I’ve been puzzling over the narrator’s assertions, in TT, that “the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought,” by contrasting them with V.Nabokov’s ideas on how to witness or engender a set of “future recollections” while isolating them from the processes of creating literary “future recollections.”*
“Here's the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn't hear me.
Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.
But the future has no such reality (as the pictured past and the perceived present possess); the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought.
Hullo, person! What's the matter, don't pull me. I'm not bothering him. Oh, all right. Hullo, person . . . (last time, in a very small voice).” (V.Nabokov, Transparent Things)
In a later chapter in TT it becomes clear that this “rejected” future refers to the order of causality and to prosaic reality: “Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.” (V.Nabokov Transparent Things,1972, Ch. 24.)
Another favorite quote (that I found used in various sites about economy, art, modernism, architecture and ballet performances often without indications of its source, sometimes even, without mentioning the author’s name), departs from the same “utilitarian” perspective: “ ‘The future’, writes Nabokov, ‘is but the obsolete in reverse.’ [ ] As he put it in Ada(1969), a novel seeded with wry bits of counterfactual history, ‘The present is only the top of the past, and the future does not exist.’” https://briangdillon.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/present-future/ **
In a different context, would I be wrong by assuming that competent chess-players can discern “the future”? Or that in a “suimate” (as explained in “The Defense”, or in creating other kinds of chess problems), and if the player is not identified with either blacks or whites, his victory implicates his having gained control of his envisioned future and over his “other”? ***
What set me on this track originally derives from another VN sentence but this specific quote remains untraceable through internet short-cuts.
Help is welcome! I’m searching for the novel in which VN observes that it is different to recollect the past by departing from a present situation and by projecting oneself in a future and then looking backwards to an imagined ‘past’ that has engulfed the present. The closest I came to it was through S.E Sweeney’s article “Playing Nabokov” when she writes: “The idea consisted of parodizing a biographic approach projected, as it were, into the future and thus transforming the very specious present into a kind of paralyzed past as perceived by a doddering memoirist who recalls, through a helpless haze, his acquaintance with a great writer when both were young. For instance either Lidia or I (it was a mater of chance inspiration) might say, on the terrace after supper: ‘The writer liked to go out on the terrace after supper’…” (248) …Brian Boyd’s biography confirms that Nabokov did indeed play such a game, in imitation of Pushkin’s biographers, with Lidia Tokmakov (Russian 147). The passage in Speak, Memory implies that they each took the role of memoirist; according to an unpublished chapter of Conclusive Evidence, however, Nabokov alone narrated his “own movements or words in the reminiscent, slightly mincing manner [she] might be supposed to develop many years later when writing her memoirs” (quoted in Boyd,Russian 147). In other words, he described himself in the third person by appropriating her voice. http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/?id=1295 Cycnos | Volume 10 n°1 NABOKOV : Autobiography, Biography and Fiction – Playing Nabokov by Susan Elizabeth Sweeney.
