Laughter in the Dark

Laughter in the Dark

I have just read Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark (1938), a spare and unsparing cinematic novel about a love affair between a rich middle-aged man, Albinus, and a young penniless usherette, Margot. Except that the love is one-sided. In it, Albinus leaves his wife and child for Margot who doesn’t love him at all and only wants his money. She carries on a simultaneous affair with Rex, an unscrupulous jackal of a man. In the course of the story, Albinus is blinded in a car accident just after he discovers about the affair, Margot by his side and Rex waiting in the wings. She manages to persuade him there is no hanky-panky going on. Thereafter Rex and Margot exploit and ridicule Albinus, concealed by his blindness, plotting to steal his money. They are an evil pair and he is a pathetic dupe. There is no moral ambiguity to the tale, written in Nabokov’s characteristically cool poetry. In the end Albinus gets irrefutable proof of Margot’s infidelity and plotting. He goes to kill her with a gun, blind as he is, but she eludes the bullet and instead stabs him to death, escaping scot-free. It occurred to me on finishing the novel that it is a story of power-imbalance: she has it, he doesn’t. He is rich and respectable, she is neither, but she is the one with the power and the will to use it ruthlessly. I imagine today’s feminists would not take kindly to this tale, having absorbed the teachings of Foucault; but it clearly represents an extreme case of a familiar human situation. Margot uses her power over Albinus, aided by Rex, and Albinus ends up blinded and dead, while she escapes all consequence.