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.