Former postings: … “hurtling through time and memory”, after quoting [Nabokov] in TT in which time [the future] becomes “a specter of thought” [ ] I chose a paragraph from “The Art of Literature and Common Sense”: “The inspiration of genius adds a third ingredient; it is the past, the present and the future (your book) that come together in a sudden flash; thus the entire cicle of time is perceived, which is another way of saying that time ceases to exist. It is a combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you. It is the prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away with the nonego rushing in from the outside to save the prisoner – who is already dancing in the open.” [ ] In ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’ , according to V.Alexandrov, Nabokov states that “time and sequence cannot exist in the author’s mind because no time element and no space element had ruled the initial vision” that constitutes the germ of the future work (pp.379-80)…Thus, although the reader may have to confront a temporal dimension when reading a novel, the author does not when it is first born in his mind.”
Present posting (Jansy Mello) - The third ingredient of inspiration, the future (“your book”, a “figure of style…a specter of thought”), still baffles me when I place these assertions side by side. The writer’s atemporal epiphany would also ( if I follow Alexandrov and his quote from Nabokov) be non-spacial, despite VN’s analogy with the instantaneous vision that painting affords him. Should I insist to consider (and I do) the visual element, the personal image I conjure up leads me to a sort of globalized or spherical “idea.”
When he begins to write his book, the author must return to mortal time, together with his characters (perhaps the latter is not obligatory) and therefore they need to inhabit a present, with or without information about or explicit links with the past and future, although they’ll be inscribed in all three . Although the writer cannot know his own future (except that he will die someday), inspiration has provided him with a complete landscape and story for the people he invents. His creations are inserted in a deterministic plot and, on top of everything else, the writer already knows their future!
And what is this future for Nabokov? Does it differ significantly from one novel to another?
A great many of his main characters meet death in the end. Pnin doesn’t, and he reappears as a “regular martinet” in “Pale Fire”. But the novel “Pnin” didn’t start with this inspirational vision. John Shade dies but his poetry lives on in “Ada” while undergoing some kind of metamorphosis or distortion (the “meta”play with Martin Gardner’s quote in “Ambidextrous universe” or Ada’s translations). Kinbote’s death appears as an information that is independent of the novel. “Ada or Ardor” has its characters die of old age (“One can even surmise that if our time-racked, flat-lying couple ever intended to die they would die, as it were, into the finished book, into Eden or Hades, into the prose of the book or the poetry of its blurb.”) forming something circular (like in the sentence about “my end was my beginning.”) In TT the “otherworld” pulls the condemned Person…
The most interesting deaths may have been those of Lolita and Humbert Humbert, since they are the condition demanded by HH to have his “confessions” published as a book in which they are very actively alive. The information that they are dead is not turned into a part of their tragedy.
I had never before considered the weight of this given deterministic vision (characters are “galley slaves,” they don’t alter the narrative by an act of fictional “free will”) in relation to the kind of future I’d expect to meet at the close of a Nabokov novel…The only exception I can bring to my mind as to what concerns a character’s dying happens in “Bend Sinister,” when the author intervenes in Krug’s tragic destiny and then goes back to his study and hears a moth “twang” against the window. Here it’s no longer “the future”, it’s Krug’s death that is “a question of style”…
However, when we bring together this closing episode with the moth, in “BS,” and the bumblebee rebounding in “Speak, Memory,” the sense of timelessness and immutability of the writer’s original inspiration is recovered.*
Bend Sinister: “As I had thought, a big moth was clinging with furry feet to the netting, on the night's side; its marbled wings kept vibrating, its eyes glowed like two miniature coals. I had just time to make out its streamlined brownish-pink body and a twinned spot of colour; and then it let go and swung back into the warm damp darkness.
Well, that was all. The various parts of my comparative paradise — the bedside lamp, the sleeping tablets, the glass of milk — looked with perfect submission into my eyes. I knew that the immortality I had conferred on the poor fellow was a slippery sophism, a play upon words. But the very last lap of his life had been happy and it had been proven to him that death was but a question of style. Some tower clock which I could never exactly locate, which, in fact, I never heard in the daytime, struck twice, then hesitated and was left behind by the smooth fast silence that continued to stream through the veins of my aching temples; a question of rhythm.”
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*Speak, Memory:” I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”