The story’s title, “That in Aleppo Once,” is of course taken from Othello’s last speech, just before he commits suicide. At the very end, the narrator pleads with V. not to use these words as a title: “It may all end in Aleppo if I am not careful. Spare me, if you took that for your title.” This ending leaves it an open question whether the narrator, in fact, is about to commit suicide. As is almost always the case in fictions constructed on a central allusion to a previous literary text, there are both parallels to and marked differences from the work invoked. The narrator, like Othello, is considerably older than his beautiful young wife, whom he adores. Unlike Desdemona, she actually betrays him, or at least claims to have done so: she is an extravagant liar, even inventing a beloved dog left behind on the couple’s flight from Paris and later telling an older woman friend that her husband killed the dog, when they never had any pet.
The young wife, then, is her own Iago, perhaps inventing—simply in order to torment her husband—this “brute of a man,” a seller of hair lotions, with whom she spent several nights after she and her husband were temporarily separated, or perhaps actually indulging in some rough sex with the uncouth stranger. Although it is perfectly natural for a writer as steeped in literature as Nabokov to build his fiction on a literary allusion, the procedure has been adopted by many novelists and is hardly an indication that the focus on literature somehow carries the writer away from the world of experience outside literature. Fielding makes the Joseph story in Genesis central to Joseph Andrews; Joyce famously organizes the episodes of Ulysses as parallels to episodes in the Odyssey; Faulkner uses the biblical story of Absalom’s rebellion as a prism through which to see the catastrophic history of the American South.
Yet the framework of allusion in no way detracts from the aim of each of these novels to provide a compelling representation of a particular time and place in all its ramified network of social relations and historical contexts. Some might regard the deployment of allusion as an instance of Nabokov’s fondness for “codes,” but as I am suggesting, it is a characteristic move not only among novelists but in literature as such. The key to the sexual betrayal plot via Othello is probably in the tragic hero’s words in his last speech that he is “one who has loved not wisely but too well,” which is a perfect characterization of the hapless émigré of the story but scarcely a piece of arcane cryptography.
Posted 9 days ago.
