​Chapter 28

Nabokov's Cincinnatus C is condemned for gnostical turpitude, and the sentence is passed for no deed at all. He has stolen nothing, injured nobody; the charge is that he is opaque. Everyone else in that world is transparent — the citizens read each other through, and that makes them citizens. Cincinnatus does not yield to the reading. Light does not pass. This is the whole of his crime. The executioner who befriends him in the cell is not being ironic: from inside that world the charge is exact, and a man who cannot be seen through has committed an offense.

Novels of this kind are usually read as satire on tyranny, and this novel is not only that. The world Nabokov built is held together by mutual legibility rather than force, and the tyranny is a consequence rather than a cause. A citizen must be readable from the surface: what he will do must follow from what he is, and nothing may occur that the reading did not contain. Cincinnatus fails this and cannot help failing it. His opacity is constitutive.

To call an event causal is to place it under a reproducible form of transition. At the scale of a world, this becomes a requirement on what may exist. "Everything has a cause" says: everything is legible; it can be brought under a form that holds beyond the single case; everything reduces to predicates from which its next state follows.

So whoever is not legible is guilty, and the guilt is of the epistemological kind. Cincinnatus has broken the condition on which laws are stated. In him something remains that does not follow from what he is, and to a reading that expects everything to follow, this registers as an obscenity — the word the tribunal uses. Turpitude, an offense against understanding.

Transparency and legibility must be distinguished. Sediment ought to be transparent: a hardened cut that shows itself as such, a body that displays its seam, a rule that admits having been laid down. Transparency of the deposit is what keeps it from issuing orders. To be legible is to be read through in the other sense — to have the next act follow from a fixed constitution, to be exhausted by the predicates that describe the person. The deposit should be transparent so that it stops dictating. The living should be illegible.

Legibility is therefore a symptom rather than a virtue. A person fully legible to those around him has hardened completely: a response is derivable from his history, an act is an instance of his type. He is easy to live with and easy to predict and there is nothing further in him to meet. The clearing is the failure of legibility — the moment the image scatters when the other did something the image did not contain — and if that never happens, either the sediment has hardened completely or the reader has stopped looking. Illegibility is not a virtue either, being no achievement of anyone's. It marks the possibility of a cut the reading did not contain.

A world organized around legibility is built around the completion of the dying. This does not require malice and works better without it. Institutions need to predict; prediction requires that people be readable; readable people are those whose acts follow from their profiles, and the profile is the sediment written down. Legibility presses toward the meon without anyone intending it, as this is what hardening looks like from outside, and an apparatus that rewards legibility encourages hardening. The tribunal in Nabokov's novel does not hate Cincinnatus. It finds him intolerable the way an unbalanced ledger is intolerable to an accountant.

At the end, Cincinnatus refuses the reading. The scaffold stands, the crowd assembles, the axe is raised, and he gets up and walks away through a world that comes apart around him like painted flats. The world that dissolves is the legible one. It was thin all along, made of what could be read off, and it holds together for as long as everyone in it consents to be read. He withdraws his consent, and there is nothing behind the scenery.

The completed reading faces limits beyond practical ignorance. Popper made the point about prediction inside a social world: a forecast, once published, enters the situation it forecasts and may alter the behavior it describes — the Oedipus effect, where the prophecy participates in bringing about or preventing what it announced. Computational irreducibility supplies a different limit: for many processes, no shortcut exists, and the only way to find out what the system does is to run it. Neither point makes human action unpredictable in general; much of it is forecast very well. Together they show that the tribunal's demand for a complete advance reading cannot be secured by refining the model: the prediction may enter the process, and the process may admit no shorter route to its outcome.

Cincinnatus is not withholding something that a better apparatus would extract. The tribunal demands more than its instruments can establish: a reading complete in advance and unaffected by its own entry into the world. His opacity exposes what that world has agreed to overlook in everyone else's case — the citizens are transparent to one another because they have consented to a reading, not because it is exhaustive.

The determinist wagers that a sufficient cause exists behind every act, not yet found and awaiting a finer instrument. Everything is legible in principle, and the illegible is a temporary condition of inquiry. Grant it, and what has been granted is that nothing anywhere is a clearing: all apparent gaps will close, all acts will turn out to have followed. That is the meon described as an achievement. He is not wrong to want it; the desire has driven much of science. He describes a completed world and calls it the true one.