Sometimes, Nabokov gave his most dastardly characters this extraordinary, fluid perception and then had them put it to fiendish uses. In Laughter in the Dark, a clever, amoral sadist named Rex dreamily imagines his bumbling victim's impending tragedy.He watched with interest the sufferings of Albinus (in his opinion an oaf with simple passions and a solid, too solid, knowlege of painting), who thought, poor man, that he had touched the very depths of human distress; whereas Rex reflected -- with a sense of pleasant anticipation -- that, far from being the limit, it was merely the first item in the program of a roaring comedy at which he, Rex, had been reserved a place in the stage manager's private box. The stage manager of this performance was neither God nor the devil. The former was far too gray, and venerable, and old-fashioned; and the later, surfeited with other people's sins, was a bore to himself and to others, as dull as rain. . . in fact, rain at dawn in the prison-court, where some poor imbecile, yawning nervously, is being quietly put to death for the murder of his grandmother. The stage manager whom Rex had in view was an elusive, double, triple, self-reflecting magic Proteus of a phantom, the shadow of many colored glass balls flying in a curve, the ghost of a juggler on a shimmering curtain. . .
He might have been describing his own stage manager's gift for inhabiting every energetic strain of his breathing, animal creations. Rex and his lover Margot are absolutely evil, but they are also full of fierce life, passion, wit and supple, eel-like charm. Nabokov can step inside their cruelty and vitality almost as if it were an electrical current, step out again and enter the much slower, cooler ambiance of their poor stooge Albinus, or that of Albinus' bland, taffy-sweet wife, and back again, all in a flash. His expanded and detached sensibility can hold them all in a state of dazzling and organic movement, which is a mimicry of life's truth in the deepest sense.
Some anti-Nabokovians might howl that the author gave this insight to such a sadistic character in order to snottily flaunt the cruelty of his own artistic methods. But Rex, to whom Nabokov has shrewdly given the gifts of a minor artist, is just the shadow of one colored glass ball flying by on his creator's shimmering curtain. Nabokov can do Rex to a T, but is well beyond him -- although I suspect that, if Nabokov had not been able to write Laughter in The Dark, he could have become Rex.
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