Dennis Kelly: "[ ] That kind of combinational replay is
the stuff of his fiction. No wonder he would make Van Veen engage in a serious
study of the “precognitive flavor” of dreams in the hope…of ”catching sight of
the lining of time.” (VN:TAY 366-367) Does such a possible ‘mise-en-abyme’
insertion of a ‘dreamtime text’ as well as ‘multiple dream-characters’ into this
Nabokovian dream narrative report suggest any possible discourse relationships
of the above incident to Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs narratives or Nabokov’s The
Gift or Nabokov’s later supposedly ‘precognitive’ Ada dream narratives later on?
//Gide defines the mise-en-abyme technique as a transposition of the work's
subject matter on the level of its characters. More precisely, this procedure
consists of placing a discourse within another discourse, whereby the
incorporated text resembles or "mirrors" as Gide puts it, the incorporating one,
emphasizing the formal structure of the work as a whole and drawing attention to
the relationship between the author and his creation. Is this possibly what
Nabokov meant by “The inner lining of time”?"
JM: I wish I were able to discuss
Dennis Kelly's questionings - some items seem to be related
to perplexities of my own (mirrors and the relationship bt an author and
his creation.) Even the sentence about "the inner lining of time" reports me to
dawns and sunsets, the mise-en-abyme to infinite return. Unfortunately I'm
not familiar with Gide and Leonid Livak's article. I hope others pick up this thread.
After puzzling over Speak,Memory's "crack of
light" by relating it to a "crack of dawn" (a radiant split), I found
another imlage that may also express two distinct things at the same
time (such as matter and energy). Now (in Bend Sinister) it's
applied to the reflective surface of a puddle, an inkblot, a pool
of spilled milk, which are important in Krug's eyes "not only because he had contemplated the inset sunset..."
but also because it "vaguely evokes in him my link with
him: a rent in his world leading to another world of tenderness,brightness
and beauty." A smooth mirror-pool that simultaneously frames a
shining sunset or a nether sky, and evokes a rent in the world that
separates author and his creatures. Although any reader may easily surmise that
Krug's "hereafter" lies in the hands of his maker and that character and
author can suffer surrealistic "visitations" (literary
epiphanies), I think that Nabokov intended to express something that
lies beyond the verbal domain, as when he used rays
of light as sharp swords.