Nabokov’s protagonists – they are inventors and owners of their world, and the artifice and the real intertwine in playful helices. Either that, or they are pathetic, in the Grecian sense, in no control of the world they find themselves in, forced to endure tragedy after tragedy. Cincinnatus finds himself moving quickly back and forth between those two roles, trying to impose an order to a real life, with an adulterous wife, a severely diminished role in society, and no greater artistic creation to show for it, by creating a dream life. Nabokov constantly lets us peer behind the curtain – frequently Cincinnatus and his double are doing two contradictory things in this fortress. One Cincinnatus is assertive and argues his case, the other sits mutely, allowing the world to happen. This dichotomy resolves itself in the final page, but it draws the dramatic tension sharp, just below the surface of the narrative.

Nabokov as a writer can certainly delight, and this novel showcases all those deliciously Nabokovian traits – firecracker prose, layered word play, ribald jokes (Marthe, C’s wife, in attempting to buy more time with C, sleeps with a jailer who was less than functional and doesn’t stop to even readjust her dress before returning to her husband). There are also layers here I still haven’t unpacked. What is the spider? Is this a suicide dream as Cincinnatus threw himself from a 3rd story window in Chapter 8? Regardless, a really lovely book.

Favorite Quotes

He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another; he learned however to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as it were—but he had only to forget himself, to allow a momentary lapse in self control, in the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and angles at which he turned his soul, and immediately there was alarm. (24)

I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life. In theory one would wish to wake up. But wake up I cannot without outside help, and yet I fear this help terribly, and my very soul has grown lazy and accustomed to its snug swaddling clothes. (36)

but here is what I want to express: between his movement and the movement of the laggard shadow—that second, that syncope—there is the rare kind of time in which I live—the pause, the hiatus, when the heart is like a feather … And I would write also about the continual tremor—and about how part of my thoughts is always crowding around the invisible umbilical cord that joins this world to something—to what I shall not say yet (53)

For thirty years I have lived among specters that appear solid to the touch, concealing from them the fact that I am alive and real—but now that I have been caught, there is no reason to be constrained with you. At least I shall test for myself all the unsubstantiality of this world of yours. (70)

Accused of the most terrible of crimes, gnostical turpitude, so rare and so unutterable that it was necessary to use circumlocutions like “impenetrability,” “opacity,” “occlusion”; sentenced for that crime to death by beheading; emprisoned in the fortress in expectation of the unknown but near and inexorable date (which he distinctly anticipated as the wrenching, yanking and crunch of a monstrous tooth, his whole body being the inflamed gum, and his head that tooth); standing now in the prison corridor with a sinking heart—still alive, still unimpaired, still Cincinnatic—Cincinnatus C. felt a fierce longing for freedom, the most ordinary, physical, physically feasible kind of freedom, and instantly he imagined, with such sensuous clarity as though it all was a fluctuating corona emanating from him, the town beyond the shallowed river, the town, from every point of which one could see—now in this vista, now in that, now in crayon, and now in ink—the tall fortress within which he was. (72)

But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is, they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind—as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off. (92)

and it was somehow funny that eventually the author must needs die—and it was funny because the only real, genuinely unquestionable thing here was only death itself, the inevitability of the author’s physical death. (124)

here was the tiresome little co-prisoner, with his shiny face, resembling the wax apple which Cincinnati’s waggish brother-in-law had brought the other day; there was the fidgety, lean lawyer, disengaging his shirt cuffs from the sleeves of his frock coat; there was the somber librarian, and, in smooth black toupee, corpulent Rodrig Ivanovich, and Emmie, and Marthels entire family, and Rodion, and others, vague guards and soldiers—and by evoking them—not believing in them, perhaps, but still evoking them—Cincinnatus allowed them the right to exist, supported them, nourished them with himself. (156)