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Vladimir Nabokov et la France

 | 
Yannicke Chupin
, 
Agnès Edel-Roy
, 
Monica Manolescu
, 
et al.

IV. Nabokov et la pensée française

Time in French, or Nabokov’s Mobile Image of Eternity

Leland de la Durantaye

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1In his first published interview, Nabokov, then living in Berlin, said that there was no German influence on his work, but that “one might properly speak about a French influence” (Lectures on Literature, xx). This French influence was of many sorts, and began as early as Nabokov could remember, with his learning of the language as a small boy and his voracious early reading of its literature (he claimed, for instance, to have read all of Flaubert by the age of fifteen [Boyd, 1990, 91]). French is as timely and timeless as Nabokov’s other languages, but in it Nabokov found a particular interest in ideas on time, most notably in the writings of two of his “favorites,” Bergson and Proust (Strong Opinions, 43). Nabokov repeatedly and vehemently rejected influence as concerns his own writing, and as concerned all great writing. While he could hardly have been more categorical on the question in public pronouncements, his privately expressed views were more nuanced. Asked about the phenomenon of literary influence Nabokov once replied:

[It] is a dark and unclear thing. One may imagine, for example, two writers, A and B, completely different but both under a certain very subjective influence; this influence goes unnoticed by reader C inasmuch as each of the three (A, B, and C) has understood Proust in his own way. It happens that a writer has an oblique influence through another writer, or that some sort of complex blending of influences takes place, and so on. One may not foresee anything in this regard.
(Field, 265)

2Prediction may be ruled out, but a look backward at the dark and unclear process is another matter.

  • 1 All references to Speak, Memory are to the Everyman edition, the only one which includes the ultima (...)
  • 2 For a more purely positive evaluation of the work, cf. especially Boyd 1991, 149 ff. In the entry o (...)

3“I confess,” Nabokov wrote mid-way through Speak, Memory, “I do not believe in time” (106).1 Many readers have had difficulty with this statement, not without reason. The beginning, end, nature and relativity of time are all things about which one might experience uncertainty and thus grant or withhold belief. I might say, for instance, that I do not believe that time had a beginning, just as I might say that I believe that it did—at the Big Bang, with a divine “fiat,” or otherwise. I might say similar things about the end or endlessness of time. I might even say that the relativities modern physics observes are ones I believe to be only apparent. But it is far from clear that time as such—this “radiant and mobile medium” as Nabokov calls it elsewhere in Speak, Memory— is something to which one might accord or withhold belief. Nabokov confesses to not believe in time (Speak, Memory, 11). The irony here could be heavy-handed, as Michael Wood saw it to be, leading to Wood’s sense that such statements are “grand, lordly, perhaps a little fatuous,” and significantly contributing to his overall sense that Speak, Memory is “a nervous and arrogant book” (Wood, 1994, 83, 100).2 The irony, whether deftly deployed or not, concerns not only how phenomenally counter-intuitive such a claim is, but also the fact that a confession without culpability is not much of one. Earlier in this same chapter—originally published under the title “Butterflies” in 1948—Nabokov made a more conventional confession, recounting how he walked, “my calves quaking, my eyes full of scalding tears, the whole of me twitching with shame and self-disgust” as he abandoned a visiting friend so that he might follow his “demon” (butterfly-hunting) (96). Such things are, of course, the sort we expect from a memoir: recalling and reflecting upon past wrongs and accompanying them with explanation and exculpation. But confessing to not believe in time is clearly a different sort of statement and asks to be understood in a different way.