However, it’s more likely that it is to be found in LATH…#
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* - “His answer to eternal decay is to make just such an exact record of even ordinary everyday trifles in order that the sense of life they represent should be available to those who live on after us: ‘here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times’.” (p.94). “To play further with the connections between time, memory, and identity, he goes on to describe the pub in which he and his companion are sitting. He notices the publican’s son who he thinks ‘will remember the billiard table and…my empty right sleeve and scarred face’ which he then designates as ‘somebody’s future recollection’ (p.98) – neatly projecting his own identity and the boy’s memory into an imagined future. Even though he was wrong about Berlin streetcars and could be wrong about the boy’s future memory, the idea is a very deft encapsulation of Nabokov’s early speculations on time, memory, and evanescence – but most importantly of all it reveals his confidence in the power of literary creation to transcend all three.”© Roy Johnson 2005 http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/09/25/a-guide-to-berlin/
“Like an ordinary ‘object’ that ‘will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times,’ as per the above-quoted ideal of the narrator’s poetic, the man with the scarred face will live on in the future memory of a child. This form of transcendence, although here in the form of enclosure in a more conventional bearer of memory, is likewise the subject matter of Nabokov’s 1927 poem …“Snimok’/’The Snapshot’…” (p.262)[ “]’Torpid Smoke’ dramatizes a young poet’s progressive submission to poetic inspiration in a story which foregrounds such themes as cosmic synchronization, the trance of inspiration, the poet’s loving attention to the details of being, and the conscious registration of future memories, while simultaneously deploying such Nabokovian motifs of containment and transition as the writer’s study and desk at dusk and, especially, the liminal, transformative possibility latent in the doorways placed throughout the narrative…”(263) “The linkage of memory and poetry is noteworthy.[ ]Poetry, it is suggested, has its source in memories from life, but also, in a deeper sense, the the memory of an original source of consciousness antecedent to life and, presumably, subsequent to death (292) I seem to remember my future works, although I don’t even know what they will be about. I’ll recall them completely and write them’” (294) Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice by Paul D. Morris.) (btw:VN’s striving towards a “conscious registration of future memories,” as mentioned above by Morris, or by T. Lyaskovets below, must be distinct from Proust’s instants of epiphany because these arise from the artist’s “involuntary memory”)
“In her article "Time, Photography, and Optical Technology in Nabokov's Speak, Memory" Tetyana Lyaskovets discusses how Vladimir Nabokov narrates time in his autobiography by invoking photography and optical instruments. Photography and optical technology function in Speak, Memory as metaphors and probe the limits of chronological time. Nabokov portrays time as personal and reversible time that collapses the past and the present and allows one to glimpse the future. Because this temporal collapse is not possible physically but, as Nabokov believes, can be achieved through one's will, he engages optical technologies which provide a spatial form for his project to re-enter his past. Optical technologies become a source of both imagery and narrative structure when Nabokov writes about creating, enlarging, and bringing images closer to the viewer in order to diminish spatial and temporal distances between observer and object. Lyaskovets argues that Nabokov's autobiography narrated through optical metaphors allows us to engage in a response to our own past (abstract "Time, Photography, and Optical Technology in Nabokov's Speak, Memory." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.3 ) Lyaskovets, Tetyana. (2014): http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2189
“By working these somber elements into a visual and emotional harmony, and then framing the scene as a recollection, Grisha ensures that he will recall it in the future just as he will recall more forcefully the image of his dead mother that has become a part of that harmony. Recognizing his own extended existence through the creation of a future memory, Grisha has himself "taken shape" along with the scene in his mind. The perceptual continuity that links the present moment with both past and future memories carries with it a notion of self-sameness. Deeper than this theoretical comprehension of identity, however, is his existential affirmation of being in the present instant."[ ] The "he" of "Torpid Smoke," for example, not only becomes "I" with the onset of a future memory of his father, but recreates his epiphany so potently that the past tense yields to the present."[ ] "she appeared as a delicately etched memory come alive: his prescience had created the conditions for a kind of future memory." http://newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1200&context=sttcl (Studies in 20th Century Literature Volume 11 | Issue 2 Article 7 1-1-1987 Practicing Nostalgia: Time and Memory in Nabokov 's Early Russian Fiction Philip Sicker Fordham University.)
