Former  posting (Jansy Mello) -  The third ingredient of inspiration, the future (“your book”, a “figure of style…a specter of thought”), still baffles me  [   ] When he begins to write his book, the author must return to mortal time, together with his characters (perhaps the latter is not obligatory)[  ] 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?

Present posting: W.G.Sebald, in his book “The Emigrants” inserted a photograph, in black and white, of Vladimir Nabokov in the Swiss Alps.

During an interview with Eleanor Wachtel (Oct.16,1997), published in English in the book “The Emergence of Memory: conversations with W. Sebald”  (Seven Stories Press, NY,2007), which I must translate back into English since my copy is in another language,  Sebald was inquired about the photographs inserted in his texts. WGS replied that they proceeded from different sources and served for different objectives, adding that most of the photos are “authentic” (taken independently of his project as story-teller) and that they serve to attest to the truth of his report: “we are more inclined to believe in images than in words”. This is why, for him (at that time), photographs allow the narrator to add legitimacy to what he is relaying to the reader.

“This has always been a preoccupation for realistic fiction writers and my work (“The Emigrants”) is a form of realistic fiction.[  ]The second function of the pictures is, perhaps, to “stop time.”  For him, “fiction is an artistic form that follows temporality, that tend towards an ending, that works over a negative gradient and it is very, very difficult for this particular kind of narrative to halt the flux of time. As we all know, this is exactly what pleases us in certain forms of plastic arts – you are in a museum and you contemplate wonderful paintings from the XVI or XVIII Centuries and your are transported outside of time. If you are capable of warding off temporality then, in a certain way, you may now reach a kind of redemption.”

It was a nice coincidence to come across this Sebald interview while I’d been engaged in quoting a Nabokov interview in which he mentions atemporality and paintings in contrast with scripture. Sebald mentions “a kind of redemption” (he is very cautious and his sentences usually resort to “some sorf of”, “A kind of”, “a way or a form of…”). When I read this I was immediately carried over to what V.Nabokov wrote about his novel “Lolita” when, in a retrospective view, he feels it as a painting hanging on a wall (I wish I had my books by me to quote these words correctly).  Perhaps the entire process of writing fiction was for him a way to engender a mental picture that could be felt “outside time” and… as a kind of redemption!

The image I added to this posting is a reproduction of the original photograph of V.N in the Alps set by side of a second reproduction of it, as it was published in Sebald’s book.

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