4In the first chapter of Speak, Memory Nabokov tells of the beginning of time—for him. “When,” he recounts, “the newly disclosed, fresh and trim formula of my own age, four, was confronted with the parental formulas, thirty-three and twenty-seven, something happened to me” (11). This something—a “tremendously invigorating shock”—is a sort of baptism into “a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time” (11). Nabokov recounts keeping tabs on this slippery and insubstantial thing as “for several years afterward I remained keenly interested in the age of my parents and kept myself informed about it, like a nervous passenger asking the time in order to check a new watch” (11). “Time’s common flow,” as he calls it, is one that he indeed shares with others, and joining the community of those who believe in time and know they do is momentous enough that he describes the experience as one where “I see my diminutive self as celebrating, on that August day 1903, the birth of sentient life” (11). To become aware of time is thus, for Nabokov, to become aware of life. And there is a time—shared with others—in which Nabokov clearly believes. If we understand Nabokov to be saying in Speak, Memory, “I confess I believe in timelessness beyond time,” then the statement takes on clearer contours. It is not given to us to believe or not believe in time, just as it is not given to us to believe or not believe in space—unless, of course, this disbelief is seen as complete skepticism about the reality of the physical world. This might be presented in a light-hearted manner, in a way that makes the tragic painfulness of life less grave, as where Petrarch finds “al mondo è breve sogno,” where Calderon says “la vida es sueño,” or where Shakespeare finds life is but an “after-dinner’s sleep.” Such skepticisms can also, of course, take more systematic form: we might claim that all space and time are but an illusion, and that the reality of Will or Being or Energy, once grasped, allows us to see through time and space for what they are: something we pass through on the way to timelessness. Plato, whom Nabokov repeatedly, and blithely, dismissed (e. g. “I detest Plato” [Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 159]), considered time a mobile image of eternity. Personal antipathy notwithstanding, is Nabokov nevertheless saying something similar? Does Nabokov believe something akin to what Proust had his narrator claim at the end of his search for lost time: that when we study with fantastical care, intuition and insight the movements of our memory we can glimpse “time in its pure state,” which pure state is an intimation of immortality? If time in its pure state transcends succession, then the perceiver must have some element which also transcends succession, runs Proust’s reasoning. It is this intuition which lay at the outset of Proust’s project, and which he placed at the end of his novel as the final revelation, the one that links the “longtemps” of the novel’s first word with the “temps” of its last one. Nabokov once said of Proust’s work that it is a “treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding place the past” (Lectures on Literature, 207). This is a wonderful phrase, but it is not quite exact. There is indeed a treasure hunt, and the hiding place is indeed the past, but the treasure is timelessness, for Proust and Nabokov alike.

5“Curiously enough,” Nabokov remarks in Lectures on Literature, “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it” (3; Nabokov’s italics). This curious claim has a curious basis. This is that “the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation” (Lectures on Literature, 3). Painting presents an advantage in this regard as “the element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it” (Lectures on Literature, 3). Nabokov requires rereading so that time may disappear from the artistic equation. Far from asking his readers to focus on the time fiction takes, he asks them to read it away. He informs them that their goal should be to reflect on the work as a whole, at once, rather than as an extended experience strung along the timeline of reading, pulled forward by anticipation and slowed by suspense. Like the great writers he is teaching Nabokov of course crafts his stories with anticipation and suspense (why else would he conceal Quilty, or Botkin, or anything else which is gradually revealed in his novels?). But this is not where the heart of his interest lies, nor where he sees the center of aesthetic appreciation. In “The Art of Literature and Common Sense,” Nabokov notes that it is not only reading which should aspire to timelessness. In the type of inspiration that most interests him, memory, perception and the future (in the form of future aesthetic production), “come together in a sudden flash; thus the entire circle of time is perceived, which is another way of saying that time ceases to exist” (Lectures on Literature, 378).

  • 3 Nabokov classed “the first half of Proust’s fairy tale” as fourth amongst twentieth century prose m (...)
  • 4 It is surprising that this fundamental distinction goes unmentioned in one of the studies dedicated (...)

6Nabokov’s greatest modern precursor in the art of depicting the experience of memory is, of course, Marcel Proust.3 Nabokov’s approach to memory, however, differs markedly from that of “the Proustian bed” in that the past can be voluntarily evoked in all its detailed life.4 Van Veen notes of the past that it “can be easily contemplated and listened to, tested and tasted at random” (Ada, 545), and in so doing rejects, as does Nabokov when speaking in his own voice, the Proustian diagnosis of the sterility and falseness of voluntary memory. It is in this more than any other factor that Nabokov differs from his predecessor (given the absolute centrality of the distinction voluntary memory/involuntary memory to Proust’s novel). Nabokov’s past seems to exist for him in crystallized images which he can evoke at will. As he says in Speak, Memory, “I inherited an exquisite simulacrum—the beauty of intangible property, unreal estate,” and he finds himself able to lovingly wander that unreal estate at the time and in the way of his choosing (40).

