Invitation to a Beheading or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Literary Aplomb

Sorry for the pun in the title, but not only is Nabokov obviously a genius, but borrowing from the title of the Kubrick movie seemed apt, considering the oblique (in my mind) similarities between the novel and film, although Invitation to a Beheading is seemingly less satire than it is surreal. At the time of writing this book Nabokov was living in 1935 Nazi Germany Berlin and, no doubt, had plenty of material to work with in building the absurdist totalitarian state of the novel - Kubrick had the Cold War and the absurd doctrine of mutually assured self-destruction via nuclear war. As with any good Existentialist-inspired art, both allow (read:implore) the reader, or viewer, to reassess self-meaning in the face of the senseless and abstract.

In Invitation to a Beheading we are introduced to Cincinnatus C., a prisoner of fictitious totalitarian-land, unable to blend into society and consequently convicted of "gnostical turpitude" and sentenced to the ax. The narrative concerns his final days, his inner-ruminations, and his interactions with the obtuse and "transparent" few including his jailor Rodion, the prison director Rodrig, his lawyer Roman, and the lone fellow prisoner a M'sieur Pierre, among others. Cincinnatus spends his days imploring his captors for the exact date of his death but is continually rebuffed for morbidity and deplored for not being gracious for their ridiculous outreaches. He writes his wife, imploring her to feel even a smidgen of remorse, to give his life some meaning - it is all for naught as he is defined not by who he is, but by who he isn't, by his lack of conformity - she rebuffs him, afraid such an acknowledgment would create an unsavory association. He also spends time writing, voicing his inner-dialogue describing his remoteness and disembodiment, as well as his dreams of a world where the semi-sleep of reality gives way to the ennobled and spiritual.

What we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is, they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind...

The book reminded me of Charlie Kaufman's work. In Synedoche, New York, Kaufman's character of Caden creates a semi-reality via performance-art through which his character "escapes," although in this case to a hyper-reality where suffering and experience are magnified, whereas in Invitation to a Beheading Cincinnatus uses his impending death as a springboard into an alternate dream-reality where he transcends the misery of his unreality. In the end, and not unlike the visuals in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as he is lead away to his demise, his cell and the prison disintegrate, his chair and cot revealed to be props that fall apart, and even the spider in the corner of his cell is shown to be fake. Unreality is collapsing, shown to be the charlatan that Cincinnatus's mind finally deemed it, allowing him to finally, borrowing from Hamlet, "shuffle off" his surreal "mortal coil."