"W.G. Sebald learned much from Nabokov, who is a ghostly presence in The Emigrants. In "Dream Textures: A Brief Note on Nabokov," collected in Campo Santo, Sebald writes: "Nabokov also knew, better than most of his fellow writers, that the desire to suspend time can prove its worth only in the most precise re-evocation of things long overtaken by oblivion. The pattern on the bathroom floor at Vyra, the white steam rising above the tub at which the boy looks dreamily from his seat in the dimly lit lavatory, the curve of the doorframe on which he leans his forehead—suddenly, with a few well-chosen words, the whole cosmos of childhood is conjured up before our eyes." Anecdotal Evidence-A blog about the intersection of books and life. PATRICK KURP
“In this extended sense, when Vladimir Nabokov’s protagonist, the despicable litterateur and murderer and textually fabricated narrator of Lolita, Humbert Humbert, evokes aurochs and angels and the immortal image or lyrical butterfly net in his final elegiac epitaph to his love for the equally textually fabricated Dolores Haze, as cited in the epigraph at the head of his chapter, he also quite deliberately calls attention to the fact that what is to be human is inextricably bound up with what can be said to be other than the human and more pointedly to emerge from the human, not merely in the temporality of biological sequence, of sex and death and progeny, but through the fabricated eternity of art, invention and inscription, and the instruments that enable them. Accordingly, if Nabokov expresses this peculiarly human yearning for a quite possibly brief and thus faux immortality through the inscriptive powers of the literary event, he is also making a case, as the allusion to aurochs makes perfectly clear, for forms of inscription beyond this relatively recent invention, with all the aesthetic and evaluative impedimenta that is has accumulated in modernity. He is making a case for a species of human action or expression, for what seems to be an aesthetic imperative, that may well take the form of what Aristotle called poeisis, but which is equally bound up with the more functional realm of techne, both of which are determined and conditioned as human making primarily by their relationship to time.” Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism. Ed.Charlie Blake, Claire Molloy, Steven Shakespeare, 2012 (Cf. Inhuman Geometry: Aurochs , Angels and the Refuge of Art. Charlie Blake, ch.10,p.211).
**- Cf. also: “In Lance (1952), a short story about time and space travel, Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “the future is but the obsolete in reverse,” suggesting that the impulse to hurtle into the future is always, already, shadowed by its own imminent obsolescence, highlighting our complicated relationship with preservation and the passage of time.” http://www.bureaugallery.com/archive.asp?g=4&key=72&p=1&Ref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bureaugallery.com%2Farchive.asp
***a. “Maurice Couturier masterfully analyzed the inner logic of Nabokov’s poetics as a bid for dominance in the fame of narrative interaction. Writing is compared by Nabokov to the devising of chess problems[ ] As in chess problems, Couturier notes, the conflict in creative writing is not played between the black and white pieces, but between the author and the readers.” (273) Hindsight and Intertextuality, José A. Garcia Landa.
b. “Luzhin makes a dimensional transition when he commits suicide by jumping out of a frosted bathroom window. Because much of Luzhin's life is presented in terms of chess, it may be appropriate to consider this final "move" in the context of the same imagery. If we associate the motion of chessmen across a board with two-dimensionality, then Luzhin's suicide is dimensional insofar as it takes him into the "white square" of the window. As in "Pale Fire," this physical motion into a surface is accompanied by a metaphysical transition (life into death). A similar image of entering a chessboard may also play a role later in Pale Fire. According to one commentator, In Pale Fire, King Alfin's old flame Iris Acht (d. 1888), may be seen as translating to Iris Eight, i.e., i8 (or eye-8), in chess notation referring to a square just off the 8x8 board (which only goes up to h8); her irisated photograph hangs above the trapdoor escape 101 Shade associates himself with the waxwing because he has, similarly, crossed the boundary between life and the metaphysical world (through his art).142 that King Charles/Kinbote ("a king-in-the-corner waiter of the solus rex type" 102) uses to evade capture. This passage was first discovered whilst his guardians were diverted by A Game of Chess, this being the name of the second part of Eliot's The Waste Land parodied by Shade in the poem "Pale Fire" (Haa05) If this network of associations is valid, then Kinbote makes a dimensional move that amounts to motion into a chessboard—much as Luzhin does—when he escapes from his captors through a secret passage. Kinbote's motion is furthermore connected to a transition that is, if not metaphysical, at least associated with a dramatic transition to a new life. 103 Motion into a flat image is also addressed in the novel Glory. As a child, its protagonist, Martin, is told a fairy tale by his mother in which a boy enters into a picture of a forest that hangs on his wall (GL 4-5).” p.104 Between Us and Artistic Appreciation: Nabokov and the Problem of Distortion,2011. James M Tonn.
# - These lines might have been referred to by Nora Scholz (“…essence has been revealed to me. Umkreisungen des Nondualen im Prosawerk von Vladimir Nabokov”,Frank and Timme, 2014.). Unfortunately I have only a copy of her book in its original German and I’ve been hopelessly examining it for months!