7Nevertheless, Nabokov shows such a great interest for “time gone astray, asprawl” (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 7) and which in Sebastian Knight’s case is expressed in his brother’s description of Sebastian’s work The Prismatic Bezel (a title which itself refers to the shifting and shimmering of technologically divided time): “the idea of time, which was made to look comic (detective losing his way... stranded somewhere in the night) now seems to curl up and fall asleep” (92; Nabokov’s ellipses). And indeed we should relate this to his “continuous effort to keep alive and bright the vision of his past,” as, in his brother’s words, “time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936—it was always year 1” (24-25; 63). To “not believe in time” is to live continuously in “year 1.” This quest for a perception of “year 1” finds greatest expression in Ada, where the heroine pursues “the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then” (70-71).

  • 5 Alongside this effort to de-spatialize Time, one finds, as well, a note of anti-relativity. In this (...)

8The title “The Texture of Time”—the germ from which Ada grew and which remains in the final product—is misleading as what Van is seeking is the texture of timelessness, the feeling for eternity that lies within every instant. The only really cogent philosophical argument in the passage is that all ways of conceptualizing time, from the river to the clock, are “frames” or “receptacles”—spatial metaphors of space used to conceptualize time (540). In this, the argument is quintessentially Bergsonian.5 This whole section in Ada is dedicated to the Arrow of Time, and is the arrowing back to Ardis (“ardis” being Greek for “arrow”), to the ardors and arbors of Edenic, Ardenic, Ardis—the childhood wonderland where the siblings fell in love (and which takes its name from Greece’s arrow [of time]). The allusion in the title to the estate (Ardis) is, thus, central. Zeno, like Van, refutes time with arrows. Zeno does this through his famous argument about the divisibility of space stopping time. Van effects a similar (in aim) exercise in refuting time though his sense of the undying proximity of the Edenic Ardis and of his first falling in love with Ada.

  • 6 Fittingly, Part IV ends with Ada, speaking about time, interrupted in mid sentence: “‘It is like—“((...)

9Van, and Nabokov with him, rejects “Universal Time” and “Objective Time” in favor of “individual, perceptual time,” which does not have to learn anything from any other form or experience of time and can continue indefinitely—perhaps even continuing as a “novo sapiens [...] which will enjoy other varieties of being and dreaming, beyond man’s notion of Time” (Ada, 536). The philosophical point, which Van finally simply says, is that it is “no wonder I failed to grasp Time, since knowledge-gaining itself ‘takes’ time” (538).6 “Pure Time,” however, in its numerous evocations in the chapter, is presented as “Tangible Time.” Van’s “Pure Time” is context-free sensuality—“Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time, Time free of content, context, and running commentary—this is my time and theme” (539). At moments, Van does call for a transcendental reduction as where he notes, “what I am concerned with is the delicate texture of Time, void of all embroidered events” (559), but, the primary motivation of his position is to aestheticize, sensualize, personalize and solipsize time as completely as possible. Which is to say, to not believe in it. Nabokov represents two times: fleeting everyday time and the frozen, crystallized image of artistic inspiration which in its intensity obscurely evokes, for Nabokov, the eternal. It is only the latter which is worthy of art, and art’s immortality, and it is only the latter which truly interests him. The idea of historical time, of historicizing time, or larger historical structures or pressures conditioning the individual’s perception of time is thus of no interest.

  • 7 As evidenced by his preparatory notes for the novel contained in the Berg Collection.

