If we stick to Giorgio Manganelli’s brief summary (“an author writes a book about an author who would like to write a book about an author who, moreover, was tempted to write a fictional biography; there is practically no other biography of this author.” … ” (news which is neither misleading nor tautological, and the only “real” news is that Sebastian, a writer, wrote books), the plot of “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight” by Vladimir Nabokov appears as a fictional transposition of a drawing by Escher. Such a model can be removed to read this novel as a small treatise on the exiled soul and an ironic questioning of literary biography as a genre. It is enough to admit that the real hero of the book is the narrator, this mysterious V. who tries to defend the reputation of his half-brother and to refute, in passing, a mediocre biography, in which prejudices have ended up distorting the features of the writer.
Born on December 31, 1899 and died in January 1936, Sébastien, like Nabokov, had a biography cut short by the Bolshevik revolution. His love life is marked by two women whom he abandons. That’s almost all we know about him, except that he also published several novels and stories, to which we must give the same importance as the rest of his identity traits. From the beginning, V. tries to rehabilitate his half-brother against an overly vulgar opinion: that Sebastian Knight failed as an artist because he separated himself from the “world of life.” A biographer with the parodic name of Goodman writes, for example, that Sebastian “succeeded, without being cynical or insensitive, in playing with the intimate emotions that the rest of humanity considers sacred.” Roy Carswell, portraitist of young Sebastian, captures in his painting a kind of egocentric alienation; A certain expression in the eyes and face of the model makes him a “Daffodil in his pond”. Even his lover describes him as “a difficult man (…), too absorbed by his own sensations and ideas to understand those of others”.
We quickly became suspicious of V.’s obsession with his half-brother’s past. Alone, in a foreign country and with an unknown language, V. makes desperate efforts to find meaning in his own life. The sullen image of his half-brother leaves him with a strange dissatisfaction, so much so that his existence only seems to have meaning if that of the other had it, and if his book is capable of establishing the resonance between this foreign past and his vague present. V. claims to be “scientifically precise”, but all his investigations seem to refute any precision. Everything conspires to separate him from his half-brother’s past. Initially, a series of obstacles force him to concentrate on what he considers to be the common thread of this life: his passion for a mysterious Russian woman. The parable of his failure reaches the final scene, when, due to an unfortunate mistake, the protagonist watches over the last minutes of a fake Sebastian in the clinic, while the real one dies alone in the next room. Dissatisfied with the repertoire of general ideas with which the biographer Goodman sends a “definitive” image of Sebastian Knight, but also with his own repertoire of memories, V. realizes that this life insists on the exchange of certainties for illusory galleries and dead ends.
These semi-secret metamorphoses are like a game whose main rule is to overcome the three fundamental barriers or tests that Sebastian himself listed: “Remember that everything they tell you goes through three metamorphoses: constructed by the narrator, reconstructed by the listener, hidden from both by the protagonist, now dead, of the story. Once these barriers are overcome, research becomes a labyrinthine journey: there are not many “real” things outside of these three conditions.
V.’s investigation will end up becoming a puzzle with fundamental pieces missing. His search for his brother’s mistress leads him to a hotel whose manager refuses to give him the names of the customers registered in June 1929. Fortunately, V. meets on the train a certain Mr. Silbermann, a mysterious ‘pro bono’ detective who will provide him with key information to find his elusive lady. Here several critics enter the picture, dedicated to warning us against Mr. Silbermann as Mr. Siller’s “alter ego,” a character in a story by Sebastian himself, “The Back of the Moon.” Silberman advises V. to abandon his research because “we cannot see the other side of the moon (…) What is past is past”.
The metamorphosis of a character from Sebastian’s work (M. Silver) into a real character from V.’s investigation (M. Silbermann) tells us that the solution to this discontinuity, to these empty spaces on which V. stumbles at every step while trying to reconstruct the past lies in the order of fiction, in the novel itself that we read. This play of voices (a book which speaks about a project which is itself) makes La Vraie Vie… an unsurpassable example of a “trap novel”, where the narration of a chain of failures and misunderstandings allows us to jump over these same failures and misunderstandings.
V.’s frustrated search is a parable on the ultimate incapacity of the biographical and the autonomy of fictional invention, even conceived as a possibility of voluntary metempsychosis. Among his half-brother’s posthumous stationery, V. discovers a curious advertisement in a newspaper, published by Sebastian under the guise of a certain MH: “The author of fictitious biographies is looking for photographs of an efficient, simple, composed gentleman, with an abstinent appearance, preferably single. You will pay for photos of childhood, youth and maturity to be published in the aforementioned book. The results of such a strange call “were going to be used – this is clearly indicated to us – in a book which Sébastien never wrote, but which he perhaps contemplated during the last year of his life”.
An enemy of the complacent arrogance of biography as a genre, Nabokov invites us to think of the soul as the opposite of a constant and measurable state in definitive circumstances. In one of the last scenes of the book, the confused narrator simultaneously delivers the blurriest and most revealing dimension of Sebastian’s photo: “The afterlife may be the capacity to live consciously in the chosen soul, in a number of souls, all unconscious of their interchangeable burden.” »
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