Autobiography as Artistic Invention: Nabokov’s Self-parody in Look at the Harlequins!

Abstract

Though often dismissed as ramblings of an aging man, Look at the Harlequins! might be the most underestimated novel in Nabokov’s oeuvre. This essay, however, contends that it is the culmination of Nabokov’s novels in which the author masterfully wields parody to invent a fantastical world inhabited by characters and works either similar or deliberately contrary to those in his real or fictional worlds. Cast in the form of a fictitious writer’s autobiography, Look at the Harlequins! manifests itself as a meta-fictional self-parody transmuting the author’s own life and art into a distorted, highly stylized account of the narrator’s “marriages, and literary life”. This essay explores this artistic invention through a twofold analysis. Initially, it focuses on the reconstruction of Nabokov’s biographical reality into Vadim’s schizoid existence. It then moves on to an examination of the parodic parallels between the novel’s fictional bibliography and the author’s own literary canon. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates that Nabokov ingeniously utilizes parody in this novel to demonstrate that autobiography is an act of artistic invention, where imagination is more vital than the average facts of life.