10In the first chapter of the 11th book of his Confessions (in the seventeenth century translation Nabokov consulted while writing Ada7), Augustine asks the Deity, “dost thou see in relation to time, that which passeth in time? Why then do I lay before thee so many narrations? Not to this end do I do it, that thou mayest come to know them upon my relation” (Augustine, 209). Augustine follows this remark up in the seventh chapter of that same book in saying of the creative Word of God that, “that which was spoken was not spoken successively, one thing spoken indeed that the next might be spoken: but all at once, and unto everlasting. Otherwise there should be time and alteration” (225). In such a remark one finds a paradigm for the inspired image of art that Nabokov intrepidly evokes. This inspiring image, this vision of art in the realm of inspiration, is a thing which passeth not in time, but which must be figured as such to be rendered into language, to be communicated to others. The image the Nabokovian artist experiences, this inspiration which leads to creation, is like that which the Augustinian Creator has of his creation—that is, a vision seen “all at once,” non-successive, and thus, non-temporal. Nabokov remarked “I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of a brainwave,” and his remark in another interview that, “yes, I write in three languages, but I think in images” (Strong Opinions, 14). In Nabokov’s discourse on aesthetics, images occupy the same place as does truth for Augustine in his “inward house of my thoughts”—from which French, Russian and English, Hebrew, Greek and Latin are equally removed and where a timeless language declares unceasingly the truth. Viewed schematically Nabokov, in Ada and elsewhere, adopts the Augustinian conceptual evanescence of time (a time which comes into play only at the moment of expression in language) as well as the Platonic postulate of the hidden Eternal (“pure time” or Eternity), the Bergsonian anti-relativity and de-spatialization of time arguments, the Proustian aspiration to sensually experience time. Brian Boyd, the critic who has written the most on Ada and who has perhaps done the most to advance critics’ understanding of the allusive register of the book, writes: “The denial of the future is not a common philosophical position [...] Nabokov’s analysis of the concept of the future, however, seems sounder than the work of most philosophers” (Boyd, 1985, 237 n. 10). No critic has done more to map Nabokov’s life and art than Boyd; no critic is so routinely right in his assessments. But the claim that Nabokov outdoes most philosophers is highly debatable. Similarly, Maurice Couturier writes that, “Nabokov est peut-être le seul romancier à ce jour à avoir réussi à vaincre poétiquement l’aporie du temps,” without specifying what the criteria for a “poetic” resolution of the aporia of time might be. Going on to discuss Sterne, Proust and Joyce, Couturier states, “mais aucun ne parvenait véritablement à faire éprouver au lecteur une expérience du temps qui ne doive rien aux processus d’identification ou de représentation” (Couturier, 153). Even if one dismisses the absence of criteria for a properly poetic resolution of time’s aporia, it is difficult to see in what respect Van Veen’s cogitations on felt time resolve any “aporias” (they rather take up aporias notably raised by Zeno, Augustine, Bergson, Proust and Borges), just as it is difficult to see in what way a literary representation of time might no longer owe anything to processes of identification or representation. Wood’s assessment is a different one:

There are two answers to the question [Van’s search for the essence of time]... The first is that the very object of inquiry is bogus, can’t be focused because it doesn’t exist. It is like looking for Language, or Goodness, or any other universal, rather than the thousands of shifting but identifiable things and groups of things we find in languages, behavior and the world... The second answer is that... his [Van Veen’s] quest is not for time at all but for something like an awareness of awareness, a consciousness not of self alone but of world and self in the instant of perception.
(Wood, 1994, 232-233; Wood’s italics)

11Rorty refers to, “the collection of general ideas which Nabokov assembled in the hope of convincing himself that time and causality were hoaxes in an odd, inconsistent mixture of Platonic atemporalism and anti-Platonic sensualism” (Rorty, 154). One could not ask for a more succinct and yet precise summary. And yet these are, of course, fictional ideas. Proust’s vision of time in the novel is one with its world. Not so in, say, Ada, where the passage of time is a preoccupation explored by characters—above all, Van—but which make little claim beyond their worlds. “What ideas can be traced in my novels,” Nabokov remarks, “belong to the creatures therein and may be deliberately flawed” (Strong Opinions, 147). As for Van Veen’s reflections, an even more particular indication is to be found: “I have not yet decided if I agree with him [Van] in all his views on the texture of time. I suspect I don’t” (Strong Opinions, 143). To which one might add Nabokov’s remark to yet another questioner: “it is all a structural trick: Van’s theory of time has no existence beyond the fabric of one part of the novel Ada” (“Anniversary Notes,” 5).

  • 8 “Aussi, si elle m’était laissée assez longtemps pour accomplir mon œuvre, ne manquerais-je pas d’ab (...)

