The Intelligibility of Opaque Things

"So I did not see Sebastian after all, or at least I did not see him alive. But those few minutes I spent listening to what I thought was his breathing changed my life as completely as it would have been changed, had Sebastian spoke to me before dying. Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being--not a constant state--that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden. Thus--I am Sebastian Knight. I feel as if I were impersonating Sebastian on a lighted stage, with the people he knew coming and going. . . . And then the masquerade draws to a close. The balding prompter shuts his book, as the light fades gently. . . . They all go back to their everyday life. . . but the hero remains, for, try as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian's mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we are both someone whom neither of us knows" (Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 202-3).

The thought that either the physical objects in the world, or the minds of the people in it, aren't solid can be comforting. Not only are other minds not inaccessible, we can know them from the inside. Others are not shut out, and we are not shut in--but (I think Cavell would say) to know another's mind from within is no longer to know it, exactly. It's to inhabit it, in the way a good actor inhabits a character (thus the appropriateness of Nabokov's stage-scenery theme). The novella Transparent Things ends with the anti-hero's revelation, just before dying, that the world is a transparent cube, whereupon he passes "from one state of being to another" (104). Invitation to a Beheading, similarly, ends with the absurd world in which its protagonist is trapped falling away at the moment he is to be beheaded.

What is interesting to me about these endings is the idea that "states of being" or "souls" are not closed to one another. If the realizations Nabokov's characters experience are "true" (whatever that would mean here), the things in the world that seem most closed to us, and those that make the least sense (e.g. the world in Invitation to a Beheading) are intelligible; intelligible in that the mind can move among them. This discovery is like the discovery that we can compare equations by instituting a system of variables, or that there is a hidden order lurking in the chemical world, which can also be represented mathematically and reasoned-with.

If such a discovery is there to be made, the philosophical skeptic is both right and wrong. Right, because the boundaries of things are not where we think they are; theories are underdetermined by evidence, the world may be composed not of macroscopic objects but stuff with no demarcations. Right, because the world may be fake, may simply fall away (although, since we can discover it to be fake, we aren't quite in the position of the skeptic). Wrong, because we can overcome the limitations of our perspective, trapped within our own minds, or within a world that doesn't make sense. The revelation that he is Sebastian is the culmination of Sebastian's half-brother's attempt to find Sebastian and understand him. The promise that I find (or want to find) in these endings is this: there is some kind of "mental maneuver" (TT 104) that will free us from the limitations of the first-person perspective--that only I can have my experience, that there is no perspective from which to assess the way all of my beliefs measure up to the world; that the world and others will remain partly out of reach from my perspective so long as I have a perspective at all.