Post for 9/15/13

I have before me a large bedraggled scrapbook, bound in black cloth. It contains old documents, including diplomas, drafts, diaries, identity cards, penciled notes, and some printed matter, which had been in my mother’s meticulous keeping in Prague until her death there, but then, between 1939 and 1961, went through various vicissitudes. With the aid of those papers and my own recollections, I have composed the following short biography of my father (173).

Nabokov does very interesting things with memory in Speak, Memory. That's not a radical claim. But, I think what's particularly interesting about this moment is it's one of the moments in which Nabokov reminds us of the artifice. Speak, Memory is not an autobiography in many senses. It's almost a "these are all the things that happened to me that relate to this (also if this happened too it would be dramatically and symbolically interesting)". What I find interesting, is these moments where Nabokov sort of tells us as readers that it almost seems as though the goal is telling us not to latch onto the facts. This book is not about the facts. Now, I'm not saying that I think the book doesn't have many factually accurate things. What I am, however, saying is that this would be a bad book to read if you wanted to hear how Nabokov's life happened, exactly and accurately (although, it may be possible that this is a failure of the medium). I have the sense that this is one of the moments where Nabokov is reminding us that this is not intended to be read scientifically, and fact checked. I feel that biography (in this context) is almost a word for portrait. Nabokov seems much more interested in understanding what his father was about than the things his father did.

I think this is actually a really great passage with which to see the entire book. The book is filled with these moments, these facts, these specificities. But it's also filled with elements of "composition." In fact, the book is about composing all these moments from his real life. Nabokov is almost in this position that he is both composer and conductor. What I mean by that is that he is neither inventing this work entirely, nor is it just a faithful representation, of it "exactly as it was." And Nabokov is not interested in things "exactly the way they were." He is interested, rather, in telling a good story that is about his life. So things will be made up and fudged occasionally in service of a better story, or a more continuous thematic connection. I think this passage is a great stand in, or rather, a great way to interpret this text through.

Post for 11/7

I think these two chapters were interesting on a number of levels. Firstly, and this is important to Nabokov, they're both self-contained. One could simply read a single chapter, and still be satisfied. Mind you, they would likely want more, considering the quality of Nabokov's prose. But really, I think it's fascinating that these chapters are all self-contained strains of thought. They each seem to have a theme. For instance, chapter five was about Mademoiselle, six about lepidopterology. And really, I think that the whole thing can be explained with Nabokov's famed section at the end of chapter six.

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment is timelessness--in a landscape selected at random--is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern--to the contrapucltural genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

And I think this says a lot about Nabokov in multiple ways. The first, and perhaps the most obvious is this idea of folding the "magic carpet" of his life. He creates connections where they do not exist. And I think that is actually a pretty good way to deal with Nabokov, and a particularly good way to deal with Lolita. It's clear that Humbert's problem is that he tries to create a story, an artifice out of life. However, art and life are not the same. Humbert ends up destroying his life for his dedication to his art. He is so dedicated to superimposing the qualities of a novel onto his life, (i.e. the first paragraph of the story is gorgeous, yes, but also incredibly capital "r" Romantic) that he ends up ignoring the perspective, and humanity of Lolita. This may be a trait Nabokov and Humbert share. I'm not saying they're alike. They're not, but I think this is a point of likeness. However, Nabokov varies by seeing the humanity in others, where we have little proof that Humbert does.

The second is the idea of timelessness that Nabokov discusses. Rather than transcending death with art, he believes he transcends death in his greatest moments of life. I rather like that. Perhaps I'm projecting my own beliefs into this moment, but I really believe that's what Nabokov is saying here.

Post for 11/5

I'm finding Speak, Memory to be massively enjoyable. I think there's something wonderful that Nabokov is tapping into with this text, and that's the perception of reality. People find reality to be sacred. I do not, and (more relevantly) Nabokov does not either. The book is filled with wonderful, often absurd details about Nabokov, his family, and his history. At moments, they are actually quite funny. I think about The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a play that took many people by storm. The story (which is, at no point claimed to be entirely fiction or non-fiction) contains a section in which the protagonist goes to China, and finds that factory workers have been blacklisted for speaking up, and essentially, that the workers in factories like FoxConn are treated horribly. So the play is essentially this person telling this story. The story turned out to not be "true" (whatever the heck that means). There was a whole scandal. People were furious, and the author was dsiclaimed of his work because he hadn't "actually" gone to the factories and seen these things. This meant that many of the details were (likely) made up. I didn't really understand the controversy, and I wasn't surprised by the supposed lack of "truth" in the piece. I had gone to the theater to see a work of art. Peoples' mere subjectivities will bring us away from the facts. Furthermore, the goal of the piece seemed to me, not really to be about whether or not these things actually happened or not.

Nabokov really plays with this in Speak, Memory. Nabokov's uses of lists becomes much more interesting in this setting than it was in Lolita. Take, for instance, Chapter Three of Speak, Memory. The whole chapter is a sort of half-realistic (the boringness of the coat of arms) half absurd (the uncle who nearly died in a bomb and nearly got on the Titanic) catalog of ships. Lists seem tangible. Lists make things seem real. People are very easily convinced by math and science, no matter how phony it is. These lists play into the very idea that science and math only exist in "reality." It's the boring, unnecessary details that give a thing realism. Nabokov is not so simplistic as to simply just add a bunch of details for realism. Nabokov really stands in between fiction and non-fiction, and writes a book that very much deals with elements of reality, but fudges the details to make them more dramatically interesting. The truth is, for Nabokov, reality is fascinating in its intricate detail, but dramatically uninteresting in its nature.