12The lowest order of mental being for Nabokov is, ironically enough, ideas: general ideas, common ideas as the thoughtless repetition of formulae handed down, rarely reflected upon and unanchored in the rich particularity of individual perception. Such “ideas” are thus of the intellectual order of idle talk, of gossip—even when those ideas are presented as the highest and purest goals of humanity—as in the case of Tolstoy. “What obsessed Tolstoy, obscured his genius, what now distresses the good reader,” says Nabokov in Lectures on Russian Literature, “was that, somehow, the process of seeking the Truth seemed more important to him than the easy, vivid, brilliant discovery of the illusion of truth through the medium of his artistic genius” (141). Next we have words, which are better, purer, as the units are smaller and the individual effort greater. Thus Nabokov can write of Ember’s reference in Bend Sinister to “Wern, who is weak and prefers ideas to words” (107). And, at last, at the pinnacle, we have that which must be translated, in literary art, into those words, the images that inspire them. When one looks closely, one sees that Van’s “Pure Time” is, in fact, pure, context-less sensuality: “Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time” (Ada, 539). Van, wanting to become “an epicure of duration,” says, “I wish to caress time. [...] I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in its fall and folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum” (537). What Van is here trying to grasp is not so much the texture of time, but the texture of texture, the sense of the senses—sensual experience “free of content, context, and running commentary” (539)—which is to say, the texture, and text, of the senses. Despite Van’s advice to “avoid the Proustian bed” it is in Proust that one finds the germ of this aspiration to “delight sensually in Time.” In an undated letter to the journalist Camille Vettard thought to be from March 1922 and at the beginning of which Proust informs his correspondent that he is not able to reply at length to the journalist’s questions as, “je suis à peu près mourant […] et ce que je voudrais que l’on vît dans mon livre, c’est qu’il est sorti tout entier de l’application d’un sens spécial” (Proust, 1970-1993, 21.77). Proust notes how difficult such a special sense is to describe but ultimately gives Vettard to understand that it is a sense of maximally dilated time—something thus of the order of the image on which the Recherche ends.8 In this letter, Proust tellingly employs what he refers to as an “imperfect” image of this sense, after having introduced the explanation by noting that making someone understand such a sense who does not inherently possess it is as ungraspable as for “un aveugle le sens de la vue” (Proust, 1970-1993, 21.77). The image at last chosen is, “celle d’un télescope qui serait braqué sur le temps, car le télescope fait apparaître des étoiles qui sont invisibles à l’œil nu, et j’ai tâché [...] de faire apparaître à la conscience des phénomènes inconscients qui, complètement oubliés, sont quelquefois situés très loin dans le passé. (C’est peut-être, à la réflexion, ce sens spécial qui m’a fait quelquefois rencontrer–puisqu’on le dit–Bergson, car il n’y a pas eu, autant que je peux me rendre compte, suggestion directe)” (Proust, 1970-1993, 21.77). Nabokov has claimed that “the true purpose of autobiography” involved not confessing one’s venal or mortal sins, not telling the historical tale of one’s historical times, but, instead, following “thematic patterns” through one’s past. The true purpose of autobiography, for Nabokov, is to see in those patterns the anthemion of eternity, the temporal pattern of a timelessness beyond time. Far then from being a trivial statement Nabokov’s confession “I do not believe in time” could hardly be more central. It is not expressed with the felicity one might wish, which may be attributed to the fact that Nabokov too nods, just as it may be attributed to the difficulty of saying in time what might lie beyond it.

Bibliography

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Rorty, Richard. (1989): “The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty.” In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p.141-168.

Wood, Michael. (1994): The Magician’s Doubts. Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Wood, Michael. (2002): “Broken Dates: Proust, Nabokov and Modern Time.” In Nabokov’s World. Volume2: Reading Nabokov. Eds. J. Grayson, A. McMillin and P. Meyer. New York, Palgrave, p.156-170.

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Notes

1 All references to Speak, Memory are to the Everyman edition, the only one which includes the ultimately rejected final chapter of the memoir.

2 For a more purely positive evaluation of the work, cf. especially Boyd 1991, 149 ff. In the entry on Speak, Memory in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, Georges Nivat side-steps the question by claiming that these are “parts of the text meant to irritate” (677). Nivat does not speculate on the purpose of such intentional irritation.

3 Nabokov classed “the first half of Proust’s fairy tale” as fourth amongst twentieth century prose masterpieces (cf. Strong Opinions, 57). In an interview with Guy de Belleval, Nabokov remarks that, “je reste... fidèle à Marcel Proust, que j’ai passionément aimé dans ma jeunesse” (interview with Guy de Belleval, iv). In an interview with Anne Guérin, Nabokov refers to recognizing “certain affinities” between his own writing and Proust’s (interview with Anne Guérin, 26). Nabokov was possibly familiar with Proust from the 20s onwards; according to his own account he first studied the Recherche, with his wife, in 1935-36. Laughter in the Dark contains a parody of Proust (toned down from the original Kamera Obscura). Nabokov’s allusions to Proust in his works are numerous. Albinus is in a certain sense a Germanized Swann. Sebastian’s brother’s description of the former’s last work (“The Doubtful Asphodel”) closely resembles Proust: “A man is dying, and he is the hero of the tale; but whereas the lives of other people in the book seem perfectly realistic [...] the reader is kept ignorant as to who the dying man is, and where his deathbed stands or floats, or whether it is a bed at all” (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 173). Humbert considers entitling a section of his narrative “Dolorès Disparue” (Annotated Lolita, 253).

