----- Original Message -----

Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 3:14 PM

Subject: combray/Proust...Cora Day?

Finally someone associated Cora Day and Combray, so it seems that my faulty remembrance was not as amiss as I´d originally feared, although it still seems to lead nowhere. I´d been perusing Proust and a lovely illustrated book about " Proust´s Dinner Table" to try to establish any real connection with Ada or Pale Fire when my eyes alighted on Nabokov´s own lecture on Le Recherche, with detailed descriptions of Combray and even a map that he drew of the invented city. He describes the process of involuntary memory ( also memorably studied by Samuel Beckett ) leading to epiphanies and some sort of "time travel"; the narrator´s synesthesia ( " Marcel saw sounds in color" ); Proust´s stylistic use of metaphors in various levels, etc.

Nabokov also wrote: " It is not [ In Search of Lost Time] a mirror of manners, not an autobiography, not a historical account. It is poure fantasy on Proust´s part, just as Anna Karenin is a fantasy, just as Kafka´s " The Metamorphosis" is a fantasy - just as Cornell University will be a fantasy if I ever happen to write about it some day in retrospect" ( Lectures on Literature ).

I know everyone can check this directly on their copy of these Lectures, but I´m adding the map of Combray anyway - just in case you think it worthwhile to forward it to Nabokov-L.