4 It is surprising that this fundamental distinction goes unmentioned in one of the studies dedicated to the relation between the two writers. In “Time, Writing and Ecstasy in Speak, Memory: Dramatizing the Proustian Project,” Christian Moraru tells his reader that, “Nabokov’s artistic wrestling with temporality strikes up a captivating conversation with Proustian poetics,” but does not tell that reader what the subject or nature of this “captivating conversation” is (190). A similarly non-specific relation is presented by J. E. Rivers in his “Proust, Nabokov and Ada,” where Rivers notes: “Sometimes Nabokov pays homage to Proust; sometimes he quarrels with him; sometimes he makes fun of him; but always he is aware of him” (135). In a similar vein, in his entry devoted to “Nabokov and Proust” in The Garland Companion, John Burt Foster Jr. directs his, and his reader’s, attention to thematic parallels-cum-influence (such as the theme of jealousy) and catalogues for his reader a number of thematic parallels. Of their relation he states, in conciliatory fashion, “Nabokov [...] acknowledges Proust’s importance for an autobiographer concerned with memory [how an autobiographer could not be concerned with memory is not addressed], yet avoids a slavish reliance on his best-known doctrine” (Foster, 475). Later in that same essay, Foster more closely states the case in saying that Nabokov’s “basic motive” is “to welcome Proust as an unsurpassed artist of memory but to bypass involuntary memory in favor of a more deliberate, lucid approach” (478). This is to state things more clearly but the essay places no stress on, and quickly bypasses, this fundamental divergence. The discussion of Bergson in this same article contains inaccuracies, as in Foster’s statement that “Henri Bergson, who made ‘duration’ one of his guiding ideas but held that thought should rely on figurative language rather than concepts” (474). The situation is actually much simpler as Bergson says that thought, in endeavoring to capture the essence of “durée”, shouldn’t rely on language at all. It is instead language itself which falsifies the continuous flow of experience which Bergson entitles “durée” and which we access through a special intuition. Language, in its necessary freezing of the mobile falsifies (far less than music) this ever-flowing, ever-expanding movement (in a manner analogous to Nietzsche’s treatment of this same question). Conceptual language, existing at a greater level of abstraction, does this to a greater extent than “figurative language,” but the fundamental distinction Bergson wishes to make here is not between conceptual and figurative language, but about language itself. It is for this reason that Paulhan classes Bergson amongst those writers who are in essence revolting against language itself, and which group of writers he designates “terrorists” (cf. Les Fleurs de Tarbes). More pointedly, and to the point, in his essay “Nabokov and Memory,” Robert Alter refers to Nabokov’s “un-Proustian” theory of memory,” as will Michael Wood (Wood, 2002).

5 Alongside this effort to de-spatialize Time, one finds, as well, a note of anti-relativity. In this, one finds another Bergsonian watermark (cf. the famous debate between Einstein and Bergson on the nature of relativity). What is most curious about Van’s position is one of its corollaries in the thought of his creator: Nabokov’s total lack of respect for Einstein as a physicist (he also expresses an absence of respect for him at a pacifist—cf. Field, 199).

6 Fittingly, Part IV ends with Ada, speaking about time, interrupted in mid sentence: “‘It is like—“(Ada, 563).

7 As evidenced by his preparatory notes for the novel contained in the Berg Collection.

8 “Aussi, si elle m’était laissée assez longtemps pour accomplir mon œuvre, ne manquerais-je pas d’abord d’y décrire les hommes, cela dût-il les faire ressembler à des êtres monstrueux, comme occupant une place si considérable, à côté de celle si restreinte qui leur est réservée dans l’espace, une place au contraire prolongée sans mesure puisqu’ils touchent simultanément, comme des géants plongés dans les années à des époques, vécues par eux si distantes, entre lesquelles tant de jours sont venus se placer–dans le Temps” (Proust, 1987-89, IV, 625).

Author

Professeur de littérature à Claremont McKenna College, en Californie. Il est l’auteur de Style Is Matter : The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (Cornell UP, 2007), Giorgio Agamben : A Critical Introduction (Stanford UP, 2009) et de Beckett’s Art of Mismaking (Harvard UP, 2016).

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